At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(41)

Maclean held up her badge. “I’m Detective Maclean. Seattle PD. I’m investigating a homicide.”

“Holy shit!” exclaimed the girl, now turning in her swivel chair to look directly at her. “Are you serious?”

The girl had a guileless face under her plastic-rimmed glasses, so wide-eyed and sincerely surprised that under other circumstances Maclean would have had to suppress a laugh.

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” she said instead. “Can I speak to whoever is in charge here?”

“Yeah, sure,” replied the girl.

She leaned into the back office and called out, “Hey Marty, there’s a police detective here. It’s about a homicide.” Then she turned politely back toward Maclean and Verraday. “He’ll be right out. Can I get you guys some coffee or water?”

“No, but thank you,” said Maclean.

The young woman went back to work, and Verraday noticed her carefully using a computer paintbrush tool to obscure the face of the girl whose escort page she was putting together. It was pixelated the same way Destiny’s was.

“Do you do that to all of them?” Maclean asked. “Obscure the faces, I mean?”

“Yes, all of them,” said the young woman. “Unless they specifically request not to have their faces pixelated or blanked out. But almost everybody wants their identity concealed. The men as well as the women. A lot of them are doing this on the side, paying for college, so they don’t want their families or the general public to be able to recognize them.”

Verraday wondered how many of his students might be on this site to pay for their skyrocketing tuition. And how many of them might end up like Alana Carmichael, Rachel Friesen, or the girl they knew only as Destiny. He didn’t want to think about it.

A few moments later, a man in his late twenties emerged from the back office. He did not share the guileless features of the emo girl, nor her fashion sense. He was stocky and wore chinos with a coral-colored polo shirt. His eyes were close set, creating the impression of a suspicious, overstuffed ferret. The young woman half-heartedly went back to her work, her attention more focused on the drama unfolding before her.

“Are you Marty?” asked Maclean.

“Yeah. Can I help you?”

Maclean held up her badge again. “I hope so. Detective Maclean, Seattle PD. A girl listed on one of your websites has been murdered.”

“That’s very unfortunate,” said Marty. “We’ve never had that happen before.”

“I’m looking for the file of a girl called Destiny.”

“Do you have a warrant?”

“No, but I can get one by two o’clock this afternoon, by which time our leads will have gone colder, and I will be very, very pissed off. Pissed off enough to bring the vice squad in here to go over your operation and your computer files with a fine-toothed comb. How’s that sound?”

“Whoa, I think we’re getting off on the wrong foot here,” said Marty. “Let’s just take a step back, okay?”

“As long as you can help me out with this girl.”

“So this person’s really dead? You’re not doing some kind of sting operation or something, looking for something else under a false pretext? Because if you did, that would be entrapment, you know.”

“Trust me, my colleague and I have seen her body at the morgue. Not a pretty sight, thanks to some shit heel who probably found her on your web page.”

“Look, people post here voluntarily. We can’t control who they go out with. Do you have her last name?”

“No, that’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.”

“A lot of people who post ads here are named Destiny,” said the emo girl. “It’s a common alias. But I can bring up every file with that username in it. Then you’d just have to cross reference it with the pictures, and we can work backward from there.”

She started typing. Marty seemed to have decided that cooperation would be wiser than obstruction.

“Everybody who lists their services on our site has to give us a real first and last name and a matching credit card,” he said. “That way we know they’re real and not some jealous ex posting nudes of whoever dumped them, or some creep looking to hurt people or pull an Ashley Madison and extort from them, you know? It happens.”

“There are twenty-seven people in our system with that name. Shouldn’t take too long. Wanna come look?” the emo girl asked.

“Thanks,” said Maclean.

Marty lifted the gate in the counter and motioned them in.

Verraday and Maclean watched over the girl’s shoulder as she pulled up the files one by one. There was a mind-boggling array of Destinys, of every iteration, more than either of them could have imagined. There was an African American Destiny dressed as Cleopatra. A red-haired Destiny in a thong. There was even a baby-faced young man named Destiny, dressed in the uniform of the Seattle Seahawks’ cheerleading squad, the SeaGals. It consisted of a blue-and-white crop top, belt, and short-shorts, plus white go-go boots.

Verraday had the sudden sense that he would never, ever fully understand the human condition.

“Oh, I remember him,” said the girl, her lip curling into a grin.

“He’d be hard to forget,” offered Maclean.

“Yeah, even around here,” agreed the girl.