Client Trap (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  Client Trap

  R.J. JAGGER

  Chapter One

  July 7

  Wednesday Morning

  Five Days Before It Began

  ___________________

  VOODOO PRIESTESS IDA WRISP didn’t like to summon the death spirits. It was always risky. Things could go wrong. Nothing had yet, not in over twenty years, but each time was different, and there was something about this time that made her eyes dart and her palms sweat. The subject of the curse—a man named Nick Teffinger—didn’t feel like the prior ones.

  He felt stronger.

  More difficult.

  More intense.

  More resistant.

  She was alone, deep in the cavity of an old building, in an underground room that few knew about and even fewer had ever seen. The door was locked and the air smelled like wet rocks. The New Orleans humidity hung thick and oppressive, even here. She couldn’t remember a hotter summer.

  The only illumination came from candles.

  A six-foot boa constrictor draped around her neck. Normally docile, the reptile was clearly nervous. It wove its head back and forth in front of her face, not more than six inches away, and flicked a forked tongue in and out of a scaly mouth more rapidly than it ever had before.

  Ida Wrisp exhaled.

  She wanted to stop.

  But, at this point, stopping was more dangerous than proceeding. The spirits had been awakened more than two days ago and were already in motion.

  She put a hand on the boa.

  And felt its strength.

  Then a chill ran up her spine.

  The death spirits were suddenly in the room. The snake must have sensed it and tightened around her neck until it was one squeeze away from cutting off her air.

  She closed her eyes and let herself slip into a trance.

  THE VOODOO DOLL WAS IN HER HANDS when she awoke. It was the most complex one she had ever built, two full days in the making. She thought she had finished it five different times, but something forced her to continue and make it more and more intricate.

  She didn’t understand why at the time.

  But did now.

  Nick Teffinger’s spirit was in the room.

  In the doll.

  A doll that wouldn’t have been able to contain it, had it been any less.

  With a razorblade, she began to make incisions in it; small, non-deadly incisions at first. The doll twitched and tried to get out of her grip, but she tightened her fingers around it. She cut into it deeper and faster. It moved; so much that she actually nicked her hand.

  She continued, one slice after another.

  Going deeper now with more deadly intent.

  She didn’t stop until the doll stopped twitching.

  Then she threw it on the floor.

  Her hands suddenly hurt. When she looked at them, she couldn’t believe what she saw—blood, lots of blood, oozing out of dozens of incisions. She almost screamed and ran out of the room. Then she realized it was over.

  Nick Teffinger had been difficult.

  He had fought back.

  But in the end, it hadn’t done him any good.

  SHE STOOD UP, picked the doll off the floor, and held it in a candle flame until the head melted. Then she wrapped it in a black cloth, together with a newspaper article that had a picture of the cursed one—Nick Teffinger—and walked up two flights of narrow stairs to ground level.

  The boa felt nice around her neck.

  It was relaxed now, almost asleep.

  The drummers and death dancers were waiting for her in the courtyard.

  Nervous.

  Apprehensive.

  Watching her every move.

  Fixated by the blood.

  She unwrapped the doll and raised it over her head. Blood dripped down her arms. Then she smiled; and the pounding of drums immediately filled the air.

  Loud.

  Frantic.

  Rhythmic.

  Then the death dance began.

  Intense—unlike anything she had ever experienced before, under a hot, sweaty New Orleans sun. She let the pounding of the skins move her body and cleanse her soul; feeling stronger than ever, more powerful than ever, more important than ever.

  No one else could have done what she did.

  Not now.

  Not ever.

  She had transcended to a new level.

  THERE WAS NO WAY TO KNOW when the curse would take effect. It could be moments, it could be hours, it could be days, or even longer. But she would feel it when it happened. The spirits would let her know.

  They always did.

  And had never failed her yet.

  Not once.

  Chapter Two

  Day One—July 12

  Monday Morning

  ______________

  NICK TEFFINGER, THE 34-YEAR-OLD HEAD of Denver’s homicide unit, parked the Tundra at the end of the dead lawyer’s cobblestone driveway, twenty steps from the front door, and turned his face to detective Sydney Heatherwood. She was an athletic 27-year-old African American from Five Points, personally stolen by Teffinger out of vice a year ago. Although she was still the newest addition to homicide, she had already cut her teeth on Denver’s worst.

  John Ganjon.

  Nathan Wickerfield.

  Jack Draven.

  Aaron Trane.

  Dylan Jekker.

  Trent Tibadeau.

  “I don’t get it,” Teffinger said.

  Sydney raised an eyebrow, opened the pickup’s door and stepped out. The Colorado sun beat down, relentlessly, warning of yet another scorcher.

  “Get what?” she asked.

  “Why this guy was messing around with Colfax whores,” he said. The dead attorney—Ryan Ripley, Esq.—was found Saturday night with his pants off in a Colfax alley known for $20 blowjobs. “I mean, if I had this guy’s money—”

  “—which you don’t—”

  “—Agreed,” he said, “but if I did, and needed to get my dick sucked, I think I’d spend the extra hundred or two and pop for an escort service.”

  They walked towards the front entrance.

  Teffinger held a thermos of coffee in one hand and a cup in the other.

  “Have you ever paid for it?” Sydney asked.

  He chuckled and raked his thick brown hair back with his fingers. It immediately flopped back down over his forehead. “What do you think?”

  “I think not,” she said.

  “Okay then,” he said, “that’s my answer.”

  “Wait a minute—”

  “And I’m sticking to it,” he added.

  THE DEAD LAWYER’S HOUSE turned out to be slightly more than just protection from the elements. Expensive textures and materials complemented an open floor plan that seemed even more expansive because of the number of windows. What really caught Teffinger’s eye, however, was the huge oil painting on the fireplace wall.

  He headed straight for it and said, “I can’t believe it—a Delano.”

  “Is he someone?”

  “Was, he’s dead now,” Teffinger said. “This piece is worth more than my house.”

  The painting—titled “Navajo Desert Sheep”—depicted a flat, desert floor that stretched many miles into the distance, where it got interrupted by a rock mesa. In the foreground, a Navajo woman on horseback watched patiently over a flock of grazing sheep. Above it all, consuming 80 percent of the painting, was a blue summer sky with white, cotton-ball clouds. In typical Delano style, the colors were realistic and the brushstrokes were brilliantly loose.

  “It’s not bad,” Sy
dney said.

  Teffinger laughed.

  “What?” Sydney questioned.

  “That’s like saying a Beatles song is sort of catchy.”

  She groaned.

  “Teffinger, we have to get you out of the sixties,” she said. “I think we’re wasting our time here. I mean, the guy got horny and decided his dick needed to be in someone’s mouth. He ended up getting a little more than he bargained for. End of story.”

  Teffinger didn’t disagree.

  But every once in a while a crime scene wasn’t what it first appeared to be. Once in a while it was staged. And once in a while, there was something in the victim’s house to suggest that it had been staged and, more importantly, why; and by who.

  He drained the coffee cup, filled it back up from the thermos and said, “You want the upstairs or the down?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’re not going to find anything.”

  They split up.

  Sydney headed upstairs and Teffinger took the victim’s study.

  The mother lode.

  Two computers.

  Bills.

  Phone statements.

  Credit card records.

  The room of secrets and electronic footprints.

  He was a half hour into it when Sydney’s voice came from upstairs, “Hey, Nick, come up here a minute.”

  She sounded excited.

  He headed up a winding staircase.

  Two steps at a time.

  Fast, but not so fast that he couldn’t sip coffee.

  He didn’t know what he expected.

  But it definitely wasn’t what she showed him; namely an expensive wooden box with a strange doll inside, about six inches long, with a needle stuck in the left eye.

  “THIS IS A VOODOO DOLL,” Sydney said.

  Voodoo.

  Teffinger heard the word but hardly processed it. His thoughts were suddenly filled with the image of Whitney White, who was found dead a year ago with a massive injury to her left eye, as if someone had pounded a screwdriver into it, up to the handle, and then pulled it out.

  She was only twenty-nine, a legal secretary in a large law firm downtown.

  Teffinger never found her killer.

  What was the name of that firm again? He tried to pull it up, but found it too buried. He picked the doll out of the box, sat down on the bed and studied it. “Tell me again the name of the law firm that our dead BJ lawyer was with,” he said.

  “Radcliffe & Snow,” Sydney said.

  As soon as he heard the words, Teffinger remembered the name of the law firm that Whitney White had worked for.

  Radcliffe & Snow.

  Chapter Three

  Day One—July 12

  Monday Morning

  ______________

  RAVEN LEE, ESQ., woke early Monday morning, when someone’s wake rocked the old wooden 34-foot sailboat that she’d been living on since early April. She stretched and decided, for the hundredth time, that the mattress was way too thin and hard for her almost-30 body. The vessel was moored at the end of D-Dock at the Chatfield Marina. Unlike Docks A and B, this one didn’t have shore power, so Raven went topside and fired up the Honda generator.

  A cloudless, blue Colorado sky hung overhead.

  Right now, in the early morning, the temperature was perfect.

  Later would be a different story.

  She plugged in the coffee maker and then turned on the bilge pump. It hummed and hissed for a moment, sucking water deep down under the floorboards somewhere in the guts of the boat, and then started to spit a heavy stream out the side of the hull into the lake.

  It sounded like a hose at full force and made her wonder if the leak was getting worse.

  Right now, in the light of day, she didn’t care about it that much. But at night, when she went to bed, it bothered her. She couldn’t help but pull up an image of the boat sinking during the night, which wouldn’t be a good thing, given that she couldn’t swim. So she usually slept with a lifejacket within reach.

  She had long blond hair.

  Too long, actually, to properly take care of on a sailboat.

  The wind tangled it.

  So she wore a baseball cap.

  That, in turn, made her head sweat; which then matted her hair down in strange shapes. Still, even with all that, she wasn’t in the mood to cut it. It had been that long since she was fourteen and now, more than ever, she needed things in her life that had roots in her younger days.

  Next week on Thursday, she would turn thirty.

  And couldn’t yet predict whether it would bring drama.

  THE COFFEE POT WAS FULL NOW. She looked around for her #1 LAWYER cup and found it sitting on Deadly Web, her debut novel, which got released last fall. The cup left a brown ring on the cover. She almost swore, since it was her only copy, but realized it was bound to happen sooner or later.

  She drank a cup of coffee while she dressed and then headed outside for a jog.

  When she got back, her cell phone rang and a woman’s voice came through, one she didn’t recognize. “My name is Erin Asher,” the woman said. “I met you last fall when you were doing a book signing at Barnes & Noble.”

  The name didn’t ring a bell, but Raven said, “Okay.”

  “I’d like to talk to you about a legal matter,” the woman said.

  Raven frowned.

  She was only working part-time now as an attorney—trying to transition into a fulltime author—and most of her billable hours were already claimed by existing clients. In fact, she hadn’t taken on a new client in over six months.

  “I was hoping we could meet this morning,” the woman said. “It’s sort of important.”

  Raven almost said no, but something in the woman’s voice wouldn’t let her.

  THE WOMAN SHOWED UP AN HOUR LATER, carrying a newspaper. She wore nylons, an expensive pinstriped dress, a crisp white blouse, and black shoes with a 2” heel. She appeared to be about twenty-seven, with a good body, a spring in her step, and stylish shoulder-length brown hair.

  Very pretty.

  Raven met her at the marina gate and liked her immediately.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” the woman said. “You have sort of a Jimmy Buffet thing going on.”

  Raven chuckled.

  “Yeah, I’m going to go shopping this afternoon for some more Margarita mix; and maybe pick up a parrot,” Raven said. “You want to come along?”

  The woman chuckled.

  They ended up in the stern of the sailboat with coffee in hand and the sun on their faces. The woman, Erin Asher, turned out to be an architect with the Denver branch of New York based Sorenson Design Group, Inc.

  Erin opened the newspaper to page 4 and pointed to an article. “Have you read this?” she asked.

  No.

  Raven hadn’t.

  “Take a quick read,” Erin said.

  Raven did.

  IT WAS AN ARTICLE ABOUT A WOMAN named Julie Pratt who ran screaming out of a house owned by Lindsay Vail at approximately 9:45 p.m. on Saturday night. Both women were twenty-five. The neighbors saw a man in a mask chase Julie Pratt down the driveway and stab her in the back with a large knife. Then the man ran back to the house, threw a woman’s body—presumably Lindsay Vail’s—into the trunk of a dark sedan and squeal off. A photograph of a man with the face of a pirate accompanied the article, but no name. The man was a suspect, wanted for questioning. Anyone having information as to who he was should call Denver homicide.

  “Here’s the problem,” Erin said. “The man that they have pictured in the paper didn’t do it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he was stalking me Saturday night,” Erin said.

  “Say again?”

  “Okay,” Erin said, “it goes like this. Saturday night I went out with a girlfriend—Samantha Dent. We had dinner and drinks from about 8:00 until about 9:15, downtown at Marlowe’s. I remember seeing this man who looked like a pirate on the 16th Street M
all before we went into the restaurant. For some reason, I felt like he was following me. Then when we came out about 9:15, he was still there, across the street, leaning against a building in the shadows. We walked down the mall to do some clubbing in LoDo and every time I turned around and checked, the pirate was walking behind us.”

  “Are you sure it was this same man who’s in the paper?”

  “Positive,” Erin said.

  “How positive—like 95 percent?”

  “No, a hundred.”

  Raven nodded.

  The guy did have a distinctive face, with a hooked nose, a cleft chin and a lightning-bolt scar that ran across his forehead, directly above the eyes.

  “We got to the club about 9:45,” Erin said. “A place called Dazzle. Have you heard of it?”

  Raven chuckled.

  “I’m a little past that scene,” she said.

  “Anyway,” Erin said, “we ended up getting stuck in a line outside the club for more than a half hour. This guy hung across the way the entire time.”

  “Are you sure it was him?”

  “Absolutely,” Erin said.

  “We finally got let into the club about 10:15,” Erin said. “I’m positive about the time because Samantha and I both kept looking at our watches.”

  Raven nodded.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Then, just for grins, I went back to the front door a half hour later, about 10:45, to see if the pirate was still hanging around. He was. Of course, by then I was freaking out and I told Samantha about it. She came up with a plan to see if the guy was following her or me. The plan was for both of us to leave the club at the same time and walk in different directions. We did that, about midnight. The guy was still there. Guess who he followed—”

  “I think I know,” Raven said.

  “I think you do too,” Erin said. “I only walked a hundred feet or so, just enough to confirm he was following me, and then met Samantha back at the club. We stayed for another hour, got in a cab and spent the night at her place.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, the bottom line is that I’m this guy’s alibi. The problem is, I don’t want to go to the police and have him walking around with full immunity until I know what he’s up to. For all I know, he’s out to kill me. How ironic would it be if I was the one who actually got him off the hook and then he did me in?”