by R. J. Jagger
Now, this morning, he was just passing Federal Boulevard when an email landed on his phone regarding “Exhibit A.” It was from Neverly Cage with a short message, “Happy viewing.”
Several photographs from Saturday night were attached.
Teffinger winced.
The woman had shown them to him yesterday, but having them land right here in his own phone gave them an eerie reality.
He’d have to show them to the chief and the D.A.
It wouldn’t be pretty.
More than that, he might have given the defense what it needed to make Zero a free man. If that happened, some other woman would end up dead down the road. The blood would be on Teffinger’s hands.
Suddenly a bad thought entered his mind.
What if Neverly was right and he was wrong? What if he was mistaken about Zero being the guy?
He shook it off.
“Don’t open that door.”
Mid-morning a padded envelope got hand-delivered to the front desk downstairs by a cabbie. On it was a label with typed words:
Detective Nick Teffinger
Personal & Confidential
Inside was a CD in a clear plastic case. Although the CD itself had no markings on it, an attached yellow post-it had the typed words:
Watch this in private
Teffinger twisted the case around in his hand.
Sydney Heatherwood walked into the room, poured a cup of caffeine and plopped her athletic African-American body into the worn vinyl chair in front of Teffinger’s desk. “Let me guess what your weekend was like,” she said. “Blond, blue eyes, tanned legs …”
He smiled.
“Something like that.”
“You never go for the black girls,” she said.
“I bounced a quarter off your ass once. If I recall right, it snapped up and almost broke the ceiling light.”
She punched his arm.
“You know what I mean. How come you never run down the black girls?”
“I have, three or four times.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And, how were they?”
“They were fine. I have no complaints, other than that quarter incident.” He shoved the CD in his coat pocket and said, “I got to run.”
Then he was gone.
4
Day Two
June 5
Monday Morning
Teffinger headed home in the ’67, picking up Neverly Cage’s beat-up Mustang in the rearview mirror halfway there, three cars back and holding.
He didn’t care.
Let her follow, he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
He parked in the driveway.
The sun beat down.
Ordinarily he would have at least put the top up.
This time he didn’t.
This time he headed straight for the front door and disappeared inside.
His heart raced.
He put the CD in the player.
What he saw he couldn’t believe.
It was dark out.
A woman in a short dress had her back against a telephone pole. Her arms were stretched up above her head as high as they could go. Her wrists were tied together. A man was in the process of wrapping the rope around the pole several times and then tying it off, binding her into position.
The woman was the raven-haired beauty from Saturday night, Rain.
The man was Teffinger.
Someone was across the way, over in the deeper shadows, filming the scene with a cell phone. They were in a pickup truck. The person doing the filming had the phone hanging out the window. The lens shook and the side of the vehicle occasionally bounced into view.
A woman’s voice said, “What’s he doing?”
A man replied, “He’s tying her up.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I think they’re just screwing around.”
“Forget them,” she said. “Get back over here and fuck me.”
“Hold on a minute.”
“Preston—”
“Just a minute.”
Over to the left of the frame, the back end of Teffinger’s pickup was parked in view.
The license plate was readable.
He paused the CD, stepped to the front window and peered out around the edge of the window covering. Neverly Cage was coming up the street. Teffinger watched as she headed to the end of the asphalt, turned around and then parked with the front end of the Mustang pointed at his house.
She wore the same sunglasses as yesterday.
He waited for a few heartbeats to see if she had plans to get out and walk over.
She didn’t.
She just sat there with her face pointed in his direction.
He let the blinds fall back into place and then pressed Play.
The CD sprang back to life.
Teffinger kissed the woman and ran his hands up and down her body.
She responded nicely.
Her feet stretched apart of her own volition
“He owns her,” the man said. “This is cool.”
“Let them be,” she woman said. “Turn that thing off and get back in here.”
“Just a minute. I want to see what he does next.”
Teffinger ripped the woman’s dress down the front, exposing a taut stomach and small white panties.
“There goes twenty bucks,” the man said.
Then he ripped her bra off.
“Make it twenty five.”
Perky tits bounced out.
Teffinger sucked a nipple, then the other. His hand went between the woman’s legs, rubbing up and down and back and forth. Then he bent down and picked something off the ground.
It was an old beer bottle.
He broke the bottom end off on the ground and then cut the woman’s panties off with the jagged edge.
With the broken glass still in hand, he kissed her, long and deep and hard.
Then something happened he didn’t expect.
He slapped her face.
“Fuck! Did you see that?”
He walked around her, eyeing her with predator eyes, then slapped her face again.
“Damn it!”
Then he did it again.
Suddenly the camera angle swept to the ground, as if the man was getting out of the truck. The camera got set on the hood. The jerky motion stopped.
“Preston! Get back in here!”
“This is fucked up,” he said.
The audio rolled and footsteps sounded.
Then the man shouted, “Hey, asshole, leave her alone!”
“Back off.”
“I said leave her alone!”
“Back off. This is none of your business.”
Suddenly the camera came off the hood.
The woman had it now, swinging it towards the scene.
Teffinger and the man were closing in on each other. Teffinger had the broken bottle in hand.
The woman screamed.
“Preston!”
The cell phone fell to the ground.
The screen went black.
Teffinger slumped onto the couch and buried his face in his hands. Even seeing it, he still didn’t affirmatively have any cognitive recollection of the events.
It was him though.
There was absolutely and without question not a scintilla of doubt about that part.
It was him, out of his mind.
A knock came at the front door. He opened up to find Neverly Cage standing there with her hands on her hip.
“You’re supposed to bring me coffee,” she said.
Teffinger knew he should smile but couldn’t.
“Sorry about that. Come on in.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, always.”
5
Day Two
June 5
Monday Morning
Teffinger’s house had a mountain where the backyard should be. Halfway up that mountain on his property was a redwo
od deck that sat slightly higher than the roofline of the house and offered an unobstructed view of Denver and the eastern flatlands. That’s where he ended up with Neverly, drinking coffee. As far as Teffinger could tell the woman was there for two reasons; one, to try to wedge dirt out of him; and two, to be around him just because she wanted to.
“Off the record,” she said, “watching you Saturday night got me a little worked up.”
“Next time come over and join us.”
“Next time I will.”
She wasn’t dressed up.
She had the look of someone who could step into a pickup game of baseball and wouldn’t be afraid to slide into second.
“Have you told Silke Jopp about Saturday night yet?”
No.
She hadn’t.
“I have a meeting with her this afternoon.”
“Why don’t you hold off?”
“Why?”
“Because there’s more to that night than what you saw.”
“Like what?”
“I’m still trying to figure it out,” he said. “I’ll make a deal with you. Hold off until I can figure it out. If you do that, I’ll fill you in on the balance.”
“You’re trying to figure it out?”
He nodded.
“So you don’t remember?”
“Correct.”
She shrugged.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “By my count you had seven beers and seven shots, plus the round that I sent over.”
“You sent over a round?”
She smiled.
“Had to.”
“Why?”
“It seemed like the right thing to do,” she said. “If I’d have known you were going to drive drunk and smash into someone’s car I wouldn’t have done it. So how are you going to figure out the rest of the night?”
“Detect,” he said. “That’s what detectives do.”
She studied him.
“My allegiance is with Silke Jopp,” she said. “She’s paying me to do a job and I’m going to do that job. On top of that, a man’s life is in the balance.”
“If you turn everything over right now, that might be all you ever get,” he said. “Maybe it will end up being enough, but maybe it won’t. If you take my way, you may end up with more. You probably will in fact.”
She chewed on it.
“Just hold off for 48 hours,” he added.
She sipped coffee and studied him over the edge of the cup.
“How do I know you’ll actually tell me anything?”
He raked his fingers back with his hair.
“Even if I don’t, in 48 hours you’ll still have everything you have now. What’s the harm?”
She looked out at the horizon line.
“Nice day.”
“Do we have a deal?”
She frowned.
“No.”
They headed down the mountain on red flagstone steps with Neverly in the lead.
Suddenly she froze.
Teffinger saw the problem.
The woman’s foot had come down next to a thick rattlesnake.
“Don’t move!” he said.
She said nothing.
Sweat ran down her face.
Teffinger walked around the snake, got a stick and waved it gently in front of the reptile’s head until it saw nothing else.
The body coiled.
The head came up.
The tail shook.
The eyes pointed at Teffinger and away from Neverly.
“Okay, talk a slow step back,” he said.
Neverly complied, getting three feet away and then running back up to the deck.
Teffinger tossed the stick down, backed up and said, “Go away. No one’s going to hurt you.”
The snake stayed coiled for a few heartbeats and then slithered into the brush.
“Okay,” Neverly said.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, forty-eight hours.”
6
Day Two
June 5
Monday Afternoon
The call Teffinger knew would come sooner or later came mid-afternoon, after he had sufficient time to sweat. “Seen any good movies lately?” Teffinger recognized the voice as the same one as on the tape, “Preston’s.”
“Cut to the chase,” Teffinger said. “What do you want?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the man said. “We’ll get to all that. First, I want to be sure you understand the full extent of what we have.”
“I’ve watched it.”
“Right, I suspect you have,” the man said. “But I want to be sure you appreciate that I didn’t leave after our little fight. You thought I did, but I hung back in the shadows and saw what you did. My girl did too. We both saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“Don’t play games,” the man said.
“Tell me,” Teffinger said. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”
“We saw what you did, you little shit. You slit the woman’s throat open with that little broken-bottle friend of yours; the same little friend you tried to shove into my face. We saw you throw her body in the back of your little white pickup truck. We saw you take off like a bat out of hell.” A pause then, “Reminds you of the Meatloaf song, doesn’t it?”
“Bullshit.”
“Where’d you dump her?”
“You saw nothing because nothing happened.”
“She’s going to show up,” the man said. “Was she your girlfriend or just someone you picked up in a bar?”
Teffinger paced.
The world spun.
“Where did it happen?”
The man chuckled.
“You don’t remember?”
“Just tell me.”
“The old warehouse district on the west side, near the South Platte.”
Teffinger winced.
He knew the area.
He’d used it for sex more than once.
In fact that’s where he spotted Decker Zero.
“So what’s the bottom line?” he asked.
“The bottom line is money,” the man said. “Start getting it in a pile. I’ll be in touch.”
The line went dead.
Thirty minutes later Teffinger was trolling through the abandoned warehouse district in second gear. The asphalt was potholed, cracked and choked with weeds. The structures were decayed, the windows were broken and pigeon wings flapped with abandon. Ten minutes into it he came to a telephone pole with a rope dangling six or seven feet off the ground. He brought the ’67 to a stop and killed the engine.
His heart raced.
This was it.
This is where he killed the woman.
The rope was long and had years and years of weather and dirt. Right now it was looped around the pole multiple times, seven feet off the ground, and tied in a double square knot. The end hung limp, no longer attached to the woman’s wrists.
Dried blood was on the ground.
Teffinger pictured it squirting out of the woman’s neck and rolling down her chest and stomach and legs. He stooped down and picked up a white button with splats of dried blood, no doubt dislodged from her dress when he ripped it open.
He shoved it in his pocket.
He walked across the road to where the videotape was taken.
The scene from that angle was exactly as he saw it.
This was definitely the right place.
He walked over to where the Tundra was parked in the videotape.
There were droppings of blood on the asphalt from the pole to where the bed of the truck had been. He pictured carrying the woman in his arms.
That’s how he got the blood on his hands and shirt and pants.
Where did he dump her?
He’d been too screwed up to dig a grave, not to mention he didn’t have a shovel. He put her in the truck and took her somewhere, probably with intent to get her away from the immediate scene but maybe not without much more thought than that.
<
br /> Maybe he only went a hundred yards or so.
Maybe he dragged her into a structure or dumped her in the first old rusted trash bin that came up. That would have been smarter than driving around town with a body in the back.
Had he been at least that coherent?
He untied the rope and brought it with him as he headed down the asphalt on foot. The blackmailer, Preston, hadn’t said anything about seeing Teffinger stop anywhere in the vicinity after putting the woman in the truck. He must have made it at least out of visual range before stopping, assuming that’s what he did.
The asphalt curved.
He walked until he was out of range and then looked in earnest for a place that might have attracted him Saturday night.
He came to a dilapidated brick structure, four or five stories high that might have been a small manufacturing plant back in the day. The steel man-door in front was secured with a rusty padlock. Red spray paint said, “No Trespassing.” To the left was a rollup delivery door that was raised up two-feet, leaving a gap at the bottom. Teffinger tried to muscle it up and found it solidly stuck.
He looked around, saw no one, then got down on the ground and worked his way inside through the gap. It was dark. The structure had few windows and those that existed were boarded.
The air had a pungent glue-like odor, maybe the ghosts of chemicals used to make rubber parts.
There was no body on the ground.
If Teffinger dragged the woman in here, he wouldn’t have pulled her far. He took three steps into the darkness just to be sure he wasn’t missing anything.
A dark silhouette ten feet farther in caught his peripheral vision.
It looked like a body.
7
Day Two
June 5
Monday Afternoon
“So what are we doing in here?” The words came from behind Teffinger. They belonged to Neverly. She was already through the gap and getting to her feet, nothing more than a black silhouette.
Teffinger walked towards her.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m working,” she said. “I saw you take the rope off that pole. What’s it relate to?”
“A case.”
“Which one?”
“One that doesn’t concern you.” He got down, rolled out the gap and said, “Come on.”
