He expected to find it gutted. He had seen that once before, the outcome of a turf war in the small hours of the night between an alley rat and a neighborhood raccoon. The shrieks of the combatants had formed a hellish and prolonged cacophony, though their skirmish had been completely invisible, cloaked in the darkness of the hour. The struggle between the raccoon and its opponent had ended suddenly with a hideous vocal duet. By grotesque coincidence, the raccoon’s growl had formed a discordant lower fourth note against the other animal’s shriek, a frenzied trill that was terrifying to hear, shooting up a neural pathway to some ancient part of Verraday’s brain that instantly recognized it as a death cry. Verraday had only discovered the outcome the next morning when he took his trash into the alley. The rat had come out the loser and lay dead in a small pool of coagulated blood. The raccoon had ripped the rat open from its crotch to its neck, disemboweling it without eating a single bite, preferring the garbage in the nearby bins to the flesh of its victim.
Verraday now ran the keychain LED beam over the rat on his doorstep and saw that unlike its vanquished predecessor, this one’s belly was intact. Its throat, however, had been slit from ear to ear with one single, neat incision, so deep that the ridges of the severed esophagus were visible. He also could feel when he’d turned it over that rigor mortis had already set in. Verraday checked the area around the rat with his LED beam and noted that there was no blood on the steps, the walkway, or on the gravel around the hedges. Whoever or whatever had done this had killed it somewhere else and brought the corpse to his doorstep only after it had bled out. But why? Could an animal have made a cut that clean? That seemed unlikely.
He didn’t know that much about bodies, but he understood minds, and his instincts told him this was the work of a human. Perhaps it was a random act of idiocy, a prank committed by somebody who didn’t know a thing about the person on whose doorstep they had laid it. Or had he been deliberately targeted?
Verraday considered the most likely candidates. At the top of his list was Bosko. Or perhaps it was Detective Fowler. If Fowler had somehow gotten wind that Verraday was working with Maclean, this crude yet sadistic signal seemed like the sort of thing he’d do to psych him out, his way of telling him to back off. Then he wondered if it was possible that a disgruntled student had done it. Verraday was normally pretty popular with his students. But there were always some who didn’t like you no matter what. They were the ones who skulked around the Internet like cowardly assassins, using sites like RateMyProfessor.com, the bane of academics, to leave a one out of five rating and comments like “Boring,” “useless,” or “know-it-all jerk” without ever having to reveal their own identities. He wondered about Koller. Verraday had gone a little heavy with the public mockery of him in the last class. Not that Koller didn’t deserve it. But had it been enough to flip Koller’s switch to the “crazy” setting, he wondered?
Verraday took his briefcase and his beef shawarma inside. He went to the kitchen, found a plastic bag, and took it out to the front steps. He dropped the rat’s body into the bag and placed it in the freezer. If this were anything more than a prank, he would need to preserve the evidence. Even though he had never actually touched the rat directly, he had an urge to wash his hands with soap and water. He retrieved his shawarma, noticing now that it was roughly the same size and proportions as the rat. He felt a wave of revulsion. He put the shawarma in the refrigerator in case his appetite came back later, but suspected it would never happen.
Then he poured himself a brandy. Though the bottle was a deep, almost opaque brown, he could tell by the weight of it that it was nearly empty. He held the bottle up to the overhead kitchen light and confirmed that it only had a few ounces left in it. Verraday had lots of wine in his rack, as well as a nearly full bottle of vodka, and another of gin. But the brandy was a specific part of his nightly winding-down ritual. He made a mental note to stop at the liquor store and get another bottle tomorrow before he came home. He was just heading upstairs to shower off from his workout when he noticed the message light flashing on his phone. It was from Maclean.
“James, I need to speak to you as soon as possible. Doesn’t matter how late it is. Call me, okay?”
He immediately punched the callback button. She answered on the first ring.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I paid a visit to the limo company. The story that Jason and Cody told us checks out. The dispatcher said they picked up a fare at the hangar around midnight. The address they took her to was Helen’s apartment. They called the driver in. I interviewed him. He said that Helen was the only passenger, and he took her straight to the door of her apartment building. Because it was late, and she was alone, he waited ’til he saw her go through the controlled entrance and into the elevator before he drove away.”
“Can the driver account for his time after that?”
“Yes. It occurred to me that a guy with a limousine would be in a position to meet a lot of call girls. And sure enough, he has. Looks like he was busy all night, shuttling them around to and from hotels. But he can answer for every minute of his time right up to the beginning of his shift the next evening. He’s got witnesses, including his kids and his wife. She vouches that he slept all day until late afternoon when he went to pick his kids up at school.”
“How about Jason and Cody. What did you find out?”
“That’s the interesting part. I ran both of them through the computer just to see what came up. Jason doesn’t have a record.”