At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)
Edward Kay
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 the building in which he was at this moment teaching his class.