At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(18)
Verraday was rushed along with his mother and sister to the emergency ward at Harborview. His mother was pronounced dead upon arrival. Verraday was kept overnight for observation and released into his father’s care the next day. Penny however, stayed in the hospital to begin the long rehabilitation from her grievous injuries. Though arduous, the rehab regimen had also given her years to talk through her feelings with therapists and work through not only her physical traumas but her emotional ones as well, with the aid of sympathetic and knowledgeable adult ears. But because Verraday didn’t have any physical injuries, he never needed to see a doctor again and received no counseling on how to cope with the loss of his mother. His situation was aggravated by the fact that the city, the police department, and their lawyers circled the wagons and did their best to discredit Verraday’s memory of the accident, shifting the blame away from their officer and onto his mother, who, being dead, was conveniently unable to speak for herself.
Even as an adult, the memories of the cajoling and bullying by police and their legal counsel in the weeks after the crash were enough to provoke an adrenaline response in Verraday, raising his blood pressure and making his muscles tighten involuntarily. After a police lawyer had repeatedly failed to find a flaw in Verraday’s recounting of the events during cross-examination, the counselor had told the judge in a faux-compassionate tone that “a child that age, having been subjected to such a distressing event, can’t be expected to recall it accurately. To place that burden on the boy would be cruel to him and grossly unjust to the accused.” The judge agreed. The case was thrown out of court for lack of evidence and Robson was allowed to keep his job on the force.
Verraday sat down in front of the fire with his wine and the Dalai Lama’s book. Penny, he knew in his heart, was rational and wise to a degree that he never would or could be. She didn’t feel rage about injustices the way he did. She just made her personal corner of the world as uplifting as possible and seemed to accept the rest as an inevitable part of the human condition. Verraday knew that Penny’s tribulations far exceeded his and continued to affect every moment of her waking life. Yet here she was, as far as he could tell, full of grace and laughter. He loved and respected his sister enough that normally, he would at least try to take her advice. But not tonight. He skimmed a few paragraphs of the Dalai Lama’s book and found it singularly unhelpful.
“Sorry, Penny,” he said as he set the book aside.
The only thing that would bring him any inner peace tonight would be to find out who had tortured and killed Rachel Friesen and Alana Carmichael and make sure the son of a bitch never had the chance to do it to anyone else.
He finished his wine and switched off the gas fireplace. The heat dissipated immediately and the chill air began to close in around him once again. Verraday went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of brandy, and headed for his study, resigned to the darkness that awaited him there.
CHAPTER 9
Verraday set his brandy and the two envelopes down on his desk. He opened his filing cabinet and pulled out the crime scene photo of Rachel Friesen that Maclean had given him the previous day. Then he sat down, reached into the center drawer, and took out the Boeing letter opener that his father, a lifelong machinist with the company, had given him as a graduation present. He slit the seals and laid the contents of the envelopes out in two separate piles, one for Rachel Friesen’s case, the other for Alana Carmichael.
He decided to begin with Rachel Friesen’s file, rationalizing that since he’d already seen her at the morgue and knew what to expect, it would ease him into the disagreeable task of examining the unfamiliar crime scene photos of Alana Carmichael. At the top of the file were photos of tracks, which, the report noted, appeared to have been made by tires of the sort found on full-size commercial vans. They had been sent to the police lab and identification was pending. The report stated that the owners of the cranberry farm, the Kerkhoff family, owned a heavy International Harvester truck as well as a Dodge Ram pickup but that neither of those vehicles’ tires matched the tracks found near the crime scene. There were photos of the bog itself, as well as the forested area around it. One was an aerial view with marks on it showing where the body was found and where the tire tracks were in relation to the cranberry bog. In the overhead shot, he could see that the farm was surrounded on three sides by encroaching new suburbs. Verraday supposed it would be only a decade at most until the farm ceased to exist and was sold off to developers to make cookie-cutter bungalows and townhouses.
At last Verraday had to face the inevitable close-ups of the body. The fact that he had seen Rachel Friesen’s corpse in the flesh less than twelve hours earlier didn’t make looking at the photos any less disturbing. There were several angles showing Rachel Friesen’s body in relation to the flooded bog and the shoreline. And there were several more from the same series Maclean had given him the previous day, but they were far more graphic. Examining the photos, he saw that there were numerous angles of the bruises and welts that covered her shoulders, back, buttocks, and thighs. They were wide and dark, not the type that would be made by most lovers engaged in sadomasochistic play. The blows needed to leave the marks that were on Rachel Friesen could only be the product of someone whose anger was uncontrollable once unleashed.
Verraday took a sip of his brandy. Then he examined the second set of crime scene photos and the reports that Maclean had copied from Fowler’s investigation of the Alana Carmichael murder.