He leaned down close to the water and cupped his hands to block the reflected light that was obscuring his view. Then he saw it again. Something curved and white. He rolled up his sleeves and reached down to grasp whatever it was. That’s when he felt it. Soft and smooth as the belly of a salmon. And then something else, thin and rough to the touch. A length of rope. He tugged on the free end of it. A metallic taste flooded Kerkhoff’s mouth as he realized what the shadowy shape ascending from the murky depths was. A moment later, the naked body of a young woman broke the surface, pushing the cranberries aside.
Small fragments of stem and leaves clung to her breasts and forehead. Her face was smooth and white, framed by long black hair that spread out across the surface of the water like a dark halo. Her lifeless eyes, red with burst blood vessels, stared past him. Her lips were parted slightly, revealing a chipped incisor. Tattooed in neat cursive under her left breast were the words “If you don’t live for something, you’ll die for nothing.”
Her belly was arched forward at an unnatural angle, and as Ray Kerkhoff looked closer, he saw why: the length of rope he had pulled on had been used to hogtie her. A brown line traced an ugly circle around her neck. Fighting to control his breath, which was coming fast and shallow now, he backed away from her body toward the shore, almost tripping as he pulled his cell phone out of his shirt pocket and called 9-1-1.
CHAPTER 1
James Verraday stood behind the podium and looked out at the faces of the second-year students filling the lecture hall for his cognitive psychology class. Projected above and behind him on a retractable screen was a panoramic photo of Seattle’s University of Washington campus, looking north along West Stevens Way. In the background was Guthrie Hall. It was, thought Verraday, a hideous example of New Brutalist architecture that would look more at home as the headquarters of a secret police agency in a failed socialist workers’ paradise like Bulgaria or Albania than as the building in which he was at this moment teaching his class.
In the photo, happy-looking students were going about their business on the campus. Many of them wore the sort of outdoor gear popular in the Pacific Northwest—down-filled vests and rainproof outer shells over sweaters and jackets. In the foreground, a pair of pretty girls—one blonde, the other African American—were laughing over a shared joke as they made their way to class. Farther along the sidewalk, a smiling young man with a gray backpack was gesturing to a fellow student to emphasize a point. In the background, a man in his midthirties was climbing out of a taxi, his face partially obscured by the pillar of the sedan. A trio of students lounged on the grass nearby. One of them, a young woman with shoulder-length brown hair, was taking a sip from a travel mug.
It was the sort of pleasant but forgettable photograph you’d see in a university brochure, an effect heightened by a cheery-looking script, superimposed at the top of the frame, that read “Welcome to the University of Washington!” It appeared to be some sort of placeholder image in Verraday’s PowerPoint presentation, and none of the students were paying much attention to it.
Without a word, Verraday hit a button on his laptop and the PowerPoint image disappeared, leaving a blank white screen in its place.
“So the last thing I want to talk about today,” he said, “is something called the short-term memory decay theory. In that image that was just up there behind me, what color was the down-filled vest of the girl taking a sip from the Starbucks travel mug?”
As usual, no one in the hall volunteered a response. Even with second-year students, Verraday almost always had to pry an answer out of them.
“Okay, let’s just have a show of hands instead. How many people think that the girl was wearing a maroon vest?”
He waited and in response received a small, tentative show of hands.
“Okay, how many of you say it was purple?”
More hesitation, then a larger number of hands went up.
“All right. So more of you think it was purple than think it was maroon. Anybody notice if it was red?”
There was silence in the room.
“Come on, you were all eyewitnesses,” he said archly. “You must know what color it was. Who thinks it’s red?”
A few students raised their hands hesitantly.
“Okay, so a small number of eyewitnesses think the girl was wearing a red vest. And some of you, a few more, think that it was maroon, right? You sure about that?”
There were embarrassed, uncertain grins.
“So clearly, most of you remember the vest as being purple.”
He observed the nods of the students who voted purple, confident at being in the majority.
“So those of you who said maroon or red, do you want to change your mind? Be with the majority?”
There was more nervous laughter, and a couple of hands went up.
“All right, so you thought it was something else, but now that all these other eyewitnesses said purple, you’re not so sure. Do you all recall seeing the man getting out of the taxi?”
There were more nods throughout the room. This was something they all felt much more certain about.