by R. J. Jagger
Blake Gray’s office turned out to be slightly more than a desk and a credenza. It had a pool table, a wet bar, couches and chairs galore, plants, a treadmill, a fountain, and two old pinball machines—all pointed at an incredible view of the Rockies.
“This is just like my office,” Aspen said.
Blake laughed.
“Now you see why I can’t go back to Colfax.”
The walls held expensive modern art, except for the wall behind his desk, which was totally barren except for an old check framed under glass.
“That’s the check I told you about,” Blake said, “the one that bounced. My reminder of reality.”
She looked at it.
$182.53.
“Insufficient Funds” stamped in red ink.
“After getting that check,” Blake said, “I spent a lot of time figuring out how to not get another one.” He chuckled. “Of course, it did no good. We still take our share of hits.”
Five minutes later, Blake’s personal assistant escorted two people into the room. Aspen recognized the man—Nick Teffinger—from the news report, but wasn’t prepared for the live version. She took her eyes off him only long enough to glance at the woman, an attractive African American with a powerful body, professionally dressed, about Aspen’s age.
“Nice digs,” Teffinger said.
He focused on the pinball machines.
“I used to play a little when I was a kid,” he said, looking at Gray. “If you want to make a wager, I’ll bet everything I own against everything you own.”
The man grinned.
“I don’t own anything,” he said. “My bankers do. But I’ll bet everything that I owe against everything that you owe.”
Teffinger walked over to the machine, tested the flippers, and put a ball in play as he talked to Aspen.
“So tell me the story,” he said. “How’d you find her?”
Aspen talked while Teffinger and Blake vied for points. “It was no stroke of genius,” she said. “I knew the date that Rachel Ringer disappeared. It was at the top of my mind. When the news report came on about the other two bodies, who disappeared about the same time as Rachel, I just put two and two together. It was just a matter of one dot, and another dot, and a straight-line connection.”
Then she told him about how she ended up in the water and actually found the head.
“No one knows yet that the head was detached,” Teffinger said. “We’re keeping that close to the vest. Have you told anyone about that?”
She ran through her memory.
“No,” she said. “Just Blake.”
Teffinger nodded.
“Good. I’d appreciate it if you both kept it that way.”
“Not a problem. That’s all I know,” she added. “It was just a fluke.”
Even though the ball was at the top of the board, Teffinger took his hands off the flippers and looked at her. “That’s not entirely true,” he said. “You heard that we found a fourth body too, right?”
She nodded.
That was true.
“And you know her name, don’t you?”
She swallowed.
“Well, I did happen to sniff around some news articles on the Internet,” she said, “to see if anyone else also disappeared in early April.”
“And?”
“A name did come up,” she said. “Catherine Carmichael.”
Teffinger was impressed.
“Bingo,” he said. “We haven’t confirmed it yet, but that’s who we think it is too. Again, keep that close to the vest.”
After Gray soundly beat Teffinger three games in a row, they ended up on leather couches drinking coffee, where Teffinger learned that Rachel Ringer didn’t have an enemy in the world.
“Not even a little tiny one?” Teffinger asked.
“If you’re looking for tiny stuff that doesn’t really count,” Blake said, “she did have a minor personality conflict with another lawyer in the firm by the name of Jacqueline Moore.”
Aspen wasn’t sure, but Teffinger seemed to react to the name.
“Jacqueline Moore,” he repeated.
“But no more so than everyone else,” Gray added. “Jacqueline rubs some people the wrong way.” He turned to Aspen. “Right?”
Aspen almost agreed, but decided to be politically correct instead.
“She’s not so bad,” she said.
Teffinger looked at her and frowned.
“In hindsight,” he said, “I wish we hadn’t put your face on the news. Someone might think you’re a witness or a threat.” He handed her one of his business cards. “Just keep a lookout. If you hear any strange bumps in the night, give me a call.”
He turned to Gray. “I’d like to look through Rachel’s emails.”
Gray put on a face as if he’d love to cooperate, but couldn’t. “They’ll be lots of attorney-client stuff in there,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I can do. I’ll look through them for you and let you know if anything looks suspicious. I’ll do that this afternoon and call you by the end of the day.”
Teffinger shrugged.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll start like that.”
Five minutes later, just as they were about to break up, Gray’s secretary buzzed on the intercom, apologized for interrupting, and informed him that he had an emergency phone call. He excused himself, walked over to his desk, picked up the phone and put it to his ear.
As he listened, his face grew serious.
He said nothing.
He only listened.
Then, at the end, he said, “I understand,” and hung up.
30
Day Five—September 9
Friday
When they got to Denver Friday afternoon, Draven dropped Gretchen off at his beat-up Chevy and gave her the keys to it, plus two thousand dollars in cash. Her job this afternoon was to find a cheap furnished place to rent for a month and stock it with food, beer, and Jack Daniels.
Buy clean sheets too, Draven hated dirty sheets.
Then, in the rental car, he drove up to the cabin and parked half a mile down the road. He snuck up to the structure on foot and found a car parked in front. After jotting down the license plate number, he crept up to the bedroom window and peeked in.
What he saw almost made him vomit.
He jogged back to the car and snaked down the mountain to Denver. On the way his cell phone rang.
“We got another client,” Swofford said.
Draven smiled.
Another client meant another pile of money.
“Details,” he said.
“He wants a specific person,” Swofford said. “She’s a stripper at a club called Cheeks. She goes by the name of Chase but her real name’s Samantha Stamp. Are you getting this?”
Cheeks.
Chase.
Samantha Stamp.
“Yeah, I got it,” Draven said. “The fee’s a hundred for a specific person,” he said.
A reminder, just to be absolutely sure there was no confusion.
“I know that and the guy’s already paid. He’s going to call me when he gets to Denver. My suspicion is that we’ll need the woman sometime tomorrow or the day after, so you’ll want to get it in motion. Don’t take her, though, until I give you the word. The guy wants to be sure he knows when that’s going to happen so he can be somewhere public, with an alibi—just in case.”
Draven could care less about that.
He already had a plan how to get the woman.
He was more concerned with being sure he didn’t have to worry about two live ones at the same time.
“We need to clean out the cabin first,” Draven said. “You know I don’t like overlap.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know when you can go back up,” Swofford said. “My guess is it’ll be sometime in the morning, before noon. I don’t see an overlap problem at this point. Remember to not take the woman until I give the go-ahead. Just scope her out and figure out how to do it, for now.�
�
“Understood.”
As soon as he hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Gretchen, calling from a payphone. “I got us a really cool place,” she said.
Excitement oozed from her voice.
Draven smiled, picturing her face.
“It’s a house.”
She gave him directions, and thirty minutes later he pulled into a long gravel drive that dead-ended at a small bungalow in an undeveloped area of Jefferson County, on the west side of Highway 93, between Golden and Boulder. The place must have been a farmhouse at one point, say fifty years ago, given the acreage.
Paint peeled off the sides, old lead-based stuff.
A wooden fence lay flat and neglected.
Weeds choked the driveway.
When he stepped out of the car, the air smelled like nature and the Colorado sky was clear and blue. He couldn’t hear even a wisp of traffic. The foothills jutted up not more than a couple of miles to the west.
He liked the place immediately.
Gretchen bounded out the door and jumped on him, wrapping her legs around his hips.
“Isn’t it great!” she said. “I only paid for a month, but we can have it longer if we want.”
She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the front door.
“It’s got a huge bed,” she said. “And I put fresh sheets on it like you wanted. I’ve been waiting all day to try it out.”
“You mean with me?”
She kissed him.
“Yes, silly, with you. Only with you.”
That evening he headed to Cheeks while Gretchen went out to shop for a TV. He told her he was a private investigator and would have to work weird hours. She had no problem with that.
He didn’t like lying to her.
It wasn’t as if he had a choice, though.
Cheeks turned out to be a bustling, high-energy place with lots of grade-B strippers and beer-goggled guys. Draven ordered a Bud Light and hung out at the bar until Chase got called to one of the stages—Stage Number Four, apparently—near the back. Men flocked over so fast that Draven was lucky to get a seat.
And no wonder, she was no ordinary stripper.
She had one of the most incredible bodies he had ever seen but, up top, had a very ordinary face. Because of that the guys, apparently, didn’t find her intimidating.
She had a sleazy, in-your-face routine, not afraid of body contact.
Draven laid a five on the stage and waited for his turn. She responded by straddling his shoulders with her legs and rubbing her crotch in his face—not close to his face, actually touching.
He tipped her another five and bought her a drink when she came off stage. When she hit him up for a private dance he said, “Sure.”
She took him to the back of the club, sat him in a dark booth facing the wall, and let him feel her up.
“Do you ever give any really private dances, off-site?” he asked.
She ran a finger down his scar.
“Maybe.”
Draven pulled two hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet and handed them to her. “There’s eight more where that came from,” he said. “Are you interested?”
“Very.”
She gave him her cell phone number and he told her he’d call her within the next couple of days.
“You won’t be sorry,” she said. “I don’t watch the clock or anything.”
31
Day Five—September 9
Friday Afternoon
The coroner—a small serious man named Robert Nelson who had a perpetual hint of whiskey on his breath—called Teffinger shortly after two in the afternoon. He confirmed a lot of the puzzle pieces that Teffinger already suspected.
The head of body number three did in fact belong to Rachel Ringer, according to her dental records.
The other Jane Doe, body number four—who Teffinger suspected to be a 19-year-old by the name of Catherine Carmichael based on the date of her disappearance—was in fact who he suspected. Again, according to dental records. Her eyes had been gouged out post-mortem, after her throat got slashed.
Body number two—Tonya Obenchain—who showed no exterior signs of trauma, died by suffocation.
Then the coroner dropped a bomb.
“Going back to Rachel Ringer,” Nelson said, “whoever took her head off used some kind of a saw with a jagged blade.”
Teffinger spun an empty coffee cup around on his desk.
He already knew that.
“A hacksaw?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” the coroner said. “The jags appear to be too big. I’m thinking something more in the nature of a wood saw.”
“Ouch,” Teffinger said.
“That word, unfortunately, is probably pretty appropriate,” Nelson said.
The man’s voice trembled.
Teffinger had never heard him like this before and stopped spinning the cup. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is,” Nelson said, “the guy cut her head off while she was still alive.”
Teffinger stood up.
“Tell me you’re screwing with me,” he said.
The man said nothing.
“Are you serious?”
Nelson confirmed that he was, very serious.
“Well, what kind of sick ass does that?”
“I don’t know,” Nelson said. “But there’s more. From what I can tell, the cutting started, stopped, and then started again. A number of times.”
Teffinger paced.
Sweat dampened his forehead.
“He took his time,” the coroner said. “He started on one side of the neck and worked his way in. Then he shifted over to the other side and did the same thing. It seems that each cut only went in a quarter of an inch or so at a time.”
Teffinger kicked his trashcan and sent it rolling across the room.
“Goddamn it!”
“I’m thinking he purposely avoided the front throat area so she wouldn’t drown in her own blood,” Nelson said. “He also avoided the back spinal area. Maybe because he wanted to watch her kick and didn’t want to paralyze her.”
Teffinger pictured it.
Then he noticed that his hands were trembling.
“How long did it take?” he asked. “All told?”
“A while,” Nelson said. “Even after he hit the aorta and she started bleeding to death.”
“Is that how she died then? Bleeding to death?”
“No. She died when he cut through her spinal cord,” Nelson said. “If she’d bled to death, she wouldn’t have had as much blood left as we found.”
It was at that moment that Sydney stepped into the room and motioned at him.
“CNN’s here,” she said. “They’re getting set up.”
Teffinger told Nelson he’d call him back later and hung up. He hadn’t taken two steps toward the door when his phone rang. He almost didn’t answer it but did.
It turned out to be a nurse from the hospital, Denver Health.
“Marilyn Black is ready to be released,” she said. “Short-term, she’s okay. But if she doesn’t get into a rehab program ASAP, we’re going to be seeing lots more of her—us or the coroner. She got really lucky this time.”
Teffinger already knew that.
“I’ll be down in about a hour to pick her up. Is that okay?”
It was.
The CNN interview turned out to be a lot more brutal than Teffinger had envisioned. The questioning focused on why the other three bodies hadn’t been discovered when the first one was. They also wanted to know if there were any suspects yet—which of course there weren’t. Finally, they wanted to know if Teffinger had located the person in the photograph that was being broadcast on the local TV stations and in the newspapers. What was her connection to everything?
He was actually glad they asked about that.
It gave him an opportunity to publicly state that they had found the woman and determined that she didn’t know anything. Hopefully, if any of t
he killers had perceived her as a threat, they didn’t now and would leave her alone.
When the interview ended, Paul Kwak blocked Teffinger’s path in the hall and brought him to a stop. “This is your lucky day,” Kwak said, scratching his big old gut.
Teffinger looked skeptical.
“If you have good news, you’ll be the first.”
“I got a lead for you on a guy selling a ’67 Corvette,” Kwak said. “I’d jump on this one myself, but I’m already tapped out after getting that ’63. It’s a small-block, but it’s a numbers-matching, two-owner car.”
“Have you seen it?” Teffinger questioned.
Kwak shook his head.
“Not yet,” Kwak said. “But it’s supposed to be primo. Red over black; and the seller’s not looking for a lot of money. He’s more interested in being sure it gets a good home.”
“Wow.”
“I’d jump all over it if I was you,” Kwak said.
Teffinger looked at his watch.
He was already late picking up Marilyn Black.
“Right now I have to run an errand,” he said. “Can we see it this evening?”
“I’ll make a call and find out,” Kwak said. “I don’t see why not.”
“Let me know; if not tonight, then tomorrow. I want to be the first guy there.”
“I’ll call you.”
Before he could get out of the building, Sydney cornered him. “I’m keeping track of young females disappearing, like you wanted me to,” she said. “Apparently a young Hispanic woman disappeared in Pueblo on Thursday, someone named Mia Avila, a 24-year-old. She runs a tattoo shop.”
Teffinger nodded and headed for the stairwell.
“Pueblo?”
“Right.”
“That’s a ways off,” he noted.
“True.”
“Hispanic too. All the victims so far were white. Anyone else?”
“No.”
“Well, just keep her on your radar screen for now,” he said. Then he stopped and turned. “Have you talked to the Pueblo PD?”
“No.”
He opened the door to the stairwell.
