by R. J. Jagger
That would explain how the woman got lured to the switchyard. Preston probably told her they were just taking a walk. It would explain why she didn’t have a purse with her.
Teffinger finished the run, showered, got into fresh clothes and headed for D’aylor Alexander’s house in the ’67 with a cup of coffee in his left hand and more of the same in a thermos.
Preston needed to go down.
He needed to go down hard.
He needed to go down forever.
D’aylor Alexander lived in a 3rd floor apartment slightly south of downtown on Broadway. Teffinger found a parking space for the ’67 on the street between a gay movie arcade and a tattoo place called Ink You Up. He made sure the ’vette was locked and headed over to the building. A sign on the elevator said Broken, which was fine because he wouldn’t have entered it to escape a tarantula attack. He headed up the stairway, pushed through the door on the 3rd floor and got oriented. The apartment he wanted, 314, was to the right.
It was locked, as he expected.
It took ten minutes to round up the building manager, a guy in a wife-beater shirt named Bob who said, “She moved in about six months ago. I never had any trouble with her. She’s quiet and pays on time. Her place is furnished which means that we own the furniture. It would be great if you didn’t mess it up.”
“Right.”
Inside it was hot to the point of oppression.
Teffinger opened a window and turned on a fan. Since D’aylor was Preston’s girlfriend, he expected to find pictures of the two them together. What he found instead was a photograph of D’aylor and Rain together.
They were on a beach, enjoying the day.
It was identical to the one he found in Rain’s apartment.
At the BNSF crime scene, he had a feeling that he’d seen the victim before. Now he realized where that feeling came from. D’aylor was the other woman in the beach photo from Rain’s apartment.
Suddenly his phone rang and a man’s voice came through. “Mr. Teffinger, I’m a lawyer and I need to speak to you right away. It’s extremely urgent.”
Teffinger didn’t recognize the voice.
It came from a stranger.
“What’s your name?”
“I’ll tell you when we talk.”
“Talk about what?”
“About a lot of things,” the man said. “I’m in your living room right now. I’m waiting for you.”
“Did you say you’re in my living room?”
“Yes.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“Let me put it this way,” the man said. “You have a brick fireplace and the bricks are painted white. On the left side of the mantle you have four books laying flat. The top one has a red cover. The couch I’m sitting on is dark blue.”
Teffinger’s heart raced.
“How’d you get in?”
The man exhaled.
“That’s not important,” he said. “What’s important is that we need to talk and we need to do it right now. I’m waiting for you. Come alone. Don’t bring anyone with you. This needs to be private.”
The line went dead.
Teffinger checked the number of the caller.
It was his home phone.
16
Day Four
June 7
Wednesday Morning
No vehicle was parked in Teffinger’ driveway when he got home, which was unexpected if a lawyer was inside waiting for him. He’d left the front door closed and locked. Now it was open.
He entered.
The place was torn apart.
A large man in an expensive suit was leaning against the wall, sizing Teffinger up as he walked in. The guy was about Teffinger’s age but at least two inches taller. He had black hair, slicked back, and a rough manly face with a square chin.
“Thanks for tearing my place apart,” Teffinger said.
The man nodded.
“You’re welcome. I think you know what I was looking for.”
Teffinger feigned ignorance.
“I don’t, but I do know one thing. Whatever game it is that you’re playing, it’s a dangerous one.”
The man shook his head as if disappointed.
“Don’t screw with me,” he said. “You don’t have the skills and I don’t have the time. I want the five hundred thousand and I want it now. Do that one simple thing and your little friend Neverly Cage will stay alive.”
Neverly Cage.
An image of the woman’s pretty face and innocent ways slammed into Teffinger’s brain.
“You better not have—”
The man waved a hand and cut him off.
“She’s fine and she’s going to stay that way as long as you don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to give me the money and I’m going to tell you where she is. You can go get her and she won’t end up rotting to death.”
“She has nothing to do with anything,” Teffinger said.
“On that count you’re wrong,” the man said. “She was the only one who knew about the meeting last night. She’s been hanging around you. She told you about it.”
“She didn’t tell me anything.”
The man frowned.
“She already confessed to it. You snuck over to Preston’s and took the money. The briefcase is under your bed. That’s a fact. It’s also a fact that I want it back. Get it. Get it now. Do you understand?”
“Who are you?”
“Just get the money.” The man pulled a gun and pointed it at Teffinger’s chest. “You have one minute.”
Teffinger exhaled.
“Sure, no problem.”
With the man in tow and the gun at his back, Teffinger pulled the five stashes out of their hiding places and handed them over.
The man put them in the briefcase and said, “See, that wasn’t so hard.”
“Your turn,” Teffinger said. “Where’s Neverly?”
The man cocked his head.
“It would be hard to explain. I’ll take you to her.” He pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his jacket pocked and tossed them. “Put these on, behind your back.”
Teffinger balked.
“We can go get her or she can rot to death,” the man said. “If she rots, though, the blood’s on your hands. You had your chance and didn’t take it.”
Teffinger’s phone rang.
The man said, “Cuffs first.”
Teffinger hesitated, bit his lower lip and complied.
The man said, “Don’t to anything stupid.” Then he connected the incoming call and put the phone between his ear and Teffinger’s.
“This is Teffinger.”
“Nick, it’s me.”
The voice belonged to a woman.
It was familiar but he couldn’t place it.
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, Rain.”
Rain?
Rain was dead.
“Where are you?”
“At home.”
“I’m coming over,” she said. “We need to talk. A friend of mine was killed, a friend named D’aylor Alexander. I know who did it. It was a guy named Bale Colton. He’s a lawyer out of New York.”
“How do you know?”
“Just stay there. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
The line went dead.
Teffinger looked at the man.
“Is that your name, Bale Colton?”
The man nodded.
“Is what she said true? Did you kill D’aylor Alexander?”
The man frowned.
“Well, this is a conversation I never expected to have,” he said. “It’s strange how life works sometimes, isn’t it?”
17
Day Four
June 7
Wednesday Morning
The man made Teffinger sit on the couch and paced in front of him, far enough away that a leg couldn’t kick out or a sudden move could get him. At first he said nothing and checked his watch every fifteen secon
ds. Then he said, “I didn’t want it to end this way. I didn’t want to have to kill you. It’s ironic that the ending is going to be what it’s going to be because if I was going to kill you, things would have been a whole lot simpler from the start.”
Teffinger’s chest pounded.
He was going to die.
“Let’s work it out,” he said.
The man shook his head.
“How can we work it out now that you know I killed D’aylor Alexander?”
“It’ll be our secret. I’ll misdirect the case and then close the file.”
“Sure.”
Teffinger exhaled.
“Why’d you kill her? What’d she ever do to you?”
“It’s complicated.”
“What isn’t?”
The man nodded.
He sat down in a chair facing Teffinger and leaned forward. “I guess it’s only fair that you know. I’m Decker Zero’s attorney.”
“I thought Silke Jopp was his attorney.”
“She is,” the man said. “She’s his second attorney. I’m his first attorney.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Zero’s a very wealthy man,” he said. “I met with him early on and we devised a plan to discredit the people’s main witness.”
“Me,” Teffinger said.
“Right, you. The plan was for you to kill someone. To distance both Zero and myself from the plan, we pretended to have a falling out. He then hired Silke Jopp who had no idea that things were at work behind the scenes. Rain and Preston and D’aylor Alexander were all part of the plan.”
“How?”
“It was simple,” he said. “We’ve done this before, eight times before to be exact. The three of them moved to Denver six months ago.”
Six months ago.
“Why?”
“So they’d be living in town when the kill took place,” she said. “We monitored your moves. You went to D-Drop every other Friday.”
Teffinger cocked his head.
That was true.
“Rain picked you up,” he said. “She got you drunk and slipped you some drugs. She took you to a deserted warehouse district—a place recommended by Zero, in fact. She pretended to find abandoned rope on the ground. It was already staged there. She talked you into tying her up against a pole.”
“So that was her idea?”
“Yes it was,” he said. “She told you she liked it rough. She told you to slap her around and rip her clothes off. You were real hesitant about that part but she kept pounding on you and you finally did it. Preston was in the shadows videotaping the whole thing. He interceded and that’s where the camera stopped rolling, ostensibly dropped. What happened after that is that Preston subdued you easily. He injected you with a form of roofies. Then he drove you home in your truck and moved you behind the wheel.”
Teffinger shook his head.
“And you all got paid handsomely by Zero,” he said.
“Yes we did,” the man said. “The beauty is that Silke Jopp and her little investigator, Neverly Cage, thought the whole thing was real. That way they could get passionate at trial in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to, knowing the truth.”
“Clever.”
“Thanks.”
“What I don’t get is why you killed D’aylor?”
The man exhaled.
“She got greedy,” he said. “She was shaking me down. Like I said, we did eight similar cases before this one. She was in on all of them. She looked back at the whole thing and didn’t think she’d been paid properly. She wanted more money, a lot more money, otherwise she was going to spill her guts to all the wrong people.”
“Why didn’t you just pay her?”
“You know why,” he said. “Once they start to turn you can’t trust them anymore. Like I said before, we could have just killed you at the outset. That would have been a lot easier than going to all the effort we did. With you dead the state’s case would have fallen apart. We try to not kill anyone unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“But still, you do.”
He nodded.
“Occasionally, but only as a last resort.”
“So how many times have you killed?”
“Not that many,” he said. “Three. That will go up to five with you and Rain. In hindsight, Rain must have known D’aylor was shaking me down. She knew that I had a motive. Hell, for all I know she was even in on the blackmail. Maybe they had plans to split the money.”
Teffinger tugged quietly at the cuffs.
They cut into his flesh.
They were tight.
They weren’t coming off.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “You killed D’aylor. There’s no way you can undo that and there’s no way I can forget what I know. We can make an exchange though. I can give you a pass on D’aylor as long as you let Rain go.”
“So you’d be giving up a catch to save a future victim? That’s how you’re looking at it—”
“Right.”
The man shook his head.
“It won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Because what you’d do is get Rain safe, then come after me. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Teffinger looked into the man’s eyes.
His mouth opened to speak but no words came out.
Suddenly a sound came from the kitchen.
“Hey, Bale.”
The man turned, froze for a heartbeat and then jerked for his gun.
A shot rang out.
The man’s face exploded.
He teetered for a second and then slumped forward into the carpet.
He didn’t move.
His eyes were open, looking at nothing.
Rain lowered her arm.
She studied the man’s body as if in a trance, then set a gun down on the table and looked at Teffinger.
18
Two Weeks Later
Saturday Evening
The cruise in Golden was one of the largest in the country. Once every month on a Saturday night, from the Sonic at one end all the way down to the high school at the other, an otherwise ordinary stretch of city asphalt became home to thousands and thousands of the best vehicles the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s had to offer. Modern muscle was also welcome and made an appearance in the shape of Chargers, Vipers, Mustangs and even an occasional Porsche. Every conceivable parking space up and down the road was jammed with vintage.
The sidewalks were lined with lawn chairs and bodies in motion.
Throaty engines revved.
Tires squealed.
Right now the late-day shadows were long but the air still burned with the afternoon’s fire.
Teffinger was in the ’67 with the top down, making his third pass, sandwiched between a ’69 Camero in front and a ’57 Chevy behind. Neverly was in the passenger seat wearing oversized sunglasses and a tattered cap turned backwards. Down below was a short green skirt and strong legs that Teffinger still hadn’t fully opened.
They were taking things slow.
A lot had happened in the last two weeks.
For starters, Rain’s bullet to Bale Colton’s head was ruled to be self-defense.
Decker Zero’s trial didn’t go well, for Zero that is. Teffinger returned the five hundred k to Preston with the understanding that Preston would in turn return it to Silke, which he did. The videotape defense that Teffinger killed Rain was gone, given the troubling little fact that Rain was still breathing and walking around the earth in feet that weren’t dead. Even the pictures Neverly took of Teffinger at the D-Drop weren’t used as evidence at trial. That was because the state could call Rain as a rebuttal witness to testify that she orchestrated the whole evening, all as part of a bigger plan—known to and even paid for by the defendant, Zero—to falsely attempt to discredit Teffinger by pinning a fake murder on him. In the end, the jury found Teffinger’s eyewitness testimony to be credible and convicted Zero on all counts.
Sentencing w
ould take place next month.
The smart money was on life without parole.
It wasn’t enough but it was something.
In exchange for immunity, Rain and Preston were cooperating with authorities across the country. So far, six defendants who walked following tainted trials had been rearrested on new charges of obstruction of justice.
It was still unclear who the dead woman was that got torn apart by the dogs. Teffinger’s best theory was that the murder was connected to the woman Zero killed. The area was being used to release women naked and then hunt them down.
Traffic ahead came to a stop.
Teffinger shifted into neutral and put on the brakes.
Neverly said, “It’s hot out.”
Teffinger nodded.
“Yeah.”
Neverly scooted her dress up and fanned her legs. A black thong came into view.
“I wore this for you,” she said.
“The thong?”
She spread her knees ever so slightly.
“No, the body. Tonight, it’s yours, assuming you want it.”
He put his hand on her thigh.
“I don’t want it, I want you,” he said.
She looked at him with a serious face and then broke out in laughter.
Teffinger smiled.
“Okay,” he said. “Busted. It’s the body I want.”
“You were gone there for a second.”
He raked his hair back with his fingers.
“I was but I’m back now. It won’t happen again.”
“I hope not.”
THE END
Copyright (c) R.J. Jagger
All rights reserved
R.J. Jagger is the author of over 20 thrillers and is also a long-standing member of the International Thriller Writers. He has two series, one featuring Denver homicide detective Nick Teffinger, set in modern times; and a noir series featuring private investigator Bryson Wilde, set in 1952. His books can be read in any order. For complete information on the author and his ebooks, hardcovers, paperbacks and audio books, as well as upcoming titles, news and events, please visit him at:
Rjjagger.blogspot.com
[email protected]
