At Rope's End

by Edward Kay

  AT ROPE’S END

  A Dr. James Verraday Mystery

  Edward Kay

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Edward Kay

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-000-6

  ISBN (paperback): 978-1-68331-001-3

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-002-0

  ISBN (Kindle): 978-1-68331-003-7

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-004-4

  Cover design by Melanie Sun

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First Edition: January 2017

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  PROLOGUE

  Ray Kerkhoff paused, pushing his baseball cap up to wipe away the sweat rolling down his forehead despite the cool October air. A heavy, gray herringbone cloud cover hung above him, stretching all the way across Puget Sound to the Olympic Peninsula. He had grown up here and was used to these moody West Coast skies, so he didn’t find them oppressively dark and claustrophobic the way that transplanted easterners did.

  Besides, the sea of crimson now spreading out beneath him in every direction more than made up for the lack of color overhead. He wiped the last of the sweat away from his eyes and put his handkerchief back in his shirt, resuming the arduous work of hauling the boom through the waist-deep water.

  Gripping the end of the boom, he traced a circle around the perimeter of the bog so that the berries would be trapped within its arc. Tomorrow morning they would be pumped by water jets onto a conveyor system that would load them into the old International Harvester truck that had been in Kerkhoff’s family for almost as long as they’d owned this bog. Then he would shepherd the year’s harvest to the Ocean Spray plant down the coast, just south of Aberdeen. There his cranberries would be pulped, sweetened, cooked, and transformed into sauce, then shipped out to be served alongside turkey at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners throughout the country.

  He gazed across the scarlet lake, and as he had liked to do ever since he was a kid, when his father ran the operation, he wondered about the scenes that would play out when “his” cranberries reached their final destination on the tables of tens of thousands of people he would never meet. He imagined who they might be: homesick college kids who had flown back to be with their families for the holidays; couples taking their children from big cities back to small towns to spend a long weekend with elderly parents thrilled to see their grandchildren; men and women in uniform whose military service prevented them from spending the holidays with their loved ones but for whom the ritual of a turkey dinner with cranberry sauce, shared with their comrades-in-arms, would take the edge off their loneliness. His cranberries might find their way into shelters or Salvation Army halls, served to homeless people for whom families were a distant memory, or maybe no memory at all.

  Kerkhoff liked to think that for all these people—most of whom would taste cranberries exactly twice a year—the distinctive flavor was infused with meaning and memories. He took pleasure from the knowledge that no matter what other troubles they faced, the ritual consumption of his berries would give comfort and a sense of continuity to their lives.

  Those reveries were Kerkhoff’s own ritual and gave his mind somewhere to go while he was slogging through the grunt work that was an unavoidable part of the harvest. He changed course to close the loop and began dragging the heavy boom back toward the shore. He plucked one of the floating cranberries off a stem and raised it to his lips. Testing it against his teeth, he found it firm, with just enough give to let him know it was ready. He bit down. The astringent tang flooded his mouth. The balance between fruit and tannin was perfect. This was one of the best crops ever.

  Heartened by this, he pulled the boom with renewed energy, legs pushing hard against the resistance of the water. Suddenly he felt a heavy tug that stopped him midstride, almost tearing the boom out of his hands. That shouldn’t be possible, he thought. The bog was clear of roots and branches. He pulled on the boom again. Kerkhoff was a muscular man, but it barely budged. He brushed away the berries floating on the surface so that he could see what the problem was. They parted momentarily, giving him a glimpse into the peaty water. A few feet below the surface, at the edge of visibility, he caught a flash of white. Then the berries closed over the gap.

  He leaned down close to the water and cupped his hands to block the reflected light that was obscuring his view. Then he saw it again. Something curved and white. He rolled up his sleeves and reached down to grasp whatever it was. That’s when he felt it. Soft and smooth as the belly of a salmon. And then something else, thin and rough to the touch. A length of rope. He tugged on the free end of it. A metallic taste flooded Kerkhoff’s mouth as he realized what the shadowy shape ascending from the murky depths was. A moment later, the naked body of a young woman broke the surface, pushing the cranberries aside.

  Small fragments of stem and leaves clung to her breasts and forehead. Her face was smooth and white, framed by long black hair that spread out across the surface of the water like a dark halo. Her lifeless eyes, red with burst blood vessels, stared past him. Her lips were parted slightly, revealing a chipped incisor. Tattooed in neat cursive under her left breast were the words “If you don’t live for something, you’ll die for nothing.”

  Her belly was arched forward at an unnatural angle, and as Ray Kerkhoff looked closer, he saw why: the length of rope he had pulled on had been used to hogtie her. A brown line traced an ugly circle around her neck. Fighting to control his breath, which was coming fast and shallow now, he backed away from her body toward the shore, almost tripping as he pulled his cell phone out of his shirt pocket and called 9-1-1.

  CHAPTER 1

  James Verraday stood behind the podium and looked out at the faces of the second-year students filling the lecture hall for his cognitive psychology class. Projected above and behind him on a retractable screen was a panoramic photo of Seattle’s University of Washington campus, looking north along West Stevens Way. In the background was Guthrie Hall. It was, thought Verraday, a hideous example of New Brutalist architecture that would look more at home as the headquarters of a secret police agency in a failed socialist workers’ paradise like Bulgaria or Albania than as t
he building in which he was at this moment teaching his class.

  In the photo, happy-looking students were going about their business on the campus. Many of them wore the sort of outdoor gear popular in the Pacific Northwest—down-filled vests and rainproof outer shells over sweaters and jackets. In the foreground, a pair of pretty girls—one blonde, the other African American—were laughing over a shared joke as they made their way to class. Farther along the sidewalk, a smiling young man with a gray backpack was gesturing to a fellow student to emphasize a point. In the background, a man in his midthirties was climbing out of a taxi, his face partially obscured by the pillar of the sedan. A trio of students lounged on the grass nearby. One of them, a young woman with shoulder-length brown hair, was taking a sip from a travel mug.

  It was the sort of pleasant but forgettable photograph you’d see in a university brochure, an effect heightened by a cheery-looking script, superimposed at the top of the frame, that read “Welcome to the University of Washington!” It appeared to be some sort of placeholder image in Verraday’s PowerPoint presentation, and none of the students were paying much attention to it.

  Without a word, Verraday hit a button on his laptop and the PowerPoint image disappeared, leaving a blank white screen in its place.

  “So the last thing I want to talk about today,” he said, “is something called the short-term memory decay theory. In that image that was just up there behind me, what color was the down-filled vest of the girl taking a sip from the Starbucks travel mug?”

  As usual, no one in the hall volunteered a response. Even with second-year students, Verraday almost always had to pry an answer out of them.

  “Okay, let’s just have a show of hands instead. How many people think that the girl was wearing a maroon vest?”

  He waited and in response received a small, tentative show of hands.

  “Okay, how many of you say it was purple?”

  More hesitation, then a larger number of hands went up.

  “All right. So more of you think it was purple than think it was maroon. Anybody notice if it was red?”

  There was silence in the room.

  “Come on, you were all eyewitnesses,” he said archly. “You must know what color it was. Who thinks it’s red?”

  A few students raised their hands hesitantly.

  “Okay, so a small number of eyewitnesses think the girl was wearing a red vest. And some of you, a few more, think that it was maroon, right? You sure about that?”

  There were embarrassed, uncertain grins.

  “So clearly, most of you remember the vest as being purple.”

  He observed the nods of the students who voted purple, confident at being in the majority.

  “So those of you who said maroon or red, do you want to change your mind? Be with the majority?”

  There was more nervous laughter, and a couple of hands went up.

  “All right, so you thought it was something else, but now that all these other eyewitnesses said purple, you’re not so sure. Do you all recall seeing the man getting out of the taxi?”

  There were more nods throughout the room. This was something they all felt much more certain about.

  “Good. Looks like everybody remembers that,” said Verraday. “So now I want you to pick that man out of a lineup, or, as our friends in the police department like to call it, a six-pack.”

  He clicked a button on his computer and the screen lit up with mug shot–style photos of six men. All were in their mid-to-late thirties. All of them had similar medium-length brown hair. One was on the thin side of average. Another was slightly heavyset. The rest were variations in the middle. Verraday smiled at the groans and laughter as the students realized the difficulty of the task he’d given them. He went through the men in the photos one by one, again asking the students to raise their hands to select which of the men they thought they had seen getting out of the taxi. When he was done, he noticed that one student, a mousy-looking girl in a bulky sweater and baggy jeans, hadn’t responded to any of them.

  “Now, I believe there is someone who didn’t raise her hand,” said Verraday. He looked at the girl. “Am I right?”

  The girl shook her head affirmatively.

  He challenged her, using a mock-bellicose tone of voice: “But I just showed you a lineup of six men and told you to pick one. Are you going to let some crook get away with murder because you can’t be sure of what he looks like? Why aren’t you picking one?”

  “Because it wasn’t any of them,” the girl replied, gazing at him through nondescript, wire-frame glasses. “It was you.”

  “It was me?” asked Verraday, acting like it was the most absurd notion he’d ever heard.

  He mugged to the rest of the class.

  “She thinks the man in the taxi was me. Can you believe it?”

  His comment, his stifled laugh, and his comically skeptical expression elicited snickers of disbelief throughout the lecture hall. He turned back to the girl.

  “You really think it was me?”

  “Yes, I do,” she replied.

  “And if I told you that I’d deduct ten percent of your term grade if you were wrong, would you still say it was me?”

  “Yes, I would,” she responded, quietly but still without hesitation.

  “Ooooh, a risk taker,” said Verraday, getting a rise out of the other students. “Well, let’s find out then.”

  Verraday clicked forward on his presentation and the original image came back up on the screen, except that now everything but the man and the taxi had been blacked out.

  There was a gasp of surprise, then more laughter from the students.

  “What do you know,” said Verraday. “You’re right. It is me. And everybody else in this room just falsely identified six innocent people as suspects.”

  He paused.

  “Now let’s take a look at the girl in the vest and see what color it was.”

  He changed the slide so that the entire original scene was now visible.

  “Anybody care to tell me anything about the girl in the vest? What color was it?”

  Verraday turned around and looked at the screen.

  “What do you know? She’s not wearing a vest at all! And it’s not a Starbucks travel mug. It’s just a plain old generic travel mug.”

  There were more embarrassed groans and laughter.

  Verraday smiled indulgently. He didn’t have to rub it in. His demonstration was making enough of an impression on its own.

  “Now, the point of this exercise was not to torture or embarrass you. I’ll save that for the midterm exam next week. Rather, it was to demonstrate something called the misinformation paradigm. There are numerous documented instances in criminal investigations where police have led witnesses exactly the way I just led you, with the result that they either contradicted their original testimony or added in seeing other things that they did not in fact see, either because they weren’t in a position to see those other things or because those other things never actually happened. In a number of cases, this has led to the conviction and sometimes execution of innocent people—all because the police played fast and loose with the evidence and eyewitnesses to get the verdict they wanted.”

  He glanced over at the mousy girl. In truth, he was surprised that anyone would have paid enough attention to pick him out of the photo after the fact. Verraday ruefully realized that if the situation were reversed, he would not have been able to identify the student who recognized him. Five weeks into the beginning of the fall semester, he didn’t know most of his sixty-odd students’ names, only the ones who had come to his office to discuss the course material or who were talkative in class. This girl in the big sweater and baggy jeans was neither of those things, though she was clearly more observant and confident than he would have given her credit for. He had only ever noticed her at all because he remembered thinking that her surname—something Scandinavian sounding like Jensen or Janzen or Johansen—didn’t seem to match her black hair
and olive skin.

  Just then, Verraday noticed someone hovering outside the door of the lecture hall. That usually meant another professor was waiting to use the room. He checked his watch and saw that it was only a couple of minutes until the end of the period. As if on cue, he heard the telltale shuffling of books and papers and the zip of Velcro. He recognized their Pavlovian response. They’d interpreted his glance at his watch as the end of the class. He knew from experience that from this point on, they’d barely hear anything he said. He decided not to fight the tide.

  “Okay, we will wrap it up there for today. The readings for next class are on the course outline, but just to remind you, it’s Daniel Yarmey, in Law and Human Behavior. He’s done some interesting research on the accuracy of eyewitness memory. And it’s time to start reviewing all the material we’ve covered so far, because the midterm is fast approaching.”

  Verraday switched off the projection system and began unplugging the connections on his laptop. As the bottleneck of students filing out of the room began to clear, he got a better look at the person hovering in the hall. It was a woman—in her early thirties, he guessed. She was tall and attractive, with dark hair. A tailored black pantsuit complemented her slim, athletic build.

  She wasn’t anybody from the psychology department. He knew everyone in the faculty and all the teaching assistants. And he didn’t think she was any of the new hires from admin—he wouldn’t have forgotten meeting her. She was too young to be one of those helicopter parents coming to complain that he should have given their kid higher marks. She carried herself with an air of authority, he noted. He considered the possibility that she was there from the dean’s office to request he bump up a student’s mark because the parents were rich and donated to the university. It was a request he always refused.

  As the last student exited, the woman slipped into the room and approached him at the lectern. She had intelligent eyes and a thoughtful expression. He really hoped she wasn’t here to ask him to pull a favor for an undeserving student.