At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(42)

On the seventeenth Destiny, Verraday spotted the blonde hair and Freya tattoo of Seattle’s latest homicide victim.

“Stop. That’s her,” he said.

“What’s her name?” asked Maclean.

The young woman leaned into the screen to check the listing information. “Helen Dale,” she responded.

“I’ll need her home address,” said Maclean.

“I’ll print it off,” said the girl.

“Do the customers contact the escorts through the site?”

“No,” said Marty defensively. “We don’t get into any of that stuff at all. The escorts arrange their own means of contact. Usually text. There’s no messaging, either incoming or outgoing on our sites, so we have no way of knowing who any of their clients are.”

“But you could figure out the IP addresses of the people who had checked her out.”

“Good luck with that,” said Marty. “You wouldn’t believe how many visitors we get.”

The emo girl nodded her head in agreement and said, “That guy in the cheerleader outfit?”

She tapped a key and put her finger on a number on the screen. “Twenty-six-thousand three hundred and seventy-one hits since he joined us six months ago. Oh, wait, make that seventy-two. He just had another one.”

“If he got hired anywhere near as often as he got gawked at,” added Marty, “he wouldn’t have to prance around in a SeaGals outfit to make a living. He’d own the whole damned stadium.”

“Okay. One last thing,” said Maclean. “Are there any more pictures in Helen Dale’s file other than what’s on the public web page?”

“Could be,” replied the girl. “A lot of people like to rotate their photos from time to time, change it up so they appeal to new types of clients, plus give their repeat customers something new to look at.”

The girl dragged the cursor over a box and clicked. A number of photos of Helen appeared, designed to appeal to as broad a public as possible. In some, she was nude, in others, she was wearing just panties or lingerie. In still others, she wore fetish gear. And in one photo, she was wearing a flight attendant’s uniform and standing in the cockpit of an empty passenger plane. She held a glass of champagne in one hand.

“How old are these?” asked Maclean.

“They’ve been in her file awhile now. More than a month. Except that flight attendant one. It was uploaded two days ago.”

“Can we see it full screen?”

“Sure.”

A moment later, the large monitor was filled with the image of Helen Dale, a.k.a. Destiny. She stood in the cockpit, grinning seductively, one arm extended to take a selfie. The flight attendant’s uniform that she wore appeared to be vintage and from an airline that neither of them recognized. It was dark outside the plane, as though the photo had been taken at nighttime or in a hangar. In one window, Maclean could make out the reflection of a man’s face.

“Send me an electronic copy of that photo, would you?” said Maclean.

“Sure thing,” said the girl.

Maclean handed the girl her business card. “Thanks, you’ve both been a lot of help.”

As they headed down the stairs toward the street, Maclean turned to Verraday. “I’m sending a forensics team to Helen Dale’s apartment. I’d love to have you come along, but it would attract too much attention.”

“I understand,” said Verraday. “Let me know if you find anything unusual. Anything at all.”

“We need to find out where that flight attendant’s uniform comes from. Could give us a clue about who that man is inside the cockpit with her. He might know something.”

“I’ll check the UW staff directory,” said Verraday. “There might be somebody there who can tell us something about the uniform or the plane. The university has a big aerospace faculty because of the work they do with Boeing. Odds are good that one of the professors is an aviation history geek and might be able to recognize the plane and the uniform. I’ll ask around.”

“Sounds good. I’ll e-mail the photo to you. By the way, did you tell your sister about Robson yet?”

“No, I’m meeting her this evening. Figured it’s better to talk about it in person.”

“That makes sense. Hope it goes okay. Good luck.”





CHAPTER 20


At six o’clock that evening, Verraday pulled up in front of his sister Penny’s house. It was a Frank Lloyd Wright style stone-and-cedar bungalow in Ballard, on a hill overlooking Shilshole Bay. There had been a break in the relentless October cloud cover, and the entire hillside and the bay below were bathed in golden-hour light from a sun that for once wasn’t obscured by cloud cover. Verraday started up the walkway, then paused and turned toward the setting sun. He luxuriated in the sight of Bainbridge Island and the Olympic Mountains backlit, the sky deep indigo above him, and to the west, a bank of clouds tinged pink and red. He closed his eyes, breathed in the sea air, and savored the warmth and light on his skin.

When he had absorbed as much of it as he could, he reluctantly let go of the moment and continued up the path to Penny’s house. He passed her Zen garden with its neatly trimmed junipers and gravel artfully raked to create the sense of water flowing down a riverbed. Penny was the more financially successful of the two of them by a considerable margin. Like her brother, she was a doctor of psychology. But she had chosen to specialize in clinical work rather than the research branch to which Verraday had been drawn. Academia didn’t interest her in the least. She had her own private practice specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy. Her clients were either wealthy or covered by insurance, which brought her an income that dwarfed her brother’s. She had also made some very shrewd investments in Seattle IT start-ups that had paid off spectacularly.