At Rope's End

by Edward Kay

  “Her name is Rachel Friesen, and besides being a close associate of Helen Dale, she was also recently murdered,” said Maclean. “Now, since your employee was one of the last people to see Helen alive, we’d like to talk to him. And I’d also like to know why you lied to us about the woman in the photo.”

  Jason dropped his facade. “I’m sorry. I lied because I hired her to work a party that I threw here for potential clients. I’m shifting the focus of the company toward executive jet charters. There are a lot of manufacturers here considering moving their operations to the Maquiladora region.”

  “The Maquiladora?” asked Maclean.

  “The Mexican free-trade zone, along the border. You wouldn’t believe how many companies are moving their manufacturing operations to Mexico. Hell, they’re even making all the Oreo cookies there now. The labor cost south of the border is ten cents on the dollar compared to here. My plan is to fly the CEOs down to Mexico, show them around, give them the magic carpet treatment. I do all the exploratory flights, and once they set up their businesses, I’ll provide an on-call shuttle service. I’ll be working all the time.”

  “Good idea for a business,” said Verraday. “Too bad a lot of Americans will lose their jobs in the process.”

  “Possibly, but it’ll save jobs right here. The jobs you’re talking about are gone whether I fly CEOs down to Mexico or somebody else does. Those people will have to learn to adapt, just like I’m adapting. That’s life. This company’s been on the ropes a few times. I’m the one pulling it out of the fire. But those senior executives won’t be too happy with me if they come to my party and the next thing you know, there are homicide detectives wanting to interview them about a prostitute being murdered.”

  “Well, Mr. Griffin,” said Maclean. “Perhaps you could enlighten me as to why you hired a prostitute to work at your promotional party in the first place.”

  “Like I said, a lot of these guys get super turned on by seeing a woman in a stewardess outfit. It’s a huge fantasy. I didn’t specifically hire her to sleep with anyone, but I wanted someone who would be cool wearing the uniform and wasn’t going to freak out if somebody got a little fresh with her. In fact, I paid her to flirt with them.”

  “Just flirt?”

  “I didn’t get into any details. I assumed that she knew her business.”

  “When did she leave?”

  “Around midnight.”

  “Can you verify that?”

  “Yes. I arranged a car to take her home afterwards.”

  “Do you have a record of that?”

  “Yes. It’s right here in the recent calls list of my phone.” Jason held out the phone, showing the number display. “See? Emerald City Limousines. I paid with Visa on the company card. I always keep the receipts. It’s in the filing cabinet right here, see?”

  He slid the drawer open and, within a moment, produced the record. Maclean examined it. It appeared to be legitimate.

  “Thank you, Mr. Griffin, I’ll check this later. Now walk me through what happened next.”

  “The guests left shortly after that, then it was just Cody and me. I was pretty drunk by then, and so was Cody. So we left my car and the van here and I called a taxi. I dropped Cody off at his place on the way.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “Yes, got the receipt for that too.”

  Jason reached into the filing cabinet and showed the taxi receipt to Maclean.

  “All right. Thank you, Mr. Griffin. Now I’d like to speak to Cody North.”

  “Sure. I’ll go get him. That’s him working on the Dash 8 out there.”

  “Do you have a PA system?” asked Maclean.

  “Yes.”

  “Then page him, please. I’d prefer if you don’t speak with him alone until after I’ve finished talking to him. And I’d like a list of all the guests who were here the night that Helen Dale was murdered.”

  “There were a lot of people here,” said Jason. “And I think a lot of them will be upset if a detective shows up at their office, know what I mean?”

  “You’ve got ’til nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” said Maclean. “Or you’ll be dealing with the vice squad as well as homicide. Now call Cody and then wait outside.”

  * * *

  Cody North sauntered into the office, looking pleased with himself as he wiped his sweaty brow with a rag before stuffing it into the hip pocket of his coveralls. He was short. About five foot eight, thought Verraday. But he had tried to compensate for it. He had bones tattooed onto the back of his hands, as well as the words “shock” and “awe” on the right and left palms respectively. Even in his mechanic’s uniform, it was apparent that he had a disproportionately well-developed upper body. His shoulders were bulked up, and his biceps pressed against his sleeves. Steroid user, thought Verraday.

  Cody North paused when he saw Maclean and cocked his head slightly, appraising her. His leering gaze alighted momentarily on her eyes, then trolled down to her feet before scanning back up to her shoulders, assessing the loose strand of hair that Verraday had noticed by the fountain. Cody North took one last glance at Maclean’s breasts before meeting her eyes again.

  “Cody North?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  She pointed to a chair in the middle of the room. “Have a seat.”

  North hesitated just long enough to show that he didn’t take her seriously, then complied.

  “I’m Detective Maclean. Seattle PD. This is Dr. James Verraday. He’s a forensic psychologist working with me on this case.”

  Cody looked at Verraday just long enough to give him a derisive smirk. “Headshrinker, huh? I don’t believe in any of that stuff. It’s all bull if you ask me.” Cody then returned his gaze to Maclean as if Verraday had ceased to exist.

  “Well, I didn’t ask you,” said Maclean.

  Cody North just shrugged. Verraday didn’t find the mechanic’s dismissive attitude toward him annoying. The fact that he treated Verraday like he was invisible was helpful, gave him a chance to study his subject more closely. North’s stray glances at Maclean’s anatomy were almost involuntary, some form of compulsion, thought Verraday. But they also seemed to be a kind of dominance display. Behind the greasy coveralls was an even greasier personality, someone who couldn’t help gawking and didn’t seem to care.

  Maclean leaned down toward her briefcase to retrieve the photo of Helen Dale. She glanced up and saw Cody stealing a peek down her blouse. Verraday, whose karate technique was rusty but still effective, had a sudden impulse to backhand the mechanic and rattle his eyeballs into a more respectful line of sight.

  Maclean adjusted her blouse in a covering gesture. Verraday wondered if it was a reflexive or conscious move. Verraday noticed that it had provoked another tiny smirk from Cody North. He seemed like the type who enjoyed intimidating and dominating women. But Maclean was unfazed.

  She held up the uncropped version of Helen Dale’s cockpit selfie. “Is that your reflection in the window?”

  “Yeah, that’s me. So what?”

  “So what can you tell me about the deceased?”

  “What do you mean, ‘the deceased’?”

  “The young woman. Do you know what her name was?”

  “Yeah. She said her name was Destiny.”

  “Well, Mr. North, we have a big problem. Because you’re in this picture with her. And a few hours after it was taken, this young lady was murdered.”

  “Shouldn’t I have a lawyer?” asked Cody.

  “You’re not under arrest,” said Maclean. “At this point, we’re interviewing you as a witness. That means you’re not entitled to a lawyer. Unless you’d prefer that I take you into custody, which is what I’ll do in about ten seconds if you don’t stop gawking and start talking. Got it, shitbird?”

  Verraday saw a flash of fury in Cody North’s eyes. Steroid rage for sure, he thought. Cody’s jaw muscles tensed and his hands curled into fists. He looked like he might leap straight at Maclean. Verraday shifte
d forward, calculating the mechanic’s likely trajectory and deciding that if North raised his ass out of the chair so much as an inch in Maclean’s direction, he’d take him down with a roundhouse. Then North seemed to regain his composure. Either that or the fight had gone out of him. Cody North stared at his knees for a long moment, and when he finally looked back up, he didn’t undress Maclean with his eyes. He just frowned sourly.

  “So what do you want?”

  “Tell me what you know about the murder victim.”

  “Not a lot. She was hired to entertain guests at a bash that Jason threw to butter up potential clients for his executive jet service.”

  “And what exactly did this ‘buttering up’ entail?”

  “Well, she mostly just moved through the crowd, greasing the wheels, you know? It was all men. Big-deal senior executive types. She chatted them up, flirted. Touched them a lot. Danced for them.”

  “What kind of dancing?”

  “Well, sort of burlesque, I guess you’d call it. Jason invited the guests into that executive jet out there, pumped music through the sound system. She came through the plane dressed in that stewardess outfit and did lap dances on the guys who wanted it. There was no shortage of takers.”

  “Did you have a lap dance with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any other kind of relations?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m asking the questions here, Mr. North, not you.”

  “Okay, yeah.”

  “What?”

  “Right after she took that picture, she closed the cockpit door and started grinding away on my lap. Then she undid my fly, reached in, and, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know,” said Maclean. “Would you care to elaborate?”

  “Sure, she jerked me off. Said it was orders from the flight deck. I didn’t hear any complaints from her, that’s for sure. That broad liked the attention. Just ate it up.”

  “And when did she leave?”

  “The party ended pretty early—for a party, that is—because we had a plane to service first thing in the morning. She left around midnight, just before the guests started to go home.”

  “And what mode of transportation did she use?”

  “Jason got her a car. It came right up to the hangar door.”

  “Did you see her get in?”

  “Yeah. Everybody saw her get in and leave. Her exit would have been pretty hard to miss. She flashed her tits out the window just as the car was pulling away.”

  “Was there anybody else in the car with her?”

  “Other than the driver, no. Didn’t look like it.”

  “What kind of a car was it?”

  “A Lincoln Town Car. White.”

  “When did you leave?”

  “Not long after that.”

  “Did you drive home?”

  “No. Jason and I were both pretty wasted, so he called a cab. We left together, and he dropped me off at my place on the way back to his condo.”

  “Mr. North, have you ever been convicted of sexual assault?”

  “No.”

  “Charged?”

  “No.”

  “Any other criminal convictions?”

  “No.”

  Cody was now shifting uneasily in his seat. He was beginning to perspire and Verraday could see that his breathing was shallow. Maclean was getting to him.

  “All right. That’s it for now. But don’t go anywhere. I’m going to check your story out. I mean go over it with a fine-tooth comb. Depending on what I find out, I may want to bring you down to the station tomorrow morning for a longer interview.”

  Cody North nodded. His eyes no longer wandered up Maclean’s calves and thighs, or probed the gaps in her blouse. They had nowhere to look but down.

  * * *

  “He’s hiding something. I’m sure of it,” said Verraday as they drove north on the I-5 back toward the campus.

  “I think so too,” said Maclean. “I just don’t know what yet.”

  “I also think he’s on steroids. Plus he’s got a lot of the classic behaviors of a sex offender. He couldn’t stop eyeing you up. It was almost involuntary. Partly sexual, partly dominance. He only stopped after you put him in his place. And if he acts like that with an authority figure who’s looking for a murder suspect, imagine what he’s like with a woman who’s in a vulnerable position.”

  Maclean nodded. “First thing I’ll do after I drop you back at the university is to take a visit to that limo company, see if Jason and Cody’s story checks out and whether Helen Dale actually made it home. Then I’m going to run both their names. Find out whether they’re hiding anything.”

  Verraday checked his watch and saw that it was getting perilously close to two PM. Maclean noticed him checking the time. She stepped on the accelerator and pulled into the fast lane, suddenly going fifteen miles an hour over the posted limit. Verraday gave her a sidelong glance.

  “What? I promised I’d get you to your class on time, didn’t I?”

  A few minutes later, she pulled the Interceptor up in front of Guthrie Hall. Verraday checked his watch again and saw that it was not quite two o’clock. She had managed to do it. He saw some of his students heading for the doorway. There was Koller, who would no doubt have something inane and annoying to say during class. Behind Koller was Jensen, wearing her usual frumpy sweater and baggy jeans. She spotted Verraday, smiled shyly at him then entered the building.

  “Those are my students,” said Verraday. “I’d better roll.”

  “I won’t keep you then. Okay if I call you at home later on with some updates?”

  “Please do,” he said. “I’m going to the gym after class, but I should be finished with my workout and back home by six thirty.”

  CHAPTER 24

  After his class and the gym, Verraday didn’t feel like cooking, so on the way home, he stopped in at an unpretentious Middle Eastern café with travel posters of Lebanon on the walls. It was a habit he had acquired in university, when pita bread, hummus, baba ghanoush, and tabouleh had stretched his scant food budget while offering something more exotic and nourishing than the Kraft dinners or ramen noodles favored by most of his classmates. Verraday chose a beef shawarma to go, mentally scrolling through his modest wine collection to select a cheap but decent Sicilian Nero d’Avola that he’d have with it when he got home.

  As he approached his house, Verraday saw that someone had once again opened his front gate while he was out and had left it unlatched. Annoyed, he walked up the path toward the front door. By the dim light of the street lamps, Verraday saw now that there was something on his doorstep. From halfway down the path, he could tell it was too irregularly shaped to be another bundle of unsolicited flyers. He pressed the button on his key fob that switched on a small LED and shone it on his doorstep. The narrow beam picked out a furry, slate-gray shape. He knelt to get a closer look and saw that it was a dead rat, face down. He retrieved his garden trowel from under the front steps and used it to turn the rat over.

  He expected to find it gutted. He had seen that once before, the outcome of a turf war in the small hours of the night between an alley rat and a neighborhood raccoon. The shrieks of the combatants had formed a hellish and prolonged cacophony, though their skirmish had been completely invisible, cloaked in the darkness of the hour. The struggle between the raccoon and its opponent had ended suddenly with a hideous vocal duet. By grotesque coincidence, the raccoon’s growl had formed a discordant lower fourth note against the other animal’s shriek, a frenzied trill that was terrifying to hear, shooting up a neural pathway to some ancient part of Verraday’s brain that instantly recognized it as a death cry. Verraday had only discovered the outcome the next morning when he took his trash into the alley. The rat had come out the loser and lay dead in a small pool of coagulated blood. The raccoon had ripped the rat open from its crotch to its neck, disemboweling it without eating a single bite, preferring the garbage in the nearby bins to the flesh of its victim.
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br />   Verraday now ran the keychain LED beam over the rat on his doorstep and saw that unlike its vanquished predecessor, this one’s belly was intact. Its throat, however, had been slit from ear to ear with one single, neat incision, so deep that the ridges of the severed esophagus were visible. He also could feel when he’d turned it over that rigor mortis had already set in. Verraday checked the area around the rat with his LED beam and noted that there was no blood on the steps, the walkway, or on the gravel around the hedges. Whoever or whatever had done this had killed it somewhere else and brought the corpse to his doorstep only after it had bled out. But why? Could an animal have made a cut that clean? That seemed unlikely.

  He didn’t know that much about bodies, but he understood minds, and his instincts told him this was the work of a human. Perhaps it was a random act of idiocy, a prank committed by somebody who didn’t know a thing about the person on whose doorstep they had laid it. Or had he been deliberately targeted?

  Verraday considered the most likely candidates. At the top of his list was Bosko. Or perhaps it was Detective Fowler. If Fowler had somehow gotten wind that Verraday was working with Maclean, this crude yet sadistic signal seemed like the sort of thing he’d do to psych him out, his way of telling him to back off. Then he wondered if it was possible that a disgruntled student had done it. Verraday was normally pretty popular with his students. But there were always some who didn’t like you no matter what. They were the ones who skulked around the Internet like cowardly assassins, using sites like RateMyProfessor.com, the bane of academics, to leave a one out of five rating and comments like “Boring,” “useless,” or “know-it-all jerk” without ever having to reveal their own identities. He wondered about Koller. Verraday had gone a little heavy with the public mockery of him in the last class. Not that Koller didn’t deserve it. But had it been enough to flip Koller’s switch to the “crazy” setting, he wondered?

  Verraday took his briefcase and his beef shawarma inside. He went to the kitchen, found a plastic bag, and took it out to the front steps. He dropped the rat’s body into the bag and placed it in the freezer. If this were anything more than a prank, he would need to preserve the evidence. Even though he had never actually touched the rat directly, he had an urge to wash his hands with soap and water. He retrieved his shawarma, noticing now that it was roughly the same size and proportions as the rat. He felt a wave of revulsion. He put the shawarma in the refrigerator in case his appetite came back later, but suspected it would never happen.