At Rope's End (A Dr. James Verraday Mystery #1)(73)
“Yeah, he stopped me in the parking lot of the liquor store. We had some words.”
“I know. He told me about it as we were going in. He said if you really did have some nut job stalker in there with you, maybe we should just leave you two alone together to sort it out because you’re such a pain in the ass.”
Verraday smiled weakly. “Yeah, that would have been convenient for him.”
“He was kidding. He agreed with me that there was no time to wait for more backup. He was the one who broke down your front door.”
“Well, tell him I have an eight-hundred-dollar deductible. That ought to give him some consolation.”
“I’ll mention it when he comes around.”
“You can mention something else too. Tell him I’m dropping the lawsuit against him.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. How can I sue someone who took a knife in the throat trying to save my life? But I’m making it conditional on him taking an anger management course.”
“I think he’d rather take the lawsuit and the knife in the throat.”
“Okay. I’ll drop the suit against him. No conditions. But I’m not dropping the one against the city and the SPD. They’re the ones who are really responsible for it. That’s where the orders came from.”
“Word is they want to settle out of court with you, James. You’ve just helped them close a lot of cases. They don’t want to be seen to be making an enemy of you. They want to treat it like an unfortunate misunderstanding.”
“What about Jensen? What happened to her?”
“Now there’s a piece of work. One of the shots I fired through the door got her in the arm. Even then, she had no intention of giving up. She jumped right through the window of your study. Hopefully your insurance will cover that, too. I looked out and saw her lying facedown on your walkway. I thought she was dead, and I knew you and Bosko both needed my immediate attention. Tempted though I was to leave the duct tape on your mouth, I was afraid you’d choke on your own blood. And I knew I’d lose Bosko for sure if I didn’t get some compression on that knife wound. So I left her out there while I tended to the two of you. When the backup arrived, they asked what had happened to the wounded suspect who was supposed to be outside. She was gone. A patrol car spotted her in an alley three blocks away. She had a broken ankle but she was halfway through hotwiring a car for a getaway. This girl’s done her homework.”
“She’s a deeply disturbed individual. And trust me, I’ve met a lot of them.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that. But she was sane enough to realize she didn’t have a chance when a second patrol car showed up and sealed off the alley. So she surrendered. She’s been charged and is in custody. No bail.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“When we checked her dorm room, we found a kill kit she’d put together: knives, box cutters, syringes, a mask, garbage bags, and plastic handcuffs. She kept a diary that she wrote everything down in. She’s been researching you since she was in high school. Had every single article you’d ever written bookmarked on her computer. She wanted to learn everything that you could teach her about profiling so that when she started killing, she’d know what to do to throw investigators off her trail. Then once she became your student, she developed a romantic interest in you. An obsession, really. She kept a diary. She wrote about you in it. A lot.”
Verraday knew he wouldn’t want to hear what was in Jensen’s diary, and he wished there was some way that Maclean hadn’t seen what was in there either. But he knew that in the course of her investigation, she would have had to read every last embarrassing word.
“Jensen fantasized about you constantly. She dreamed that the two of you would become a dynamic duo, killing together and then making love.”
Verraday said nothing. He felt embarrassed. He wondered if Jensen had written about the pictures she’d taken of herself and mentioned that he’d looked at her photos online. It would be just his luck if, at the first blush of romance, Maclean had come across something humiliating about him in Jensen’s notes.
“Killing the rat, killing Robson, it’s all there,” said Maclean. “She also mentioned torturing and killing animals and taking pictures of them back when she lived with her parents in Tacoma. She had planned to kill her roommate too. And some other student named Koller. Any idea who that is?”
“Unfortunately, yes. I’m familiar with him,” said Verraday.
He fought to suppress a laugh, only because it hurt so much.
“I wonder what triggered all this in her?” he mused.
“Wait ’til you hear this,” said Maclean. “Jensen was adopted. Born in Serbia. Spent the first year and a half of her life in an orphanage there. According to her adoptive parents, the place was a hellhole. Cold. Wet. Leaks in the ceiling. She’d been kept in a steel crib, no contact with any other kids, and only about two minutes a day of adult interaction during feedings and diaper changes.”
“I’ve read about those orphanages,” said Verraday. “In spite of the shit those kids go through, most of them turn out okay once they’re adopted. Human beings are resilient. But that’s the nature of psychopathy. If the condition pre-exists in a child raised under the best of circumstances, with loving parents in a nurturing environment, that child might grow up to be a corporate lawyer or a hedge fund manager. Under the worst circumstances—like being left in a crib for the first year and a half of your life with no love, no warmth, no bonding—you get a serial killer.”