Foreign Affairs (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  Teffinger shook his head.

  “What does all this have to do with me moving to Paris?”

  “I’m getting there,” Fallon said. “Just hold on. Anyway, we ended up going to a building that was being renovated. A man met us there. He seemed nice. He told the other woman that he wanted to put her in a standing spread-eagle position, feel her up and vibrate her. He wasn’t into pain or whipping or anything like that. The other woman said fine and he strung her up. Then she looked at me and said, Come on and join us. The man looked at me. And said, Yeah, you want to?”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said fine and he strung me up, face to face with this incredibly beautiful woman,” Fallon said. “He tied a rope around our waists so that our stomachs stayed together. Our breasts pressed against each other. We were totally naked. Then he started to vibrate the woman between the legs and finger me at the same time.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Teffinger said.

  “It was. Then it got ugly—very ugly.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “HE SAID WE WERE GOING TO NOTCH IT UP a little, and he put ball gags in our mouths. At first it freaked me out, but they were breathable and didn’t restrict my airflow, they just kept us from calling out. Then he went back to teasing us. Everything was fine. Then he put a plastic bag around the other woman’s head and sealed it around her neck with duct tape. She suffocated to death, right in front of me. Then he said, Your turn.”

  She exhaled.

  “I pulled at the ropes as hard as I could but it did no good,” Fallon said. “He was just about to put a bag over my head when someone broke a window and shouted something. The man ran away.”

  She looked at Teffinger.

  “I suppose you figured out the other woman’s name by now,” she said.

  He had.

  He had indeed.

  Sharla DePaglia.

  “Right,” she said. “From there, everything went downhill.”

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Day Ten—July 21

  Wednesday

  ______________

  “THE MAN WHO BROKE THE WINDOW turned out to be someone from Blue Moon who came over to be sure everything was okay,” Fallon said. “He cut me down and took me to a house in the Luxembourg Quarter. I met with a woman named Emmanuelle and told her what happened. Then she took me home. Sharla DePaglia was found the next morning when the construction crew showed up. Then the weirdest thing in the world happened.”

  “What?”

  “Targaux responded and asked me to come with him,” Fallon said. “That’s when I made my big mistake. I should have told him about my involvement right then and there. I should have told him that I was a witness and could identify the killer. I should have told him I had a conflict of interest.”

  Teffinger nodded.

  True.

  That would be the right thing to do.

  “But I didn’t tell him,” Fallon said. “I was scared. I was scared of what he’d think. I was scared of getting fired. I was scared of being ridiculed. So I stayed quiet as if I didn’t know a thing.”

  Teffinger frowned.

  “That was wrong.”

  She sighed.

  She knew that.

  She knew that a hundred times over.

  “Then, out of the blue, Targaux assigns the case to me,” Fallon said. “It was my very first case as the lead detective.”

  “That’s a strange turn of events,” Teffinger said.

  She nodded.

  “In a way, it was the best thing and the worst thing that could have happened,” Fallon said. “It was the best thing because I actually knew what the killer looked like and knew what happened. All I had to do was find him. But it was the worst thing, too, because I wouldn’t be able to arrest him once I found him. I couldn’t arrest him because he’d tell everyone I was actually the other woman. I couldn’t let that happen, not only because it was true, but because I’d also kept quiet and hadn’t disclosed it when I should have.”

  Teffinger raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s quite a dilemma,” he said. “But if that’s your full disclosure—that you got attracted to another woman, or took cocaine, or kept quiet when you should have talked—I don’t really care about any of those things. The not-talking part was a bad decision, but I could see how it could happen.”

  She shook her head.

  “No, that’s not the disclosure,” she said.

  It isn’t?

  No.

  There’s more.

  “It gets worse,” she said.

  “I WANTED MORE THAN ANYTHING in the world to bring this guy down,” Fallon said, “not only because of what he did to Sharla DePaglia right in front of my face, but because I knew he’d kill me if he ever found out who I was.”

  “Because you could identify him,” Teffinger said.

  She nodded.

  Exactly.

  “I knew he was into bondage, so I started frequenting the places where he might show up, on the hopes of bumping into him,” she said. “I always wore a disguise. I put in more hours than you can believe, all on my own time. It was inevitable that sooner or later our paths would cross. I got more and more concerned about what to do once that happened.”

  “You’re back to your Catch-22,” Teffinger said.

  Yes.

  The dreaded Catch-22.

  “Meanwhile,” Fallon said, “I was staying in contact with Emmanuelle at Blue Moon. One day she proposed a very simple solution. All I had to do was find out who the guy was and let her know. She’d hire a hitman to kill him.”

  Teffinger frowned.

  Fallon must have read the look on his face because she said, “I know, the whole idea was wrong, but at the same time it was so right. The guy would end up dead, as he needed to be, and my secret would forever stay a secret. So, with that plan in mind, I continued to frequent the bondage haunts on the hopes of running into the guy and feeding his name to Emmanuelle.”

  She paused and exhaled.

  “Do you hate me yet?”

  Teffinger squeezed her hand.

  “Of course not.

  She swallowed.

  “It gets worse.”

  “THERE’S AN UNDERGROUND club in the Latin Quarter called De Luna,” Fallon said. “Every two months, they have a fetish night. They actually tie up women, show bondage movies, stuff like that. It’s a huge event. Several hundred people show up. They dress in leather and chains and get drunk.”

  Really?

  Teffinger had no idea.

  “Anyway,” Fallon said, “they had a fetish night set for last Monday.”

  “You mean the day I came to Paris?”

  Right.

  Then.

  “You and I had talked about using me for bait earlier that day,” Fallon said. “You ended up staying at the houseboat that night. I got up, after you went to sleep, and went to De Luna as part of my continuing efforts to find the guy.”

  Teffinger remembered waking up in the middle of the night.

  Fallon wasn’t there.

  The next day he asked where she was.

  She said she couldn’t sleep and took a walk.

  “I had to say that,” she said, “because if I told you I went to a bar, then I’d have to explain the whole thing.”

  “I understand,” Teffinger said.

  “At the club,” Fallon said, “something happened that hadn’t happened in a whole year. I actually saw the guy.”

  “You did?”

  She nodded.

  Yes.

  “THERE WAS A PROBLEM, THOUGH,” she said. “I wasn’t positive it was him. I was pretty sure it was him—more than 95 percent—but I wasn’t absolutely positive. It had been a year since I’d seen him and I was on cocaine at the time. And his face was ordinary. There wasn’t anything about it that really stood out. So, I didn’t know what to do.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, at first I thought about watc
hing him from a distance and then trying to follow him after he left the club,” she said. “With any luck, I could get a license plate number or something to tell me who he was.”

  “And?”

  “And then I realized something,” she said. “Even if I succeeded, and found out his name and where he lived and everything else, I still wouldn’t be positive he was the one. I couldn’t call Emmanuelle, and have her put a hitman on the guy, without knowing for sure that he was the right person.”

  Teffinger picked up a twig and broke it.

  He understood.

  “Plus,” Fallon said, “by that time I had totally reevaluated the whole hitman thing. As convenient as it would have been, I was beginning to get more and more reluctant to be a party to it, even though it would solve all my problems.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I did something I wish I hadn’t,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you might hate me after I tell you the last part.”

  Teffinger doubted that but said, “So tell me.”

  SHE DIVERTED HER EYES. “Before I tell you the last part, I want to tell you something else first. I love you. I have from the first moment I saw you. I think you already know that.”

  Teffinger nodded.

  He did but it was still nice to hear.

  “That’s all that matters,” he said.

  “You better hear the rest of the story before you say that,” Fallon said.

  She exhaled.

  Okay, here goes.

  “Last Monday night, at De Luna, I made a split-second decision,” she said. “I figured that the only way I’d know for sure if this man was in fact the right one, was to let him see me. If he was in fact the right man, he’d follow me and try to kill me. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t. There was a woman stretched out on a rack and people were paying 5 euros to feel her up and tickle her. This guy was there watching.”

  Okay.

  So what happened?

  “When she got off, I got on,” Fallon said. “They stretched me out. I told the guy who was taking the money for the prior woman to keep doing what he was doing. I told him he could keep all the money. He was fine with that, of course. I also told him to put a blindfold on me. The reason I did that was so that this guy would feel safe taking a good long look at me. In any event, if he was the right one, he’d know me by my tattoo. To make a long story short, I spent some time on the rack. Then I got dressed and left the club.”

  “So now you were bait,” Teffinger said.

  Right.

  Bait.

  “I walked back to the houseboat so he’d be able to follow me if he wanted,” she said. “The way I pictured it in my mind, if he was in fact the killer, he’d come to get me. I would kill him and you’d be my witness that it was self defense. That would solve all my problems. My secret would be safe. I wouldn’t have to participate in a hitman scheme. I’d know that he was the right person. And he’d be justifiably killed.”

  “I LIED TO YOU,” she said. “I told you that I gave my name to someone pretending to be from INTERPOL who wanted to know who the page 5 witness was. You thought that the bait plan that you and I talked about was all set and in place. Actually, that whole thing was a lie. I made the whole thing up. The reason I did that was so you’d be watching your back, and mine. I didn’t want the guy to show up to kill me and then blindside you when you didn’t suspect it. Also, deep down, I hoped that you’d kill him.”

  Teffinger raked his hair with his fingers.

  It immediately flopped back down.

  “The dead man in the bedroom of my boat is the man from De Luna,” Fallon said. “Now I know for sure that he’s the one who killed Sharla DePaglia.”

  “So that case is solved,” Teffinger said.

  “Solved is the wrong word,” Fallon said. “Resolved is the better word.”

  Teffinger nodded.

  Right.

  Resolved.

  Over.

  Done.

  “In hindsight,” Fallon said, “he was no doubt the man you lunged at. Actually, it was a good thing he escaped, because if you had captured him alive, I would have been screwed.”

  Teffinger retreated in thought.

  He said, “Do you remember when we got back to the boat a couple of days ago and found that burlap bag on the deck? The one you thought was trash that someone had tossed on board?”

  Yes.

  She remembered.

  “I’ll bet the snakes were in there,” Teffinger said. “I can see him walking by and nonchalantly tossing it onboard. The snakes would crawl out and you’d eventually bump into them. That was a pretty good plan, actually, because he’d already had a close encounter with me. So he came up with a way to kill you without even being there.”

  She squeezed his hand.

  “If that’s true, then we spent a lot of time on the boat with those things right there somewhere,” she said.

  True.

  “We were lucky,” Teffinger said. “When you didn’t die, he must have figured the snakes left. Then he got impatient and decided to get it over with.”

  Fallon nodded.

  “THAT’S MY DISCLOSURE,” she said. “You got stabbed twice and almost got killed thanks to me.”

  “All to get your guy,” Teffinger said.

  She nodded.

  Right.

  “That’s the first person you killed,” Teffinger said. “How does it feel?”

  Silence.

  Then she said, “It feels like Sharla DePaglia is finally at peace.”

  Her eyes got moist and she laid her head on his arm.

  “So do you still want to move to Paris?”

  Teffinger put his arm around her and squeezed.

  “Are you done? Or is there more?”

  “I’m done.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, if that’s all you have, then you don’t have enough to scare me away,” he said.

  She hugged him.

  “What would it take? To scare you away—”

  Teffinger thought about it and said, “A cupboard with no coffee in it.”

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Day Ten—July 21

  Wednesday

  ______________

  THE LOOTERS HADN’T FALLEN for the coin trap, at least not yet, meaning they were still out there somewhere. Amaury came to Paris and moved in with Deja, ostensibly to protect her, at least until the word got out that the Egyptian government had possession of the treasure. Wednesday morning, Alexandra called Deja at the law firm and asked if she could meet for lunch.

  Deja was swamped but could break away for a quick one.

  “Bring Amaury,” she said.

  “I’m already planning on it.”

  AT LUNCH, DEJA HAD SOMETHING INTERESTING to report. “Yves Petit did a lot of legal work for Nicholas Ringer. Yves sat down to close up loose ends on some of the open files he was working on, since Ringer’s now dead. It turned out that Ringer fabricated the purchase and sale of a yacht a couple of weeks ago at Yves’ office. The purchasers didn’t really exist. They were actors and the certified check they gave as a down payment had actually been bankrolled by Ringer.”

  “Why would he do that?” Alexandra asked.

  “As far as I can figure, it was a convoluted way for him to meet me,” Deja said. “That day, we got to talking about Remy, who had been killed a week earlier. Ringer nonchalantly offered to hire a P.I. to help find Remy’s killer. His motive, in my opinion, was to get close to me. That way, if you got squirrelly and started doing something you shouldn’t, Ringer would find out about it through me. He was setting himself up as his own spy, in effect.”

  “Sneaky.”

  “Very.”

  “I GOT A CALL THIS MORNING FROM CAIRO,” Alexandra said.

  She paused and said nothin
g else.

  “And?” Deja asked.

  “And, it was a pretty interesting call.”

  Deja rolled her eyes.

  “Come on, girl, spit it out.”

  “Okay, it goes like this,” Alexandra said. “First of all, the credit for finding the treasure is going to go to me, you, my parents and your uncle, Remy. But that’s not the big news.”

  “That’s pretty big to me,” Deja said.

  Well, true.

  Actually it was but there was more, much more.

  “Okay, what I’m about to tell you is completely off limits to ever repeat,” Alexandra said. “There are only a handful of people in the world who know what I’m about to say.”

  Really?

  Yes.

  She was serious.

  Dead serious.

  “So spit it out,” Deja said.

  “OKAY, HERE GOES,” Alexandra said. “One of the jars in the cave turned out to be filled with documents, apparently authored by the rich guy who masterminded the robbery in the first place. In those notes, he talks about a pharaoh who ruled about 1500 B.C. He was an incredibly important person in his time and ruled for more than twenty years, meaning he had accumulated a considerable wealth. His tomb has never been found, to this day. The notes talk about his tomb. They describe it as being located in a southern area. Where we were was west of the Valley of the Kings, where most of the tombs have been found. South of that, in an area we never went to, is a place called the Valley of the Queens. That’s where Cleopatra was buried, plus many more. The location of this new tomb is south of the Valley of the Queens. That’s an area no one has really explored.”

  “Interesting,” Deja said.

  “No, that’s not interesting,” Alexandra said. “Here’s what’s interesting. They want me to head up the expedition to find it.”

  “Wow,” Deja said. “Congratulations.”

  Alexandra leaned across the table and whispered into Deja’s ear, “And I want you and Amaury to join me.”

  Before Deja could react, Amaury leaned over and whispered into her other ear, “I already said yes.”

  Deja must have had a deer-in-headlights look because they both laughed.