“I will.”
After he hung up, Verraday went to his study, switched on his computer, and Googled the store Maclean had gone to check out. It was kinky and morbid but with a hint of kitsch. There was a lot of fetish gear and nineteenth-century curios that suggested a fixation on the macabre and sadistic. He clicked on the “About Us” link and was taken to an artfully composed, high-contrast photo portrait of the proprietor, one Aldous Whitney. He was half in shadow, half in light. There was a gorilla skull near Whitney’s elbow, but the photo had intentionally left the details obscure. An eye socket, a couple of large canine teeth, and the dim outline of a cranial ridge were the only clues as to the identity of the strange object lurking in the dark. In the foreground was a taxidermy “mermaid.” Verraday guessed that this “mermaid” was comprised of the head, arms, and chest of a macaque grafted to the silvery body of a carp. It was topped off by a blonde Barbie doll–style wig.
Within a glass counter just in front of Whitney’s chest lay an array of disturbing devices that defied their beholder to envision precisely how they might be used. But judging by the various clamps, straps, prongs, nodules, and screws on the devices, he thought it safe to assume they were intended for people of either very sadistic or very masochistic tastes.
These were the accessories with which Whitney chose to associate himself in order to project a visual impression to the rest of the world. Sex and death. That, concluded Verraday, is what drove this man’s psyche. Then again, sex and death is what drove most humans’ psyches—at least if you believed Freud. Not that Verraday did.
Now Verraday turned his attentions from the props to the man himself. Whitney’s facial expression was smug and his slight smile was almost a sneer. Verraday found it distasteful and vaguely provocative. The fact that Whitney enjoyed surrounding himself with the preserved corpses of animals that had first lost their lives and then their dignity through a taxidermist’s whims was both morbid and sadistic. Whitney had created a sexual aura around himself because it was good for business. But he no doubt had also chosen this line of work because he enjoyed it and the attention it brought him.
Verraday looked Whitney up on Facebook. It didn’t take long to find him. Clearly he was a man who enjoyed a party, particularly if that party was a fetish night. He had upwards of fifteen hundred Facebook friends, presumably too many for him to be on a first-name basis with them all. It appeared to be more of an affinity list. Checking Whitney’s “likes” section, he discovered a swingers’ club and semiannual fetish wear conventions in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Vancouver. Many of the photos in his album had been taken at these events, where Whitney had a booth and was promoting his store and its wares. In all his photos, he was surrounded by a throng of people in fetish gear, mostly shapely young men and women. Like the ringleader at a circus, Whitney was the central focus in all of them. There were a number of people tagged in his photos, mostly young men. Verraday systematically clicked on the tags so that he was taken to their individual Facebook pages. It soon became apparent that Whitney’s love of antiques did not extend to his partners, who were mainly young men with leather fetishes, and who appeared to be about half his age. In one photo, Whitney was locking lips on the dance floor with a man dressed in a kilt. In another photo, on the page of someone named Darryl G., who described his occupation as “model/agent provocateur,” Whitney stood in the midst of a cheering crowd. He was posing like a warrior, holding two leashes, at the end of which were two muscular, twenty-something leather-clad men wearing studded collars and harnesses. One of them was “Darryl G.” Verraday picked up his phone and keyed in Maclean’s number.
CHAPTER 14
In interrogation room number six at the Seattle PD headquarters on Fifth Avenue, Maclean was leaning hard on Whitney. He was a creep, the sort of man who took pleasure in making women feel uncomfortable, and she despised him for it. And she was growing extremely tired of his flippant responses to her questions.
“Mr. Whitney, do you remember sending payments to Rachel Friesen or Alana Carmichael, or having phone calls with either of them?”
He responded in a tone of voice that was both dismissive and evasive, which punched a button inside Maclean that set her on slow boil. “Detective, I purchase vintage and antique curios from many sources for discerning collectors all over the world. I can’t possibly remember all of them by name.”
“I’ve got a hunch it’s not their names that you’d remember. And neither one of them were old enough to qualify as antiques. But maybe this will jog your memory.”