At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(3)
Verraday clicked forward on his presentation and the original image came back up on the screen, except that now everything but the man and the taxi had been blacked out.
There was a gasp of surprise, then more laughter from the students.
“What do you know,” said Verraday. “You’re right. It is me. And everybody else in this room just falsely identified six innocent people as suspects.”
He paused.
“Now let’s take a look at the girl in the vest and see what color it was.”
He changed the slide so that the entire original scene was now visible.
“Anybody care to tell me anything about the girl in the vest? What color was it?”
Verraday turned around and looked at the screen.
“What do you know? She’s not wearing a vest at all! And it’s not a Starbucks travel mug. It’s just a plain old generic travel mug.”
There were more embarrassed groans and laughter.
Verraday smiled indulgently. He didn’t have to rub it in. His demonstration was making enough of an impression on its own.
“Now, the point of this exercise was not to torture or embarrass you. I’ll save that for the midterm exam next week. Rather, it was to demonstrate something called the misinformation paradigm. There are numerous documented instances in criminal investigations where police have led witnesses exactly the way I just led you, with the result that they either contradicted their original testimony or added in seeing other things that they did not in fact see, either because they weren’t in a position to see those other things or because those other things never actually happened. In a number of cases, this has led to the conviction and sometimes execution of innocent people—all because the police played fast and loose with the evidence and eyewitnesses to get the verdict they wanted.”
He glanced over at the mousy girl. In truth, he was surprised that anyone would have paid enough attention to pick him out of the photo after the fact. Verraday ruefully realized that if the situation were reversed, he would not have been able to identify the student who recognized him. Five weeks into the beginning of the fall semester, he didn’t know most of his sixty-odd students’ names, only the ones who had come to his office to discuss the course material or who were talkative in class. This girl in the big sweater and baggy jeans was neither of those things, though she was clearly more observant and confident than he would have given her credit for. He had only ever noticed her at all because he remembered thinking that her surname—something Scandinavian sounding like Jensen or Janzen or Johansen—didn’t seem to match her black hair and olive skin.
Just then, Verraday noticed someone hovering outside the door of the lecture hall. That usually meant another professor was waiting to use the room. He checked his watch and saw that it was only a couple of minutes until the end of the period. As if on cue, he heard the telltale shuffling of books and papers and the zip of Velcro. He recognized their Pavlovian response. They’d interpreted his glance at his watch as the end of the class. He knew from experience that from this point on, they’d barely hear anything he said. He decided not to fight the tide.
“Okay, we will wrap it up there for today. The readings for next class are on the course outline, but just to remind you, it’s Daniel Yarmey, in Law and Human Behavior. He’s done some interesting research on the accuracy of eyewitness memory. And it’s time to start reviewing all the material we’ve covered so far, because the midterm is fast approaching.”
Verraday switched off the projection system and began unplugging the connections on his laptop. As the bottleneck of students filing out of the room began to clear, he got a better look at the person hovering in the hall. It was a woman—in her early thirties, he guessed. She was tall and attractive, with dark hair. A tailored black pantsuit complemented her slim, athletic build.
She wasn’t anybody from the psychology department. He knew everyone in the faculty and all the teaching assistants. And he didn’t think she was any of the new hires from admin—he wouldn’t have forgotten meeting her. She was too young to be one of those helicopter parents coming to complain that he should have given their kid higher marks. She carried herself with an air of authority, he noted. He considered the possibility that she was there from the dean’s office to request he bump up a student’s mark because the parents were rich and donated to the university. It was a request he always refused.
As the last student exited, the woman slipped into the room and approached him at the lectern. She had intelligent eyes and a thoughtful expression. He really hoped she wasn’t here to ask him to pull a favor for an undeserving student.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Professor Verraday?”
“That’s me.”
She held out her badge. “I’m Detective Constance Maclean, Seattle Police Department.”
Verraday immediately bristled. This was worse than if she had been a flunkey from the dean’s office. Much worse.
“If you’re here to try to talk me into dropping the lawsuit, you can forget it,” he said.
“I’m not here to talk you out of anything, Professor.”
“And if the Seattle Police Department thinks that they can send someone to my place of employment to hang around the halls in front of my students and try to intimidate me, I can assure you and your bosses that is not going to work.”