Dark Hunger (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)
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“Interesting.”
“This is way beyond an obsession,” Sydney said.
True.
Teffinger leafed through a few of them and then headed back to the refrigerator and poured a bowl of milk for the cat, which immediately attacked it with a fast pink tongue.
“You own him now,” Sydney said.
“Oh no.”
“What are you going to do? Just leave him here?”
“This is animal protection’s problem, not mine.”
“Animal protection? He’ll spend two weeks in a cage and then be put down,” Sydney said. “Is that what you want?”
He grunted.
“He wouldn’t do that to you, if you were the cat,” she added.
“How do you know?”
“Because even I wouldn’t do that to you, Teffinger.”
He raked his hair back with his fingers.
“So you say.”
NOTHING OF RELEVANCE TURNED UP for some time. Then they found something interesting in a desk drawer—a handwritten family tree. At the bottom was the name “Rave Lafelle.”
At the top was “Evan Radcliffe.”
“1837-1871.”
“Stake/Burned.”
“So what is this supposed to mean?” Teffinger asked, pointing. “That this guy was a vampire? And she was related to him?”
Sydney cocked her head.
“Looks that way.”
Teffinger shifted feet.
“I wonder if this thing is legit,” he said.
“As obsessed as she was, she checked it twenty times,” Sydney said. “You can bet your cat on it.”
THEY TRIED TO BOOT UP THE VICTIM’S LAPTOP but it had a security password that didn’t respond to Cameron or Vampire.
So Sydney tucked it under her arm.
And Teffinger tucked the cat under his.
And they headed outside.
“Wait a minute,” Teffinger said.
“What?”
“Wait right here.”
He ducked back inside the house and returned two minutes later.
“Alley,” he said.
“Huh?”
“That’s the cat’s name—Alley.”
“How’d you find out?”
“The grocery list on the counter says, Food for Alley.”
“You’re such a freaking detective sometimes,” Sydney said. “It’s downright scary.”
He chuckled and said, “Yeah, once I even found my own nose. And get this part—in the dark.”
Chapter Nine
Day Two—April 13
Wednesday Afternoon
______________
WHEN TRIPP LANDED at LaGuardia International Airport on Wednesday afternoon, he could still smell Rozeen in his clothes and taste her on his tongue. He could go for a fulltime diet of a woman like that, no doubt about it. He didn’t know how much he spent on her, but it had been worth every penny.
The U.S. soil felt good.
No, not good.
GOOD.
No doubt the French vampire’s estate was swarming with police and Paparazzi right now—poor Diamanda, not just killed, but brutally beaten to death, and stabbed through the heart with a wooden stake.
Such a tragedy.
Such a waste.
Whoever did it ransacked the house, looking for something.
TRIPP’S CELL PHONE RANG as soon as he stepped out of the terminal and the voice of Jake VanDeventer came through. Tripp pulled up the image of a rough, tanned face and piercing blue eyes, something in the nature of a bad guy from an old black-and-white spaghetti western.
“We have a problem,” VanDeventer said.
The man sounded stressed.
“How so?” Tripp asked.
“Abbot didn’t call last night or today,” VanDeventer said.
Tripp understood the implications.
Abbott had gone to Denver.
He was supposed to check in every night.
The same way that Tripp did.
Not doing so either meant that Abbott had been killed.
Or was in custody.
“What do you propose?” Tripp questioned.
“I’m catching the next plane to Denver,” VanDeventer said. “I want you to meet me there.”
Tripp turned around.
“I’m on my way,” he said.
Chapter Ten
Day Two—April 13
Wednesday Morning
______________
THE SHOT TO THE SKINHEAD’S FACE last night blew away most of his nose and killed him on impact. Rave dropped the gun, sank to the floor, leaned against the wall and stared at the body. She didn’t feel sorry. It was self-defense, pure and simple. But she did know that her life had just changed.
How big and how far, she couldn’t tell.
But a change had come.
London turned off the lights, pulled the window curtain to the side and looked out. The surrounding houses remained dark, showing no evidence that anyone had heard the shot.
“Thank God for the storm,” she said.
“I suppose we should call the police,” Rave said.
“No.”
The word surprised Rave.
“Why not?”
The Jamaican woman sat on the floor next to Rave, put her arm around her shoulders and said, “Lots of reasons. For starters, that gun is illegal as hell. It isn’t registered and the numbers have been ground off. That’s a felony offense, in case you’re not aware.”
Rave swallowed.
“Why?” she asked.
“You mean, why is it an illegal gun?”
“Right.”
“In case I ever had to use it,” London said. “I can’t afford to get connected to a homicide.”
“Why not?”
“Because I already got connected to one once before,” she said.
“You did?”
“I’ll tell you about it later. The important thing now is to figure out what to do with that,” London said, referring to the body.
“I shot him, it’s my problem,” Rave said. “Just take your gun and leave.”
“And then what? What do you tell the police when they ask where the gun is?”
“I don’t know—”
“And what do you think they’re going to say to that? Oh, okay, never mind. I guess we’re done here. Have a nice day, ma’am. They’re going to pick you apart. You’ll end up taking the fall. I’m not going to let that happen.”
“So what do we do?”
“I say we dump the little prick somewhere and stay the hell out of the whole thing.”
Dump him?
“Where?”
“I don’t know,” London said. “Up in the mountains somewhere. We got nothing to lose. Even if we somehow get caught doing it—which we won’t—we can still fall back on the story of what really happened.”
“Except they might not believe it if they find out we dumped the body,” Rave said. “We’ll look guilty at that point.”
“We have his DNA in your carpet,” London said. “We can prove beyond doubt that he got killed in your living room if we need to. You can also prove that you never had any association with him before tonight. Why else would you kill him, if not in self-defense? So if we do get caught by some chance—which we won’t—we simply tell the truth about what happened and say we panicked afterwards and did something stupid. By then the gun will be gone and we can tell the police we threw it in a lake or something—we give them a false location and they never find it. That way at least we don’t have to face an illegal firearm charge.”
Rave chewed on it.
“Plus, once your record shows that you killed someone, even if it’s found to be self-defense or justifiable, it’ll follow you around for the rest of your life,” London said. “That little seed of doubt will always be there. If you ever do something else, they’ll figure that you may have gotten away with something the first time, but they’ll be real sure it doesn’t happen twice.”
Rave n
odded.
That made sense.
“That’s the situation I’m in right now,” London said.
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, we’ll dump him.”
London said, “It’s going to be light in a couple of hours. Let’s get some sleep and figure the rest out tomorrow.” She paused and added, “I’ll do it. You don’t even have to be involved.”
Rave exhaled.
“What?” London asked.
“No way. You came here to protect me,” Rave said. “If you hadn’t been here, I’d be dead right now. So I’m the one who owes you, not the other way around.”
“Okay, we’ll both do it then.”
THAT WAS LAST NIGHT.
Now it was morning.
Time to dump the body.
Chapter Eleven
Day Two—April 13
Wednesday Morning
______________
TEFFINGER DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO with Alley, so he brought him up to homicide, found Chief Tanker’s office empty, and stuck him in. Then he wrote “Free Cat Inside” on a piece of paper and taped it to the door. An hour later he got notified that the computer geeks got Cameron Leigh’s laptop opened.
He was at his desk, drinking coffee and checking out the victim’s files, when Alley jumped up and stared at him.
“This isn’t going to happen,” Teffinger said.
The cat curled up on a manila file.
And closed one eye.
Then the other.
Teffinger almost picked it up and put it back in the chief’s office, but noticed a file called Passwords and pulled it up. It had a list of passwords, PINS and lock combinations. The one of most interest was the woman’s AOL email address with the password DENVERVAMP.
He logged on to the net and pulled up the victim’s emails.
What he saw he could hardly believe.
Sydney walked into the room and Teffinger waved her over. She made a pit stop at the coffee pot and focused on Alley as she headed over.
“No pets allowed in the office,” she said.
“Not funny.”
She slurped the coffee.
“You look too happy,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re in Cameron Leigh’s emails. Here’s the last one she sent, which happened to be at 8:07 on Sunday night—the night she got killed. Read it.”
She did.
It was to someone named Pamela.
The important part of it said, I saw some guy twice today in different locations. I got a creepy feeling that he was following me because the first time I saw him was downtown and then next time was in the parking lot of my grocery store an hour ago. If I turn up dead, be sure they put KILLED BY A SKINHEAD WITH LOTS OF TATTOOS on my gravestone.
Sydney looked at Teffinger.
Stunned.
“You got to love technology,” she said.
“Yes you do.”
“And karma,” she added.
“What do you mean?”
“You adopt Alley and now good luck’s coming your way.”
“I did not adopt that fur ball,” Teffinger said.
“Then why is he on your desk?”
Teffinger ignored her and typed an email to Pamela, whoever she was, asking her to call him. With any luck, she knew more about the skinhead than just this email.
TWO MINUTES LATER, he was in a conference room with Sydney and Sergeant Katie Baxter, who wore her hair short and her smile big. Alley scooted in just before Teffinger closed the door. Teffinger looked at the cat, said “I’ll be right back,” and stepped out. Thirty seconds later he returned with a cup of coffee.
There.
Better.
“You’re not going to be happy about my latest and greatest plan because it’s going to be 99 percent grunt work and 1 percent fun,” he said. “But here it is. First, we find out where Cameron Leigh did her grocery shopping. My guess is that it’s the King Soopers or Safeway closest to her house. Then we find out if the store has any surveillance tapes from Sunday that show the skinhead.”
“Doable,” Baxter said.
Teffinger looked at her, nodded, and purposely kept his eyes off her world-class chest.
Which wasn’t easy.
“The next part is harder,” he said. “She also got followed by Mr. Wonderful quote-unquote downtown. We need to call everyone programmed into her cell phone and see if they know where she went downtown. Then we need to locate all the surveillance cameras that may have shined on her and our skinhead friend, see if they have any tapes, and check ’em.”
“Ouch,” Sydney said.
“I want this guy’s face on the six o’clock news,” Teffinger said.
“Six o’clock of what month?” Baxter asked.
“That’s a lot of work,” Sydney added.
True.
It was.
But the woman would be dead a lot of years.
“I just had another thought,” Teffinger added. “This guy may have been hanging around the victim’s house. We need to find out if any of the neighbors saw him.”
“What about her work?” Baxter questioned.
Teffinger didn’t get excited. “She’s a teller at the Wells Fargo Bank in Lakewood, on Union, and didn’t work on Saturday or Sunday. My gut tells me that she didn’t start to get stalked until Sunday, so the bank will be a dead end. We’ll keep it on the list, but at the bottom for now.” He paused. “That’s the plan unless someone has a better one.”
No one did.
So they divvied up the work.
ON THE WAY OUT OF THE ROOM, Sydney said to Baxter, “I’ve never seen him like this before.”
“What do you mean?”
“He actually kept his eyes up where they were supposed to be,” Sydney said. “Now he knows what your face looks like.”
Baxter laughed.
“Yeah, I noticed that,” she said. “I actually reached under my blouse and squeezed myself once to see if the air had come out.”
“I can hear you,” Teffinger said. “I’m right here.”
“We know,” Sydney said.
“We just don’t care,” Baxter added.
They split up.
The fur ball followed in Teffinger’s wake down the three flights of stairs to the parking garage.
And ended up riding shotgun.
“This is a one-shot deal,” Teffinger said. “Don’t get used to it. And don’t think I talk to animals, because I don’t.”
Chapter Twelve
Day Two—April 13
Wednesday Night
______________
TRIPP LANDED at Denver International Airport just as the sun went down. He grabbed a Westword from a newsstand, rented a nondescript Dodge and checked into a rat-under-the-bed hotel on Colfax, paying cash. He found a high-end escort service in the back of the Westword that seemed promising.
He dialed.
Talked.
And gave a credit card number.
An hour later he was at a wildly insane downtown nightclub called The Church, dancing with an incredibly sexy dark woman who called herself Kanteese.
Tripp liked her smile.
And her body.
And her perfume.
And the way she stayed so close.
Unlike Rozeen, who was cute-beautiful, Kanteese was stately-beautiful—a modern day Sophia Loren. Tripp couldn’t figure out her ancestry, but pictured her jogging on a Mediterranean beach.
Greece, maybe.
Or southern Italy.
Unfortunately, he didn’t get the opportunity to consummate the relationship, because Jake VanDeventer called shortly after eleven and said his flight from Johannesburg had just landed at DIA.
VanDeventer wanted to meet immediately.
And what VanDeventer wanted, VanDeventer got.
After all, he was paying the bills.
Tripp made Kanteese a deal—he’d give her an extra $500.00 cash now, which she would have earned la
ter this evening, but she would owe him a free hour of first-class sex later and would need to give him her phone number. Otherwise, she could just keep the money he’d given her already and call it even.
She opted for the $500.00.
Tripp took a picture of her with his cell phone, programmed her number in, called, listened to the phone in her purse ring, and smiled. Then he gave her a kiss and headed into the night to meet VanDeventer.
Chapter Thirteen
Day Two—April 13
Wednesday
______________
RAVE AND LONDON CRUISED SOUTH on I-25 at two under the speed limit, with the skinhead’s body in the trunk and Billie Holiday on the CD player.
They were nervous.
But not overly so.
The biggest thing was to not get pulled over or get a flat or get in an accident. The second biggest thing was to not do something stupid if one of the first biggest things happened.
So far, no problems.
The weather was clear and sunny.
The vehicle—London’s dark-blue Camry—had only 5,500 miles on the odometer and ran great.
They passed Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Trinidad and a bunch of one-store towns, but the population really dwindled after they crossed the line into New Mexico.
Twenty miles later they turned off the highway and headed into a rolling untamed terrain filled with arroyos and sagebrush. Ten miles later—after not seeing a single sign of civilization—they stopped on the asphalt and killed the engine. They put on baseball caps and dark sunglasses and stepped out.
Not a sound came from anywhere.
Two large black birds floated on silent wings high above them.
Not a wisp of air moved.
They could see a long ways down the road in both directions.
Miles.
Many miles.
They were alone.
No question about it.
“What do you think?” London asked.
“Let’s do it,” Rave said.
THEY CARRIED THE SKINHEAD’S BODY a good fifty yards off the road and dumped it in a deep arroyo. No one would be able to see it from the asphalt in a million years.
When they got back to the car there was still no one in sight.
They turned the vehicle around, being careful to stay on the asphalt and not get the tires in the dirt.