“All right. That’s it for now. But don’t go anywhere. I’m going to check your story out. I mean go over it with a fine-tooth comb. Depending on what I find out, I may want to bring you down to the station tomorrow morning for a longer interview.”
Cody North nodded. His eyes no longer wandered up Maclean’s calves and thighs, or probed the gaps in her blouse. They had nowhere to look but down.
*
“He’s hiding something. I’m sure of it,” said Verraday as they drove north on the I-5 back toward the campus.
“I think so too,” said Maclean. “I just don’t know what yet.”
“I also think he’s on steroids. Plus he’s got a lot of the classic behaviors of a sex offender. He couldn’t stop eyeing you up. It was almost involuntary. Partly sexual, partly dominance. He only stopped after you put him in his place. And if he acts like that with an authority figure who’s looking for a murder suspect, imagine what he’s like with a woman who’s in a vulnerable position.”
Maclean nodded. “First thing I’ll do after I drop you back at the university is to take a visit to that limo company, see if Jason and Cody’s story checks out and whether Helen Dale actually made it home. Then I’m going to run both their names. Find out whether they’re hiding anything.”
Verraday checked his watch and saw that it was getting perilously close to two PM. Maclean noticed him checking the time. She stepped on the accelerator and pulled into the fast lane, suddenly going fifteen miles an hour over the posted limit. Verraday gave her a sidelong glance.
“What? I promised I’d get you to your class on time, didn’t I?”
A few minutes later, she pulled the Interceptor up in front of Guthrie Hall. Verraday checked his watch again and saw that it was not quite two o’clock. She had managed to do it. He saw some of his students heading for the doorway. There was Koller, who would no doubt have something inane and annoying to say during class. Behind Koller was Jensen, wearing her usual frumpy sweater and baggy jeans. She spotted Verraday, smiled shyly at him then entered the building.
“Those are my students,” said Verraday. “I’d better roll.”
“I won’t keep you then. Okay if I call you at home later on with some updates?”
“Please do,” he said. “I’m going to the gym after class, but I should be finished with my workout and back home by six thirty.”
CHAPTER 24
After his class and the gym, Verraday didn’t feel like cooking, so on the way home, he stopped in at an unpretentious Middle Eastern café with travel posters of Lebanon on the walls. It was a habit he had acquired in university, when pita bread, hummus, baba ghanoush, and tabouleh had stretched his scant food budget while offering something more exotic and nourishing than the Kraft dinners or ramen noodles favored by most of his classmates. Verraday chose a beef shawarma to go, mentally scrolling through his modest wine collection to select a cheap but decent Sicilian Nero d’Avola that he’d have with it when he got home.
As he approached his house, Verraday saw that someone had once again opened his front gate while he was out and had left it unlatched. Annoyed, he walked up the path toward the front door. By the dim light of the street lamps, Verraday saw now that there was something on his doorstep. From halfway down the path, he could tell it was too irregularly shaped to be another bundle of unsolicited flyers. He pressed the button on his key fob that switched on a small LED and shone it on his doorstep. The narrow beam picked out a furry, slate-gray shape. He knelt to get a closer look and saw that it was a dead rat, face down. He retrieved his garden trowel from under the front steps and used it to turn the rat over.