by R. J. Jagger
“It leaves in thirty minutes.”
The pirate examined the ticket and checked his watch.
“Thanks,” he said.
The plan was simple.
With Robert’s face all over the news, New Orleans was too hot. Now that Dalton was here, they didn’t need the pirate. So he would take a bus to Baton Rouge and fly to Denver from there. He’d kill Lindsay Vail, who absolutely, positively needed to die, since she’d seen Dalton’s face.
Dalton reminded him again where the key to the playroomwas stashed—ten paces to the right of the front door of the building, under a rock.
“Be sure you clean up the blood,” he said. “If I were you, I’d dump her where she’ll never be found. Up in the mountains somewhere is your best bet. Put a lot of rocks on her. Otherwise the animals will dig her up and a hunter will end up stumbling on her.”
The pirate chuckled.
“You act like this is my first time.”
He pulled out the map that Dalton drew for him; the map to Dawn Hooker’s house; the 5-acre horse property off Highway 93, north of Golden. He studied it and said, “So three Harley guys live there with her, huh?”
Dalton nodded.
“Yeah. Why don’t you just blow her off? I mean, your face is already all over Denver. You should just slip in, do Lindsay Vail, and then head to L.A. or somewhere. Kick back and hit the strip clubs and the beach. ”
The pirate chewed on it.
“Can’t,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for too long. The Harley guys weren’t wearing colors, right?”
Dalton shook his head.
“Not that I saw.”
“Because I’d rather have cops chasing me than Hell’s Angels.”
Understood.
The pirate looked at his watch.
Game time.
He slapped Dalton on the back and said, “Thanks for checking her out. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem,” Dalton said. “Oh, she has a dog, too.”
“Okay, thanks.”
They hugged.
Then the pirate slipped on sunglasses and headed for the bus station carrying a black nylon bag in one hand and the ticket in the other.
Dalton leaned out the window and shouted, “Good luck.”
“You too.”
“See you in hell.”
“I’ll be there.”
85
T effinger was walking out of Jessie-Rae’s hotel when Sydney called and said, “We found someone on one of the airline manifests who fits the profile of the woman trying to kill you. She’s black, younger and good-looking. Her name is Kristen Starkell. Does that name ring a bell?”
Teffinger searched his memory.
The name didn’t pop up.
He dug deeper.
Again, nothing.
“No.”
“I’m going to send her photo to your phone,” she said. “Call me back and let me know if it’s her.”
Teffinger hung up.
Ten seconds later the photo arrived.
He studied it and swallowed.
Then he dialed Sydney and said, “I’m pretty sure that’s her. What do we know about her?”
“Hardly anything yet, other than she flew to New Orleans this morning.”
“So she’s here now?”
“Yes. Any sign of Jessie-Rae?”
No.
Not a one.
“I’ll let you know what I find out on your new friend.”
Teffinger almost hung up.
“Hey? You still there?”
She was.
“Do me a favor,” he said. “Jessie-Rae has three or four credit cards, but the only one we have the account number on is the one she used for the hotel and the car rental last night. Go to my house. The key to the front door is taped under the electrical panel on the east side of the house. There’s a box of papers that Jessie-Rae set in the spare bedroom. I’m pretty sure there are bank statements and financial stuff in there. See if you can find out what other credit cards she had and then get in touch with those companies too. If any of them are used, I want to know about it immediately.”
“What do you want me to do first? That or run down Kristen Starkell’s background?”
“That.”
“Okay. I’m on my way.”
“Don’t look under my mattress,” Teffinger said.
“Why not?”
“Just don’t do it.”
An hour later, Sydney called back, very excited. “I found something I didn’t expect,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Jessie-Rae has five other credit cards in addition to the one we knew about,” she said. “Someone made the rounds at several banks in New Orleans yesterday afternoon, drawing cash against them. Guess how much—”
He didn’t know.
“Fifty thousand dollars, total.”
“You’re kidding.”
She wasn’t.
“Did someone steal them?”
“I haven’t had a chance to run that down,” she said. “But I’m assuming she was the one who got the money. All the cash came over the counter as opposed to ATMs. Banks would want some type of identification before handing over that much green.”
True.
“So what the hell’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Sydney said. “But something, that’s for sure. Hey, I looked under your mattress. There was nothing there.”
He chuckled.
“Got you,” he said.
“Yes I did. I suppose you’re all proud of yourself.”
“Yes I am.”
86
T he blowjob alley was up Colfax, a few blocks north of Capitol Hill, less than a twenty-minute walk. Instead of heading back to the library after lunch, Yardley walked up Broadway and turned north on Colfax, drawn to the alley.
It always surprised her how edgy the city felt just a few blocks off the beaten path.
This time was no different.
A storefront jammed with comic books and posters attracted her eye across the street. It looked like something straight out of the sixties.
She picked her way through traffic and went over to see if the inside was as cluttered as she pictured.
It was, even more so.
It didn’t look like the owners had thrown anything away in twenty years. The aisles were jammed with an eclectic mix of old vinyl albums, cassettes, posters, pot paraphernalia, tie-dye shirts, beads and you-name-it.
The guy behind the counter was stuck in the sixties, right down to the bandanna, long hair and Doors T-shirt. An old Turtles song—“So Happy Together”—came from the speakers. Incense wove through the air.
“Hey there,” the man said.
“Hey there back,” Yardley said. “I have a weird question for you. Do you have any phonebooks that go back a year or two or three that you haven’t thrown away?”
The man smiled.
Flashing neglected teeth.
“I got better than that.”
He disappeared into the back room, returned with an old phone book and set it on the counter. “This is an original—repeat original—phone book from San Francisco, 1964. It has Gracie Slick’s phone number in it.” To prove it, he flipped to a page marked with a yellow Post-It and pointed.
Sure enough.
Gracie Slick.
He beamed.
“I’m impressed,” Yardley said. “Is the number still good?”
The man chuckled.
“You’d be surprised how many people ask that exact same thing,” he said.
“I was joking,” Yardley said.
“Oh.”
“That’s cool, but what I really need is something just a year or two old, from Denver. I’m trying to track down an old friend.”
“Hold on.”
He took Gracie Slick back into the rear room and then returned with a battered White Pages, three years old.
“Try this.”
She tried it and ac
tually found what she hoped to find, namely an address and phone number for Andrea Copperstone, the woman with the neck tattoo who mysteriously disappeared eleven months ago. She wrote the information down, slid a $5.00 bill across the counter and said, “Thanks. You have a nice store. I’ll come back someday when I have time to look around.”
“Right on.”
“And far out.”
Outside, she almost continued her journey to the blowjob alley, but instead turned around and trotted to her car parked by the library on Bannock. She headed west on the 6th Avenue freeway and punched the radio buttons as she drove, actually getting a few good songs.
Van Halen’s “Panama.”
Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”
Meatloaf’s “I Won’t Do That.”
Madonna’s “Burning Up.”
She exited at Wadsworth, drove for four blocks and wound east into a modest, older neighborhood of single, detached houses nestled in mature cottonwoods, maples and ponderosas. Andrea Copperstone’s address turned out to be a humble wooden bungalow in need of a paint job, on a good-sized chunk of shady land. Yardley parked in the street, walked up the gravel driveway and rang the bell.
No one answered.
Walking back to her car, she looked around for signs of life and found some. Across the street two houses down, a woman was watering the grass with a hose.
Yardley put on her friendliest face and headed over.
On the way, she looked over her shoulder and couldn’t believe what she saw.
Coyote.
Sitting in her car.
Fifty yards down the street.
Watching.
87
W hen Dalton got back to the French Quarter after dropping the pirate off at the bus station, James Madden wasn’t there, but someone else was—an incredibly attractive black woman, sitting on the couch. She watched him with deep, brown predator eyes as he walked in. He immediately got the feeling that she could have killed him twice before he even knew she was there.
She walked over and shook his hand.
“We finally meet,” she said.
“So who am I meeting, exactly?”
She ran a finger down his chest. “Let me ask you a question,” she said. “If you were stranded on an island, and you could have any woman in the world stranded there with you, who would it be?”
“Living or dead?”
“Either.”
“Marilyn Monroe, I guess, assuming she lived up to the hype when I actually saw her in the flesh.”
“Then Marilyn Monroe it is,” she said. “That’s what you call me until our project is over. After that, I don’t exist any more.”
“So mysterious,” Dalton said.
“It’s safer for everyone that way,” she said. “Better yet, call me Norma Jean. I like that better than Marilyn.”
Dalton did too.
“That’s fine, but on one condition,” Dalton said.
“Which is—?”
“When the project’s over, you spend a night with me on that island.”
She turned, walked towards the couch and said over her shoulder, “I don’t do white men.” Then she sat down, looked at him and added, “But in your case I’m going to make an exception. So you have a deal. Now, let me tell you about my plan to kill Teffinger.”
“A full night,” Dalton said.
She nodded.
“Of course.”
“And my rules,” Dalton added.
She chuckled.
“You drive a hard bargain.”
“Yes I do.”
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If you want rules, that’s fine, but we’re going to split them. Half the night yours, and half the night mine.”
Dalton smiled.
“This is going to be fun,” he said. “Now tell me how we kill Teffinger.”
88
S hortly after noon, a fierce wind kicked up and serious black clouds rolled in. Teffinger had never been in a hurricane, but this felt like the leading edge of one. He called Jessie-Rae’s cell phone repeatedly, but each time the power was off, meaning he couldn’t trace the location.
He didn’t have much to go on but he did know one thing, namely, Kristen Starkell—the black woman who tried to kill him in Denver—had to be working with at least one other person in New Orleans.
That’s because she wasn’t in town yesterday when Teffinger’s car got forced into a death roll and Jessie-Rae disappeared.
The best way to find Jessie-Rae was to find Kristen Starkell and let her lead the way; the best way to find Kristen Starkell was for Teffinger to turn himself into a more visible target and draw her in.
That wasn’t going to happen in the middle of downtown, so he got in his car and drove to where the people were fewer and where someone tailing him might actually become detectible.
The wind shook the car.
He drove with the radio off and kept one eye in the rearview mirror.
Then his cell phone rang.
He answered immediately, hoping it was Maggie Bender with news of a BOLO hit on Jessie-Rae’s car. Instead, Sydney’s voice came through. “Tell me her credit card was used,” Teffinger said.
No.
That wasn’t why she called.
“Do you know about Jessie-Rae’s sister?” Sydney asked.
“Her sister?”
“Right.”
“I didn’t even know she has a sister,” Teffinger said.
“She never mentioned it?”
“No, why?”
“Well, when I was going through that box at your house, there was a clipped newspaper article that caught my eye. It was about a 30-year-old woman named Zandra Oceana, from Boston. Apparently she was found dead in her house. The police were treating it as a homicide.”
“Well that’s weird,” Teffinger said.
“It really didn’t mean much to me at first,” Sydney said. “But then I got to thinking that maybe all these murder attempts aren’t directed at you at all. Maybe they’re all aimed at Jessie-Rae. Maybe she and her sister got on someone’s wrong side. The sister got killed. Now it’s Jessie-Rae’s turn.”
Teffinger chewed on it.
To some extent, it made sense.
The shot through the Corvette window could have been aimed at Jessie-Rae. The rattlesnake could have bitten her as easily as him. Jessie-Rae was in the car yesterday when someone ran them off the road. And maybe the black woman followed Jessie-Rae to New Orleans, not Teffinger.
But, on the other hand, Teffinger spotted the black woman on the beach at Chatfield.
Jessie-Rae wasn’t around then.
Same thing for when she tailed him down by the South Platte and he almost caught her before the drifter beamed him in the back of the head with a rock.
So, Sydney’s theory made some sense, but not enough to get diverted.
“Okay, do this—call Boston and find out what happened, but only after you run out of other things to do.”
A blue mid-sized car appeared in his rearview mirror. He wasn’t sure, but thought it might have been there ten minutes ago too.
He told Sydney, “I have to run.”
An asphalt road appeared on his right.
He took it.
Trees twitched violently in the wind. He tightened his hands on the steering wheel and kept his eyes on the mirror.
Come on. Kill me.
89
A fter talking to Andrea Copperstone’s grass-watering neighbor, Yardley got in the 4Runner, did a U-turn, and waved at Coyote as she blasted past. She made a number of quick random turns. Three minutes later Coyote called and said, “You lost me.”
“Good. That’s what I was trying to do.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
“That’s none of your business,” Yardley said. “Why are you following me, anyway?”
“It’s my job. Remember?”
“I’ll be back at the marina later,” she said. “Stalk me there.”
; “You’re such an uncooperative stalkee.”
“So sue me.”
She hung up, took I-70 east, exited at Pecos and headed north. Ten minutes later she passed three strip clubs and pulled into a white standalone building with PHYSICAL GRAFFITI TATTOO in neon.
Inside, an attractive-in-a-scary-way man ran his eyes over her, from top to bottom, and introduced himself.
“I’m Big Rick.”
“Little Yardley,” she said. “Andrea Copperstone used to work here, right?”
She already knew the answer was yes.
Andrea’s neighbor, the grass-waterer, had been very clear on where Andrea worked before she disappeared eleven months ago.
Big Rick leaned back.
“You know Andrea?”
“No.” She showed him a picture of the pirate. “Does this guy look familiar?”
He studied it.
“Robert,” he said.
“You know him?”
He shook his head. “Negative,” he said. “He only came in here once and that was—God, I don’t know—four or five years ago, maybe. The reason I remember him is because of the tattoo he got.”
“Why? What was it?”
“It was a woman getting shot in the back of the head with a revolver at point-blank range,” he said. “The bullet was just coming out of her forehead. Blood and skull and brains were splattering forward.”
She read nineteen potential last names.
He didn’t recognize any of them.
“Did Andrea give him the tattoo?” she asked.
Big Rick nodded.
“She did,” he said. “How do you know?”
Yardley exhaled.
“I’m a lawyer, researching a case for a client,” she said. “From what I can tell, Robert got several tattoos four or five years ago. In each case, he got it from an attractive female—probably someone he picked in advance. In each case, it was a tattoo of a woman being killed. Now, if my theory is right, he’s killing the women who gave him the tattoos in the same way depicted in the tattoos they gave.”
