At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(12)

“At first, I just tried to forget about her. Get on with my life. But then she started calling me.”

“She called you? You didn’t call her?”

“That’s right. I hoped that if I backed off, it would make her realize that I was serious about insisting that she got some help. But she refused.”

“How did she sound when she called? What did she talk about?”

“She was always upbeat and energetic, but in kind of a forced, artificial way. Like she was high. Or manic. She said she was getting her act together. She told me she had quit her job at the store so she could focus on becoming famous. She said she was going to build an ‘online following’ and become a web personality.”

“Meaning what?” asked Maclean.

“She was always a little short on details, but she told me she had been accepted as a model on an online site called Assassin Girls and that she had a lot of admirers. She was really proud of that.”

“Assassin Girls?” said Verraday. “I’ve never heard of it. What is it?”

“It’s an alt-erotica website. Pinup girls with tattoos, piercings, scarification, that sort of thing.”

“Can you show it to us?” asked Maclean.

“Yeah, sure.”

Kyle moved to his computer and started typing.

“Did you ever look at her profile there?” asked Verraday.

“Just once, when she first told me about it.”

“Why only once?”

“You’ll know in a second when this page loads.”

A moment later, the monitor was filled with images of young, scantily clad girls with tattoos and piercings.

Even now, Kyle only looked at the screen long enough to confirm that the page had loaded, then he looked away.

“I found it depressing that Rachel’s sense of self-esteem was dependent on exposing herself to strangers like this. And that whatever I could give her, it wasn’t enough.”

Maclean nodded sympathetically. “Is her profile still on the site?”

“I don’t know,” replied Kyle. “Like I said, I only saw it the one time.”

“Mind if we check?” said Maclean.

Kyle sighed. “Sure. No problem.”

A moment later, Rachel’s profile page appeared on the screen. She was identified only by her first name. Verraday noticed that Kyle’s face was momentarily frozen in grief at the sight of her. Even in death, she still had a powerful hold on him.

In one of the photos, she was making a flirty, pouting expression and pulling on her necklace, touching the tip of an ankh to her lips seductively. Verraday was certain that whoever had killed Rachel must have seen this portrait and mentally filed it away to devise his own response to it. In another photo, Rachel stood in front of a mirror wearing nothing but a seductive smile, a pair of black over-the-knee boots, and her beaded ankh necklace. She had a lot of tattoos and piercings, the jewelry all rings and studs except for one unusual piece that caught Verraday’s eye. It was a tiny version of a Native American dream catcher that hung from a piercing in her navel.

“Did she always wear that dream catcher?” asked Verraday.

“No,” replied Kyle. “She got her navel pierced after we split up.”

Another photo featured a close-up of the scripted tattoo beneath her left breast. “Rachel got that after we split up too,” said Kyle. “I never saw it ’til she was on this site. She said that was her new motto.”

Maclean read it off the screen. “‘If you don’t live for something, you’ll die for nothing.’”

“Yeah,” said Kyle. “A lot of those piercings are new too. She said she was going to reinvent herself.”

Down one side of Rachel’s page was a comments section showing the profile pictures of her admirers. The assortment included art school boys, alternative musicians, guys with jail tattoos, gang bangers, and even doughy middle-aged family men who looked like they had written their urgent declarations of passion with the door to their den locked, in between shuttling their broods to and from Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Verraday read some of their predictable comments to himself. Seeing Rachel’s so-called admirers, and the sorrowful expression on Kyle Davis’s face reflected in the monitor, put him in a melancholy frame of mind.

“Thanks,” said Maclean gently. “You don’t have to show us any more.”

Kyle closed the Assassin Girls page. “Like I told you, I only looked once. That was enough for me,” he said. “I never looked at her page after that until just now with you.”

“You said earlier that after that night in the bar, you never saw her again ‘in person.’ What exactly did you mean by that?”

“Rachel texted me about a month before she disappeared and asked to have a Skype call.”

“And did you agree to it?” asked Maclean.

“Yes. When we connected, I saw that she was in her studio apartment. She looked high. She was acting flirty, leaning forward toward the screen, twisting her hair around her fingers. She said she was starting a new business and she wanted me to be her focus group.”

“What was the business?” asked Verraday.

“When Rachel stood up and backed away from her webcam, I saw that she was wearing a black latex dress and high heels. Then I noticed that there was a blonde girl in the background sitting on the edge of Rachel’s bed. Rachel put some music on and started dancing. Then she gestured to the other girl to join her. They started close dancing together and making out in front of the camera. Then she said this was going to be her webcam business, putting on shows for her ‘fans.’ Rachel asked me if I was turned on.”