At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(7)
Carefully, he picked his way through the shadows until he reached his desk, bent over, and switched on the small halogen lamp that sat atop it. He found Maclean’s card where he had left it the previous evening, sliding it into the narrow beam of light so he could make out her office phone number. He lifted the phone receiver off its cradle and keyed it in. He had a moment of apprehension, wondering what he would say if she were still there and answered—how strange it would seem getting a call from him at three thirty in the morning. He was relieved when, after four rings, her voice mail picked up. At the prompt, he said simply, “Detective Maclean, this is James Verraday. I’ve been thinking it over. If you’d still like my help, I’m in.”
CHAPTER 4
Verraday shivered involuntarily. It wasn’t the sight of Rachel Friesen’s body on the stainless steel table in front of him, though that was disturbing enough. It was the fact that the morgue in the King County Medical Examiner’s Office was kept at precisely 36 degrees Fahrenheit, not giving him the chance to shake off the chill of the cool, damp, fog that had rolled in from Puget Sound that morning. As a forensic psychologist, Verraday was more accustomed to coming face to face with murderers than with their victims, and it hadn’t occurred to him to wear an extra layer of clothing to keep the relentless iciness of the morgue out of his bones. Verraday appreciated that if Maclean had noticed him shiver, she hadn’t commented on it. He also appreciated that if she had noticed the electronic time stamp on the message he’d left on her office voice mail, she hadn’t let on either. Nobody ever left messages at that time of night unless they were a shift worker or someone being visited by demons. And Verraday wasn’t a shift worker.
“So what do you know about her?” he asked.
“Rachel Friesen was twenty-two years old,” replied Maclean. “She attended University of Washington, same campus you’re at.”
He didn’t recognize her. UW Seattle was a large campus. Hundreds of students passed through his lecture hall every year. Even so, he didn’t like to think that the halls of academia had become quite as depersonalized and factory-like as the critics claimed.
“She had a double major, English and theater,” Maclean continued. “She also took an intro to psychology course.”
Verraday’s face relaxed slightly. “I’ve never taught Intro to Psych. So she wouldn’t have been one of my students.”
“I know. I would have warned you if you had.”
“So what makes you think that this murder is linked to the Carmichael case?”
“For starters, the victims’ profiles are similar.” She led him toward the body. “They were about the same age. Similar look. The tattoos, the piercings.”
Verraday now saw that Rachel had a number of tattoos that weren’t visible in the photo that Maclean had laid out on his office desk the previous afternoon. One scripted tattoo followed the cleft line beneath her left breast. It read, “If you don’t live for something, you’ll die for nothing.”
On the inside of her left ankle was a Buddhist mandala, a symbol he was familiar with because his sister Penny had a pair of them tattooed defiantly on the feet that she could no longer feel.
Verraday examined a small hole in the skin at the top of her navel. “Was she wearing any jewelry in this piercing when they found her?”
“No.”
“If she was wearing a piece there when she was murdered, the killer probably took it as a souvenir. We should find out what she wore there and keep an eye out for it. If the killer took something from Rachel, he would have done the same with Alana Carmichael.”
“The way in which the victims were murdered is distinctive,” said Maclean. “Take a look at the strangulation marks.”
Verraday leaned in close and examined a pattern of bruises as well as an ugly brown line encircling her neck.
“So those two bruises on the throat indicate thumb pressure,” he commented.
“That’s right,” said Maclean. “But according to the medical examiner, death was the result of strangulation with the garrote that left that ligature mark around her neck.”
Verraday nodded agreement. “The killer started off choking her with his hands,” he said. “He would have gotten more and more aroused. Then when he got really turned on, he switched to the garrote. That’s his end game.”
Verraday looked at Rachel’s chipped upper left incisor.
“According to the examiner,” said Maclean. “The killer probably broke Rachel’s tooth using her necklace.”
Maclean pulled out a transparent evidence bag holding the piece of jewelry, a string of black beads separated by silver links. It was not, as he had first thought, a rosary. The pendant was a hieroglyphic cross with a loop at its head. The cross bar was dented.
“An ankh,” said Verraday. “The Ancient Egyptian symbol of eternal life.” He knew from seeing students around the campus that it was popular with goths, though he guessed that their concept of eternal life owed more to late-night B horror movies than to pharaohs and sun worship. He balled his hand into a fist and tensed his arm muscles as he played out in his mind the force that must have been necessary to chip that piece off Rachel’s tooth and dent the ankh.
“He must have punched her with the beads wrapped around his hand like a set of brass knuckles,” said Verraday. “The force necessary to do that implies extreme sexual rage.”