Verraday entered the foyer, kicked off his boots, and hung his leather jacket up on a large Victorian hall tree. It was the only family heirloom he possessed. His great-grandparents had bought it new just after they made the move west to San Francisco from Toronto in the 1890s. There was something reassuring about this piece of Victoriana. After more than a century of existence, its color had deepened to the warm hue of aged whiskey, and it remained solid, like the people who had crafted it. Unlike the disposable, box store crap that was everywhere today, it had been built to last.
Verraday lived alone and kept the thermostat low when he was out, so the house was cold and made him feel like he hadn’t shaken off the chill of the morgue. He slid the thermostat needle up to 74 degrees and heard the furnace rumble to life below him in the basement. He checked his landline and saw from the display that someone had left a voice mail. He punched in the code to play it back. It was Penny.
“Hey James, it’s me. Just checking to see if you’re still coming over for dinner next week. Also, there’s this neat thing happening that you might be interested in. Call me when you get a chance.”
He was curious about what the “neat thing” she was talking about might be. Penny was always upbeat and optimistic, and he was tempted to call her. But the day had left him feeling unsettled. All his professional training emphasized that reaching out and sharing his feelings was the recommended way of coping with unpleasant emotions and traumatic experiences. It was one of the most basic pieces of advice that psychologists gave to their patients—and to each other. But he didn’t feel up to speaking to anyone now, at least not about himself.
Ironically, talking to criminals didn’t bother him anymore. But that was because he shared nothing of himself with the convicts he interviewed. They were always eager to take part in studies. Some thought it might help buy them early parole. Others just liked being interviewed because even an audience of one made them feel important. The psychopaths were the most challenging interview subjects. They came from many different social, economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. But Verraday noted that there were certain characteristics that they all had in common. Chief among them was that they were cocky, self-assured, and always shifted blame for their crimes onto their victims. “She should have known better than to get in the car with a stranger,” or “Anybody who keeps that much cash around is just asking for trouble.” He had observed that psychopaths contrived to avoid first-person pronouns. They used a distinctive syntax that employed a passive voice and made the victim the subject of the sentence rather than the object so that a statement of fact like “I killed her” or “I beat him and robbed him” became “She lost her life” or “He was beaten and robbed,” so that they, the perpetrator, were strangely absent from their accounts of the crimes they had committed.
Their uniquely self-serving manner of speech had irritated him when he had first started going into prisons to interview convicted murderers for his profiling research. But Verraday was now inured to their manipulative behavior, unaffected by their bullshit, their attempts to curry favor and minimize the heinousness of what they had done. What did affect him still, and deeply, was the thought of the victims’ ordeals, their deaths or life-shattering injuries, and the toxic outcome it had, not only on them, but on their families, spouses, and significant others. He knew what it felt like to be one of those survivors, knew what it had done to his father and his sister.
Verraday strode across the living room into the kitchen and extracted a bottle of red wine from a rack, a big Cabernet from the hot, dry Yakima Valley. He uncorked it and poured himself a large glass. He swirled it around, inhaled its nose of blackberries and leather, and allowed himself the sensual pleasure that momentarily transported him away from the ugliness of the world. He took a sip of the wine and held it in his mouth a moment, savoring it, imagining he could feel the heat of the sun locked within it.
He carried the glass into the living room and, still feeling a chill despite the warm air now rising out of the vents, switched on the gas fireplace. Trying to shake off the leaden emotions that the day had left him with, he selected a book that Penny had given him for Christmas the year before last, The Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Inner Peace. Penny had told him, in her blunt but affectionate manner, that it might help him with his anger and anxiety issues. His older sister had a particular gift when it came to dealing with the vicissitudes of life.
She had been a star basketball player at her school. Her skill on the court was so extraordinary that at the age of twelve, her school counselors had predicted that she would go to university on a full athletic scholarship. That is, until the night thirty years ago when Verraday, his mother, and his sister were returning from an evening of Christmas shopping and Officer David Robson of the Seattle Police Department ran a red light and broadsided their car. The police cruiser rammed into the driver’s side door, killing their mother instantly. Penny had been sitting directly behind her. The force of the impact crumpled the family’s sedan in on her, crushing her legs and pelvis and irreparably injuring her spinal cord. She had been paraplegic ever since. It had taken two years of physiotherapy for Penny to have even a semblance of physical independence. But though she managed to accomplish a surprising number of everyday tasks on her own, she had never managed to escape from the wheelchair that the accident had put her in. And barring some medical miracle yet to be devised, she never would. Somehow, despite the fact that the crash had robbed her of a scholarship and the use of her legs, Penny was more stoic and accepting of her situation than her younger brother, who had been sitting farthest from the point of impact and so had received only cuts and bruises.
Verraday was rushed along with his mother and sister to the emergency ward at Harborview. His mother was pronounced dead upon arrival. Verraday was kept overnight for observation and released into his father’s care the next day. Penny however, stayed in the hospital to begin the long rehabilitation from her grievous injuries. Though arduous, the rehab regimen had also given her years to talk through her feelings with therapists and work through not only her physical traumas but her emotional ones as well, with the aid of sympathetic and knowledgeable adult ears. But because Verraday didn’t have any physical injuries, he never needed to see a doctor again and received no counseling on how to cope with the loss of his mother. His situation was aggravated by the fact that the city, the police department, and their lawyers circled the wagons and did their best to discredit Verraday’s memory of the accident, shifting the blame away from their officer and onto his mother, who, being dead, was conveniently unable to speak for herself.
Even as an adult, the memories of the cajoling and bullying by police and their legal counsel in the weeks after the crash were enough to provoke an adrenaline response in Verraday, raising his blood pressure and making his muscles tighten involuntarily. After a police lawyer had repeatedly failed to find a flaw in Verraday’s recounting of the events during cross-examination, the counselor had told the judge in a faux-compassionate tone that “a child that age, having been subjected to such a distressing event, can’t be expected to recall it accurately. To place that burden on the boy would be cruel to him and grossly unjust to the accused.” The judge agreed. The case was thrown out of court for lack of evidence and Robson was allowed to keep his job on the force.
Verraday sat down in front of the fire with his wine and the Dalai Lama’s book. Penny, he knew in his heart, was rational and wise to a degree that he never would or could be. She didn’t feel rage about injustices the way he did. She just made her personal corner of the world as uplifting as possible and seemed to accept the rest as an inevitable part of the human condition. Verraday knew that Penny’s tribulations far exceeded his and continued to affect every moment of her waking life. Yet here she was, as far as he could tell, full of grace and laughter. He loved and respected his sister enough that normally, he would at least try to take her advice. But not tonight. He skimmed a few paragraphs of the Dalai Lama’s book and found it singularly unhelpful.
“Sorry, Penny,” he said as he set the book aside.
The only thing that would bring him any inner peace tonight would be to find out who had tortured and killed Rachel Friesen and Alana Carmichael and make sure the son of a bitch never had the chance to do it to anyone else.
He finished his wine and switched off the gas fireplace. The heat dissipated immediately and the chill air began to close in around him once again. Verraday went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of brandy, and headed for his study, resigned to the darkness that awaited him there.