At Rope's End

by Edward Kay

  “I think he’d rather take the lawsuit and the knife in the throat.”

  “Okay. I’ll drop the suit against him. No conditions. But I’m not dropping the one against the city and the SPD. They’re the ones who are really responsible for it. That’s where the orders came from.”

  “Word is they want to settle out of court with you, James. You’ve just helped them close a lot of cases. They don’t want to be seen to be making an enemy of you. They want to treat it like an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

  “What about Jensen? What happened to her?”

  “Now there’s a piece of work. One of the shots I fired through the door got her in the arm. Even then, she had no intention of giving up. She jumped right through the window of your study. Hopefully your insurance will cover that, too. I looked out and saw her lying facedown on your walkway. I thought she was dead, and I knew you and Bosko both needed my immediate attention. Tempted though I was to leave the duct tape on your mouth, I was afraid you’d choke on your own blood. And I knew I’d lose Bosko for sure if I didn’t get some compression on that knife wound. So I left her out there while I tended to the two of you. When the backup arrived, they asked what had happened to the wounded suspect who was supposed to be outside. She was gone. A patrol car spotted her in an alley three blocks away. She had a broken ankle but she was halfway through hotwiring a car for a getaway. This girl’s done her homework.”

  “She’s a deeply disturbed individual. And trust me, I’ve met a lot of them.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting that. But she was sane enough to realize she didn’t have a chance when a second patrol car showed up and sealed off the alley. So she surrendered. She’s been charged and is in custody. No bail.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “When we checked her dorm room, we found a kill kit she’d put together: knives, box cutters, syringes, a mask, garbage bags, and plastic handcuffs. She kept a diary that she wrote everything down in. She’s been researching you since she was in high school. Had every single article you’d ever written bookmarked on her computer. She wanted to learn everything that you could teach her about profiling so that when she started killing, she’d know what to do to throw investigators off her trail. Then once she became your student, she developed a romantic interest in you. An obsession, really. She kept a diary. She wrote about you in it. A lot.”

  Verraday knew he wouldn’t want to hear what was in Jensen’s diary, and he wished there was some way that Maclean hadn’t seen what was in there either. But he knew that in the course of her investigation, she would have had to read every last embarrassing word.

  “Jensen fantasized about you constantly. She dreamed that the two of you would become a dynamic duo, killing together and then making love.”

  Verraday said nothing. He felt embarrassed. He wondered if Jensen had written about the pictures she’d taken of herself and mentioned that he’d looked at her photos online. It would be just his luck if, at the first blush of romance, Maclean had come across something humiliating about him in Jensen’s notes.

  “Killing the rat, killing Robson, it’s all there,” said Maclean. “She also mentioned torturing and killing animals and taking pictures of them back when she lived with her parents in Tacoma. She had planned to kill her roommate too. And some other student named Koller. Any idea who that is?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. I’m familiar with him,” said Verraday.

  He fought to suppress a laugh, only because it hurt so much.

  “I wonder what triggered all this in her?” he mused.

  “Wait ’til you hear this,” said Maclean. “Jensen was adopted. Born in Serbia. Spent the first year and a half of her life in an orphanage there. According to her adoptive parents, the place was a hellhole. Cold. Wet. Leaks in the ceiling. She’d been kept in a steel crib, no contact with any other kids, and only about two minutes a day of adult interaction during feedings and diaper changes.”

  “I’ve read about those orphanages,” said Verraday. “In spite of the shit those kids go through, most of them turn out okay once they’re adopted. Human beings are resilient. But that’s the nature of psychopathy. If the condition pre-exists in a child raised under the best of circumstances, with loving parents in a nurturing environment, that child might grow up to be a corporate lawyer or a hedge fund manager. Under the worst circumstances—like being left in a crib for the first year and a half of your life with no love, no warmth, no bonding—you get a serial killer.”

  “It’s sad, really,” said Maclean. “Her parents told me that when they got her, she was so developmentally stunted, she didn’t know how to walk or even smile. They eventually got her physically healthy, but the other part of her, that inner part, never seemed to heal. They said she never seemed to bond with them either. Not really. They bought a few family pets over the years but stopped because the animals always died mysteriously. They tried taking her to a counselor. You can guess the rest.”

  “Psychopaths are extremely good at appearing normal when it suits them,” said Verraday, “and they can be very charming when they want something. Counselors get fooled all the time. It takes years of training—and really good instincts—to detect one.”

  “The adoptive parents hoped that going away to university and getting a career would straighten her out. They’re feeling pretty guilty about what happened. But they said there was never enough evidence to do anything serious, and they loved her in spite of it all.”

  “It’s human nature,” said Verraday, “irrational as it is. It’s an evolutionary development. Parents love their kids and want to protect them no matter what those kids are like. Otherwise most of us would probably have been strangled in our cradles.”

  “I like it when you let your romantic side show like that,” quipped Maclean.

  Verraday began to laugh but felt a searing pain in his shoulder and abdomen. Once it had subsided enough for him to speak, he continued.

  “By the time they took her out of the orphanage, it wouldn’t have mattered what her adoptive parents did. No amount of kindness would have changed her. The jack-in-the-box handle was cranking away inside her head, and it was just a matter of time until the lid blew off.”

  “I’ll tell them you said so. Except for that jack-in-the-box part. Maybe it’ll make them feel better. Anyway I don’t want to monopolize your time. The doctor says that until you’re stronger, you can only have visitors for half an hour a day. Penny’s waiting out in the hall. With your dad.”

  “My dad? Did I hear you correctly?”

  “You just said it yourself. Parents love their kids.”

  Verraday nodded. “Listen, before you leave. You still up for going to that Thai restaurant with me next weekend?”

  Maclean frowned. “Sorry. I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  Verraday had an anxious, sinking feeling, and he didn’t want to push Maclean for a reason. Maclean had read Jensen’s diary. He could only imagine what Jensen must have written in there. Probably something about Verraday checking out the thumbnails of her in lingerie. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, and no doubt it would have extinguished any budding romantic feelings that Maclean had toward him. He resigned himself to it. What could he expect? He was an idiot to have taken Jensen’s bait, and the Internet was a merciless public arena that didn’t allow you to conceal any lapses in judgment. He might as well have set up a Twitter feed to announce his sexual tastes and lack of common sense to the world.

  “That’s too bad” was all he could muster by way of a response. But he didn’t push it, because he really didn’t want to hear the reason she had changed her mind about going out on a date with him.

  “For one thing,” Maclean continued, “the doctor says you won’t be out of here until next week. And I’m not really into Thai food, so I’ll have to pass.”

  “Sure, I understand,” said Verraday, trying not to sound dejected.

  Then Maclean grinned at him mischievously. “But I heard there�
�s a Bettie Page exhibit on at the MoMA. Could be fun. What do you say?”