At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(17)
Most of the flyers were the usual junk mail standards: vinyl siding installers, window cleaners, chimney rebuilders, and carpet cleaners. One caught his eye however. It was for a burlesque and rockabilly show at a club downtown, near Pike Place Market, featuring a troupe of performers called Sinner Saint. He’d heard about them. There was something clever and arch about their presentation. Their retro outfits were sexy but artistic and left something to the imagination. Their attitude was campy and tongue in cheek, and the dancers gave themselves witty names like Evilyn Sin Claire. He threw all the flyers into the recycle bin—except the one from Sinner Saint, which he slipped inside his briefcase. It looked like a fun night out. And as his sister Penny regularly reminded him, fun was something he didn’t have enough of in his life, a fact he considered as he put his key in the front door lock, not looking forward to the task that awaited him.
CHAPTER 8
Verraday entered the foyer, kicked off his boots, and hung his leather jacket up on a large Victorian hall tree. It was the only family heirloom he possessed. His great-grandparents had bought it new just after they made the move west to San Francisco from Toronto in the 1890s. There was something reassuring about this piece of Victoriana. After more than a century of existence, its color had deepened to the warm hue of aged whiskey, and it remained solid, like the people who had crafted it. Unlike the disposable, box store crap that was everywhere today, it had been built to last.
Verraday lived alone and kept the thermostat low when he was out, so the house was cold and made him feel like he hadn’t shaken off the chill of the morgue. He slid the thermostat needle up to 74 degrees and heard the furnace rumble to life below him in the basement. He checked his landline and saw from the display that someone had left a voice mail. He punched in the code to play it back. It was Penny.
“Hey James, it’s me. Just checking to see if you’re still coming over for dinner next week. Also, there’s this neat thing happening that you might be interested in. Call me when you get a chance.”
He was curious about what the “neat thing” she was talking about might be. Penny was always upbeat and optimistic, and he was tempted to call her. But the day had left him feeling unsettled. All his professional training emphasized that reaching out and sharing his feelings was the recommended way of coping with unpleasant emotions and traumatic experiences. It was one of the most basic pieces of advice that psychologists gave to their patients—and to each other. But he didn’t feel up to speaking to anyone now, at least not about himself.
Ironically, talking to criminals didn’t bother him anymore. But that was because he shared nothing of himself with the convicts he interviewed. They were always eager to take part in studies. Some thought it might help buy them early parole. Others just liked being interviewed because even an audience of one made them feel important. The psychopaths were the most challenging interview subjects. They came from many different social, economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. But Verraday noted that there were certain characteristics that they all had in common. Chief among them was that they were cocky, self-assured, and always shifted blame for their crimes onto their victims. “She should have known better than to get in the car with a stranger,” or “Anybody who keeps that much cash around is just asking for trouble.” He had observed that psychopaths contrived to avoid first-person pronouns. They used a distinctive syntax that employed a passive voice and made the victim the subject of the sentence rather than the object so that a statement of fact like “I killed her” or “I beat him and robbed him” became “She lost her life” or “He was beaten and robbed,” so that they, the perpetrator, were strangely absent from their accounts of the crimes they had committed.
Their uniquely self-serving manner of speech had irritated him when he had first started going into prisons to interview convicted murderers for his profiling research. But Verraday was now inured to their manipulative behavior, unaffected by their bullshit, their attempts to curry favor and minimize the heinousness of what they had done. What did affect him still, and deeply, was the thought of the victims’ ordeals, their deaths or life-shattering injuries, and the toxic outcome it had, not only on them, but on their families, spouses, and significant others. He knew what it felt like to be one of those survivors, knew what it had done to his father and his sister.
Verraday strode across the living room into the kitchen and extracted a bottle of red wine from a rack, a big Cabernet from the hot, dry Yakima Valley. He uncorked it and poured himself a large glass. He swirled it around, inhaled its nose of blackberries and leather, and allowed himself the sensual pleasure that momentarily transported him away from the ugliness of the world. He took a sip of the wine and held it in his mouth a moment, savoring it, imagining he could feel the heat of the sun locked within it.
He carried the glass into the living room and, still feeling a chill despite the warm air now rising out of the vents, switched on the gas fireplace. Trying to shake off the leaden emotions that the day had left him with, he selected a book that Penny had given him for Christmas the year before last, The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Inner Peace. Penny had told him, in her blunt but affectionate manner, that it might help him with his anger and anxiety issues. His older sister had a particular gift when it came to dealing with the vicissitudes of life.
She had been a star basketball player at her school. Her skill on the court was so extraordinary that at the age of twelve, her school counselors had predicted that she would go to university on a full athletic scholarship. That is, until the night thirty years ago when Verraday, his mother, and his sister were returning from an evening of Christmas shopping and Officer David Robson of the Seattle Police Department ran a red light and broadsided their car. The police cruiser rammed into the driver’s side door, killing their mother instantly. Penny had been sitting directly behind her. The force of the impact crumpled the family’s sedan in on her, crushing her legs and pelvis and irreparably injuring her spinal cord. She had been paraplegic ever since. It had taken two years of physiotherapy for Penny to have even a semblance of physical independence. But though she managed to accomplish a surprising number of everyday tasks on her own, she had never managed to escape from the wheelchair that the accident had put her in. And barring some medical miracle yet to be devised, she never would. Somehow, despite the fact that the crash had robbed her of a scholarship and the use of her legs, Penny was more stoic and accepting of her situation than her younger brother, who had been sitting farthest from the point of impact and so had received only cuts and bruises.