by Edward Kay
“With Fowler? Yeah, I can believe it. So what about your husband? What happened there?”
“I don’t think he knew what to believe. But I’ve seen enough of this as an investigator to know that a lot of marriages don’t survive a sexual assault, particularly if there’s any doubt about the victim and her relationship to the accused. My ex stuck around for a few weeks, but it started eating away at him. Then one day I came home from work and he wasn’t there. But there was a letter from a lawyer initiating divorce proceedings.”
“I’m sorry,” said Verraday. “But you’ll get through this. You’ve got survivor instincts.”
The waiter had finished up with the other customers and brought the check. “There you go, folks,” he said, again with that genuine smile.
Verraday pulled out his wallet but Maclean waved it away.
“Your money’s no good here, Professor. I’m getting paid for all this. I mean, not overtime. Those days are long gone. But I do get paid my regular hours, and I appreciate what a time suck this is for you.”
“Well, your company is a lot more agreeable than most of the time sucks I get sucked into.”
“Thanks, but just the same, this one’s on me.”
“Okay, but only if I get the next one,” said Verraday.
“Deal,” said Maclean as she threw down a couple of twenty-dollar bills to cover it and then stood up to leave.
Verraday glanced down and saw that she had left a 20 percent tip. Generous, but not so generous as to indicate an emergency exit from the conversation.
“Thanks folks,” the waiter called after them. “Enjoy your evening.”
When they reached the front door, Verraday held it open for Maclean, then followed behind her to the sidewalk.
“So at the risk of sounding creepy and Fowler-esque, can I walk you to your car?” he asked.
Maclean turned to face him. She smiled. “Trust me, you couldn’t possibly sound creepy and Fowler-esque. And I appreciate the offer. But I’m trained in Muay Thai and I’ve got a box cutter and a Glock nine millimeter in my purse. So barring a zombie apocalypse, I’ll be okay. But I’ll be happy to escort you to your ride.”
“I always admire self-confidence,” said Verraday. “I can’t say I’m packing anything more than attitude, but I did make it as far as blue belt in karate, so I think I can handle myself.” He pointed to his car. “Plus I’m parked two doors down. I only have about eight or nine seconds to get into trouble, so I should be all right.”
Maclean arched an eyebrow at him. “In my experience, Professor, eight or nine seconds is more than enough time to get into all kinds of trouble. But don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out for you until you make it to your car. Good night.”
She lifted her right hand and made a slight waving gesture at Verraday. It struck him as almost childlike. He was charmed by it. He had no doubt that if anyone could fend off a zombie apocalypse, it was her. But at the same time, he felt compassion and admiration for this woman who had lost her natural male protector at such a formative stage, had fought every inch of the way to get where she was, and had even survived a sexual assault from a senior colleague. Despite all that, she remained open hearted enough to insist on playing the shepherd with him now and was still able to give him such an unselfconscious wave.
“Good night to you, Detective,” said Verraday, smiling, with a slight bow that was only partially ironic.
She watched as he walked the few paces to his car door then clicked his remote. She smiled then turned away, giving him one last glance over her shoulder as she crossed the street. He climbed into his car and went to start the engine but felt a protective impulse of his own. He hesitated, lingering while Maclean got into her vehicle, a Jeep of some sort, which was parked under a streetlight. Only after she pulled away from the curb and turned down a side street did Verraday start his own vehicle and leave.
On the drive home, Verraday’s head was swimming with the news about Robson. He knew he’d have to tell Penny, but wasn’t sure what the best way would be. It was late now, and he was too tired to call her. It would be a long conversation and not the kind he wanted to have on the phone anyway. He was seeing her for dinner next week. But the news was too important to wait until then. He clumsily texted, “Hey sis. Something’s come up. Wondering if we could get together for dinner tomorrow instead of next week?”
To his surprise, she texted back almost immediately to confirm. She was better at this than he was. Verraday slipped his cell into his jacket, stepped onto the sidewalk, and was relieved to see that the gate was closed and latched this time. He walked up his path to the front steps, fumbled for his keys only slightly, and then entered the foyer. Inside, he kicked off his boots and hung his jacket up on the hall tree. He went straight to the kitchen, took his Seattle World’s Fair tumbler from the dish rack and reached for the bottle of brandy at the back of the counter.
Then he changed his mind. It was late. Almost midnight now. The dark ale and the shared conversation with Maclean had been satisfying. He really didn’t need anything else. It was just habit, he told himself. So instead, he poured some water into his glass, took a sip, and headed upstairs with it to bed.
CHAPTER 19
The next morning, Maclean and Verraday pulled up in front of a two-story building in Belltown. They walked up a narrow set of stairs and on the second floor, found a door with a small sign beside it reading “Erotes Hosting.”
“This is the place,” she said. “They administer four different sites for male, female, and transsexual escorts in the Seattle area, plus an alternative dating site.”
They entered. There was no receptionist. In the back, through a glass door, was a tomb-like machine room where the servers stood on a raised floor in the perpetual chill of air-conditioning. At the back of the office, a bespectacled young woman dressed in emo style sat at a desktop computer. She wore heavy eyeliner, a purple streak in her hair, and striped arm warmers pulled down to her knuckles to ward off the cold. She didn’t hear Verraday and Maclean over the roar of the fans at first. From their side of the counter, Verraday and Maclean could see that the young woman seemed to be putting together a webpage.
“Excuse me,” called Maclean.
In her peripheral vision, the emo girl spotted them. Without taking her gaze off the screen as she dropped some text into a blank box, she said in a welcoming tone of voice that surprised them both, “Hey, what can I do for you?”
Maclean held up her badge. “I’m Detective Maclean. Seattle PD. I’m investigating a homicide.”
“Holy shit!” exclaimed the girl, now turning in her swivel chair to look directly at her. “Are you serious?”
The girl had a guileless face under her plastic-rimmed glasses, so wide-eyed and sincerely surprised that under other circumstances Maclean would have had to suppress a laugh.
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” she said instead. “Can I speak to whoever is in charge here?”
“Yeah, sure,” replied the girl.
She leaned into the back office and called out, “Hey Marty, there’s a police detective here. It’s about a homicide.” Then she turned politely back toward Maclean and Verraday. “He’ll be right out. Can I get you guys some coffee or water?”
“No, but thank you,” said Maclean.
The young woman went back to work, and Verraday noticed her carefully using a computer paintbrush tool to obscure the face of the girl whose escort page she was putting together. It was pixelated the same way Destiny’s was.
“Do you do that to all of them?” Maclean asked. “Obscure the faces, I mean?”
“Yes, all of them,” said the young woman. “Unless they specifically request not to have their faces pixelated or blanked out. But almost everybody wants their identity concealed. The men as well as the women. A lot of them are doing this on the side, paying for college, so they don’t want their families or the general public to be able to recognize them.”
Verraday wondered how many of his students
might be on this site to pay for their skyrocketing tuition. And how many of them might end up like Alana Carmichael, Rachel Friesen, or the girl they knew only as Destiny. He didn’t want to think about it.
A few moments later, a man in his late twenties emerged from the back office. He did not share the guileless features of the emo girl, nor her fashion sense. He was stocky and wore chinos with a coral-colored polo shirt. His eyes were close set, creating the impression of a suspicious, overstuffed ferret. The young woman half-heartedly went back to her work, her attention more focused on the drama unfolding before her.
“Are you Marty?” asked Maclean.
“Yeah. Can I help you?”
Maclean held up her badge again. “I hope so. Detective Maclean, Seattle PD. A girl listed on one of your websites has been murdered.”
“That’s very unfortunate,” said Marty. “We’ve never had that happen before.”
“I’m looking for the file of a girl called Destiny.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“No, but I can get one by two o’clock this afternoon, by which time our leads will have gone colder, and I will be very, very pissed off. Pissed off enough to bring the vice squad in here to go over your operation and your computer files with a fine-toothed comb. How’s that sound?”
“Whoa, I think we’re getting off on the wrong foot here,” said Marty. “Let’s just take a step back, okay?”
“As long as you can help me out with this girl.”
“So this person’s really dead? You’re not doing some kind of sting operation or something, looking for something else under a false pretext? Because if you did, that would be entrapment, you know.”
“Trust me, my colleague and I have seen her body at the morgue. Not a pretty sight, thanks to some shit heel who probably found her on your web page.”
“Look, people post here voluntarily. We can’t control who they go out with. Do you have her last name?”
“No, that’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.”
“A lot of people who post ads here are named Destiny,” said the emo girl. “It’s a common alias. But I can bring up every file with that username in it. Then you’d just have to cross reference it with the pictures, and we can work backward from there.”
She started typing. Marty seemed to have decided that cooperation would be wiser than obstruction.
“Everybody who lists their services on our site has to give us a real first and last name and a matching credit card,” he said. “That way we know they’re real and not some jealous ex posting nudes of whoever dumped them, or some creep looking to hurt people or pull an Ashley Madison and extort from them, you know? It happens.”
“There are twenty-seven people in our system with that name. Shouldn’t take too long. Wanna come look?” the emo girl asked.
“Thanks,” said Maclean.
Marty lifted the gate in the counter and motioned them in.
Verraday and Maclean watched over the girl’s shoulder as she pulled up the files one by one. There was a mind-boggling array of Destinys, of every iteration, more than either of them could have imagined. There was an African American Destiny dressed as Cleopatra. A red-haired Destiny in a thong. There was even a baby-faced young man named Destiny, dressed in the uniform of the Seattle Seahawks’ cheerleading squad, the SeaGals. It consisted of a blue-and-white crop top, belt, and short-shorts, plus white go-go boots.
Verraday had the sudden sense that he would never, ever fully understand the human condition.
“Oh, I remember him,” said the girl, her lip curling into a grin.
“He’d be hard to forget,” offered Maclean.
“Yeah, even around here,” agreed the girl.
On the seventeenth Destiny, Verraday spotted the blonde hair and Freya tattoo of Seattle’s latest homicide victim.
“Stop. That’s her,” he said.
“What’s her name?” asked Maclean.
The young woman leaned into the screen to check the listing information. “Helen Dale,” she responded.
“I’ll need her home address,” said Maclean.
“I’ll print it off,” said the girl.
“Do the customers contact the escorts through the site?”
“No,” said Marty defensively. “We don’t get into any of that stuff at all. The escorts arrange their own means of contact. Usually text. There’s no messaging, either incoming or outgoing on our sites, so we have no way of knowing who any of their clients are.”
“But you could figure out the IP addresses of the people who had checked her out.”
“Good luck with that,” said Marty. “You wouldn’t believe how many visitors we get.”
The emo girl nodded her head in agreement and said, “That guy in the cheerleader outfit?”
She tapped a key and put her finger on a number on the screen. “Twenty-six-thousand three hundred and seventy-one hits since he joined us six months ago. Oh, wait, make that seventy-two. He just had another one.”
“If he got hired anywhere near as often as he got gawked at,” added Marty, “he wouldn’t have to prance around in a SeaGals outfit to make a living. He’d own the whole damned stadium.”
“Okay. One last thing,” said Maclean. “Are there any more pictures in Helen Dale’s file other than what’s on the public web page?”
“Could be,” replied the girl. “A lot of people like to rotate their photos from time to time, change it up so they appeal to new types of clients, plus give their repeat customers something new to look at.”
The girl dragged the cursor over a box and clicked. A number of photos of Helen appeared, designed to appeal to as broad a public as possible. In some, she was nude, in others, she was wearing just panties or lingerie. In still others, she wore fetish gear. And in one photo, she was wearing a flight attendant’s uniform and standing in the cockpit of an empty passenger plane. She held a glass of champagne in one hand.
“How old are these?” asked Maclean.
“They’ve been in her file awhile now. More than a month. Except that flight attendant one. It was uploaded two days ago.”
“Can we see it full screen?”
“Sure.”
A moment later, the large monitor was filled with the image of Helen Dale, a.k.a. Destiny. She stood in the cockpit, grinning seductively, one arm extended to take a selfie. The flight attendant’s uniform that she wore appeared to be vintage and from an airline that neither of them recognized. It was dark outside the plane, as though the photo had been taken at nighttime or in a hangar. In one window, Maclean could make out the reflection of a man’s face.
“Send me an electronic copy of that photo, would you?” said Maclean.
“Sure thing,” said the girl.
Maclean handed the girl her business card. “Thanks, you’ve both been a lot of help.”
As they headed down the stairs toward the street, Maclean turned to Verraday. “I’m sending a forensics team to Helen Dale’s apartment. I’d love to have you come along, but it would attract too much attention.”
“I understand,” said Verraday. “Let me know if you find anything unusual. Anything at all.”
“We need to find out where that flight attendant’s uniform comes from. Could give us a clue about who that man is inside the cockpit with her. He might know something.”
“I’ll check the UW staff directory,” said Verraday. “There might be somebody there who can tell us something about the uniform or the plane. The university has a big aerospace faculty because of the work they do with Boeing. Odds are good that one of the professors is an aviation history geek and might be able to recognize the plane and the uniform. I’ll ask around.”
“Sounds good. I’ll e-mail the photo to you. By the way, did you tell your sister about Robson yet?”
“No, I’m meeting her this evening. Figured it’s better to talk about it in person.”
“That makes sense. Hope it goes okay. Good luck.”
CHAPT
ER 20
At six o’clock that evening, Verraday pulled up in front of his sister Penny’s house. It was a Frank Lloyd Wright style stone-and-cedar bungalow in Ballard, on a hill overlooking Shilshole Bay. There had been a break in the relentless October cloud cover, and the entire hillside and the bay below were bathed in golden-hour light from a sun that for once wasn’t obscured by cloud cover. Verraday started up the walkway, then paused and turned toward the setting sun. He luxuriated in the sight of Bainbridge Island and the Olympic Mountains backlit, the sky deep indigo above him, and to the west, a bank of clouds tinged pink and red. He closed his eyes, breathed in the sea air, and savored the warmth and light on his skin.
When he had absorbed as much of it as he could, he reluctantly let go of the moment and continued up the path to Penny’s house. He passed her Zen garden with its neatly trimmed junipers and gravel artfully raked to create the sense of water flowing down a riverbed. Penny was the more financially successful of the two of them by a considerable margin. Like her brother, she was a doctor of psychology. But she had chosen to specialize in clinical work rather than the research branch to which Verraday had been drawn. Academia didn’t interest her in the least. She had her own private practice specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy. Her clients were either wealthy or covered by insurance, which brought her an income that dwarfed her brother’s. She had also made some very shrewd investments in Seattle IT start-ups that had paid off spectacularly.
Her house had originally been built for an executive at Boeing in the 1950s, and Penny had had it renovated to be fully wheelchair accessible. A ramp led to Penny’s front door, with a narrow set of stairs beside it. Verraday reached out to ring the bell, but before he could touch it, the door swung open, revealing Penny in her wheelchair, smiling.