At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(52)
Maclean nodded. “First thing I’ll do after I drop you back at the university is to take a visit to that limo company, see if Jason and Cody’s story checks out and whether Helen Dale actually made it home. Then I’m going to run both their names. Find out whether they’re hiding anything.”
Verraday checked his watch and saw that it was getting perilously close to two PM. Maclean noticed him checking the time. She stepped on the accelerator and pulled into the fast lane, suddenly going fifteen miles an hour over the posted limit. Verraday gave her a sidelong glance.
“What? I promised I’d get you to your class on time, didn’t I?”
A few minutes later, she pulled the Interceptor up in front of Guthrie Hall. Verraday checked his watch again and saw that it was not quite two o’clock. She had managed to do it. He saw some of his students heading for the doorway. There was Koller, who would no doubt have something inane and annoying to say during class. Behind Koller was Jensen, wearing her usual frumpy sweater and baggy jeans. She spotted Verraday, smiled shyly at him then entered the building.
“Those are my students,” said Verraday. “I’d better roll.”
“I won’t keep you then. Okay if I call you at home later on with some updates?”
“Please do,” he said. “I’m going to the gym after class, but I should be finished with my workout and back home by six thirty.”
CHAPTER 24
After his class and the gym, Verraday didn’t feel like cooking, so on the way home, he stopped in at an unpretentious Middle Eastern café with travel posters of Lebanon on the walls. It was a habit he had acquired in university, when pita bread, hummus, baba ghanoush, and tabouleh had stretched his scant food budget while offering something more exotic and nourishing than the Kraft dinners or ramen noodles favored by most of his classmates. Verraday chose a beef shawarma to go, mentally scrolling through his modest wine collection to select a cheap but decent Sicilian Nero d’Avola that he’d have with it when he got home.
As he approached his house, Verraday saw that someone had once again opened his front gate while he was out and had left it unlatched. Annoyed, he walked up the path toward the front door. By the dim light of the street lamps, Verraday saw now that there was something on his doorstep. From halfway down the path, he could tell it was too irregularly shaped to be another bundle of unsolicited flyers. He pressed the button on his key fob that switched on a small LED and shone it on his doorstep. The narrow beam picked out a furry, slate-gray shape. He knelt to get a closer look and saw that it was a dead rat, face down. He retrieved his garden trowel from under the front steps and used it to turn the rat over.
He expected to find it gutted. He had seen that once before, the outcome of a turf war in the small hours of the night between an alley rat and a neighborhood raccoon. The shrieks of the combatants had formed a hellish and prolonged cacophony, though their skirmish had been completely invisible, cloaked in the darkness of the hour. The struggle between the raccoon and its opponent had ended suddenly with a hideous vocal duet. By grotesque coincidence, the raccoon’s growl had formed a discordant lower fourth note against the other animal’s shriek, a frenzied trill that was terrifying to hear, shooting up a neural pathway to some ancient part of Verraday’s brain that instantly recognized it as a death cry. Verraday had only discovered the outcome the next morning when he took his trash into the alley. The rat had come out the loser and lay dead in a small pool of coagulated blood. The raccoon had ripped the rat open from its crotch to its neck, disemboweling it without eating a single bite, preferring the garbage in the nearby bins to the flesh of its victim.
Verraday now ran the keychain LED beam over the rat on his doorstep and saw that unlike its vanquished predecessor, this one’s belly was intact. Its throat, however, had been slit from ear to ear with one single, neat incision, so deep that the ridges of the severed esophagus were visible. He also could feel when he’d turned it over that rigor mortis had already set in. Verraday checked the area around the rat with his LED beam and noted that there was no blood on the steps, the walkway, or on the gravel around the hedges. Whoever or whatever had done this had killed it somewhere else and brought the corpse to his doorstep only after it had bled out. But why? Could an animal have made a cut that clean? That seemed unlikely.
He didn’t know that much about bodies, but he understood minds, and his instincts told him this was the work of a human. Perhaps it was a random act of idiocy, a prank committed by somebody who didn’t know a thing about the person on whose doorstep they had laid it. Or had he been deliberately targeted?
Verraday considered the most likely candidates. At the top of his list was Bosko. Or perhaps it was Detective Fowler. If Fowler had somehow gotten wind that Verraday was working with Maclean, this crude yet sadistic signal seemed like the sort of thing he’d do to psych him out, his way of telling him to back off. Then he wondered if it was possible that a disgruntled student had done it. Verraday was normally pretty popular with his students. But there were always some who didn’t like you no matter what. They were the ones who skulked around the Internet like cowardly assassins, using sites like RateMyProfessor.com, the bane of academics, to leave a one out of five rating and comments like “Boring,” “useless,” or “know-it-all jerk” without ever having to reveal their own identities. He wondered about Koller. Verraday had gone a little heavy with the public mockery of him in the last class. Not that Koller didn’t deserve it. But had it been enough to flip Koller’s switch to the “crazy” setting, he wondered?