He decided to begin with Rachel Friesen’s file, rationalizing that since he’d already seen her at the morgue and knew what to expect, it would ease him into the disagreeable task of examining the unfamiliar crime scene photos of Alana Carmichael. At the top of the file were photos of tracks, which, the report noted, appeared to have been made by tires of the sort found on full-size commercial vans. They had been sent to the police lab and identification was pending. The report stated that the owners of the cranberry farm, the Kerkhoff family, owned a heavy International Harvester truck as well as a Dodge Ram pickup but that neither of those vehicles’ tires matched the tracks found near the crime scene. There were photos of the bog itself, as well as the forested area around it. One was an aerial view with marks on it showing where the body was found and where the tire tracks were in relation to the cranberry bog. In the overhead shot, he could see that the farm was surrounded on three sides by encroaching new suburbs. Verraday supposed it would be only a decade at most until the farm ceased to exist and was sold off to developers to make cookie-cutter bungalows and townhouses.
At last Verraday had to face the inevitable close-ups of the body. The fact that he had seen Rachel Friesen’s corpse in the flesh less than twelve hours earlier didn’t make looking at the photos any less disturbing. There were several angles showing Rachel Friesen’s body in relation to the flooded bog and the shoreline. And there were several more from the same series Maclean had given him the previous day, but they were far more graphic. Examining the photos, he saw that there were numerous angles of the bruises and welts that covered her shoulders, back, buttocks, and thighs. They were wide and dark, not the type that would be made by most lovers engaged in sadomasochistic play. The blows needed to leave the marks that were on Rachel Friesen could only be the product of someone whose anger was uncontrollable once unleashed.
Verraday took a sip of his brandy. Then he examined the second set of crime scene photos and the reports that Maclean had copied from Fowler’s investigation of the Alana Carmichael murder.
First, Verraday looked at one of the missing persons pictures supplied by Carmichael’s mother to the police department when her daughter first disappeared. It was a snapshot that looked like it had been taken in a back garden on a sunny July afternoon. In it, Alana wore a retro, pastel-green summer dress, something that looked like it was from the early 1950s. Her hair was even darker than Rachel’s, dyed black probably, thought Verraday, and cut medium-length in a Dita Von Teese, rockabilly style. Like Rachel, she had more piercings than most young women, but unlike the other victim, Alana’s were more prominent. She had a stud through her right eyebrow, as well as a nose ring. On her left ear, which was the side visible in the photograph, she had three rings at the bottom, in her lobule, and two more at the top of the ear, along the helix, beside two prominent studs. But what stood out the most was a cupid’s arrow. It was stainless steel, about two inches long and ran diagonally across her upper ear. The entry point, from which the arrow’s fletchings stuck out, was on the upper front helix. The arrow’s head emerged from a point at the back of her ear about three-quarters of an inch lower than the entry point. There was a black-and-red tattoo running down the left side of her throat, curving round her neck. The picture was small, but it appeared to be a cluster of roses. There was a second tattoo on her right arm, stretching from just above her wrist to a few inches above her elbow. This also seemed to be a cluster of roses, but in a more colorful red, yellow, and blue rendering. She held a tray on which there were two glasses and what appeared to be a pitcher of daiquiris. She wore a comically exaggerated expression of cordiality that morphed that “perfect hostess” smile seen so often in midcentury women’s magazines into a satirical “mad housewife” effect.
Clearly something in the visual culture of that era appealed to Alana, and a lot of young women like her, yet they felt the compulsion to mock it at the same time. But despite her sardonic mugging, Alana’s eyes didn’t have the brightness and light of a true smile. There was melancholy behind the vivid colors she surrounded herself with and the wit and style she projected. In another life, thought Verraday, someone with Alana’s highly developed aesthetic sense might have become an in-demand art director, costume designer, or set decorator. He wondered what her story might have been had she never been sexually assaulted by a stepfather, had never experienced all those setbacks that put her on a trajectory that would ultimately intersect with that of her killer.
That was Alana Carmichael in life. Now came the inevitability of observing Alana Carmichael in death. With a sense of foreboding, Verraday slid the first crime scene photo out from beneath the missing persons report. It was an overhead view of a dumpster. On top of broken furniture, pizza boxes, discarded flowerpots, and other detritus of everyday life lay the naked body of Alana Carmichael. Her head was slumped to the left, hanging over the side of a garbage bag. On the inside of her upper left thigh was a green tattoo, a forest or jungle of some sort. Upon closer examination, Verraday saw that it was the Garden of Eden, with Eve, an apple, and a serpent lurking within it.