At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(31)
He debated calling Maclean again. Maybe she’d pick up this time. So he gave it a try but got her voice mail again. Frustrated, he grabbed the bottle of brandy off his bookcase, hesitated, then thought, Fuck it, and poured himself a double shot.
*
Verraday had forgotten to set his alarm. He had awakened several times during the night, his mind beset by disturbing thoughts and images. He hated that state, that limbo that provided neither the rejuvenation of sleep nor the clarity of wakefulness. He had a slight headache from the brandy, so he took some ibuprofen. As a result of oversleeping, he didn’t have time to go to the gym to blow away the cobwebs. He had to content himself with some stretches followed by push-ups, crunches, and free weights. The fog of the brandy and his troubled sleep began to fade away a bit.
What wasn’t fading away was his foul mood at being dismissed by Maclean, practically fired. Not that he could be fired. He wasn’t getting paid for this. Hadn’t even wanted to take this on. It wasn’t his job. If he’d told his lawyer he was helping out a homicide cop, he’d have gotten a warning that he was endangering his own case.
Even so, Maclean’s lack of faith irked him. Verraday felt certain about the killer still being out there. He checked his phone. Destiny still hadn’t texted him back. He tried again in case she was a morning person.
He headed for the foyer to pull on his boots and bomber jacket. Evidently Destiny was a morning person, because by the time Verraday had stepped onto his front porch, he heard the beep that alerted him to an incoming text. He took out his phone and saw that it was from her.
“Hey creeper, stop sending me messages or I’ll call the cops. Now fuck off and leave me alone.”
Verraday felt a sudden twinge of shame from the hostile reaction he had provoked from the sender. His intent was to protect her, but he couldn’t deny that his chivalry was tinged with some attraction, and he wondered if somehow she had picked up on that. Between the vestiges of a mild hangover, Maclean’s abrupt termination of his involvement in the case, and now this scathing rebuke from a stranger he’d try to help, he had a momentary urge to erase the chastising message and make it go away as if it had never existed. Make all of it go away. But he resisted that impulse in case the message would somehow be useful in the future. He slipped his cell phone into his jacket and locked the door. He checked his watch and saw that he had hurried through his morning ablutions and exercise so effectively that he was actually a few minutes ahead of schedule, so he decided to walk to the campus instead of taking his car.
Verraday made sure his front gate was latched behind him then set off on foot, walking south a few blocks then cutting through Ravenna Park over the Twentieth Avenue pedestrian bridge. As he crossed the gully, he noticed that the leaves of the maple trees were turning color now, the green giving way to yellow and orange at the tips. It would advance slowly but relentlessly over the next few weeks until the life had been choked from the leaves. Then they would disengage, drift down into the ravine below to be returned to the earth. He always felt ambivalent about the fall. The harvest and the autumn colors gave him a sense of comfort and continuity, but there was an unsettling duality to it. It was fleeting. The bounty and brilliant colors were followed by the inevitable months of bleakness. It gave him a vague sense of depression. He mused over the emotions that were stirred up in him every year at this time. Was it some metaphor for life that he hadn’t decoded yet? Or was it just that the literal representation of the nature of life itself, no metaphor required, that released darkness into every corner of his consciousness?
It wouldn’t be long until the Thanksgiving decorations went up in the drugstores and supermarkets—uncharacteristically jovial Puritans as well as smiling images of their unsuspecting victims, the turkeys, and their equally unsuspecting victims, the Native North Americans. Thanksgiving for Verraday was an early reminder of how his family had been torn apart. The day after Thanksgiving, when those absurd decorations came down, the blandly cheerful Santas and elves and reindeer would go up, and the air in every mall and shop would be filled with insipid versions of Christmas music. Worst of all for him was the dreaded “Deck the Halls,” because it had been playing on the car radio when Officer Robson T-boned their family’s vehicle and had become frozen in Verraday’s mind as the official soundtrack to his mother’s death and his sister’s lifetime of disablement.
Verraday exited the park, continuing down Twentieth toward the university. Despite the disquieting chain of thoughts set off by seeing the changing color of the big-leaf maples, his blood was beginning to pump, the ibuprofen had kicked in, and by the time he reached the campus, the last unpleasant vestiges of the hangover and his insomnia had nearly faded away.
CHAPTER 16
The class that Verraday was teaching that morning was Introduction to Criminal Psychology. Some of the students who took the course were also in his cognitive psychology class. Some planned to make a career in psychology or criminology. And then there were the ones who enrolled because they had developed a morbid interest in serial killers by watching too many documentaries on TLC or Netflix. There was always one in every class—that is, if you were lucky and weren’t subjected to two or even several of them.
Verraday was about ten minutes into the lecture when a hand went up in the second row. It was Koller again. It was always Koller. After ignoring him long enough to finish his own point and remind the kid which of them was in charge, Verraday glanced at him.