by R. J. Jagger
The gun went off.
January screamed.
River turned and Wilde punched him.
Two bloody minutes later, Wilde was standing over River, training the gun down on the man’s head. January was two steps away, holding a bleeding shoulder.
Suddenly Wilde heard a voice.
It was coming from the shaft to his left, not the one River pointed out before.
“Don’t move!”
He headed over and shined the light in.
Alabama was on a wooden beam, thirty feet down.
There was no rope around her chest or anywhere in sight.
“Are you okay?”
“Help me, Wilde! I’m losing it!”
Wilde walked over to River.
“You’re going to go down and put a rope around her,” he said.
“You’re crazy,” he said. “She’s not even alive. She’s dead.”
Wilde fired the gun into the air.
“I’m not playing.”
He and January lowered River down on a rope to the beam.
“Do it!” Wilde shouted down.
River hesitated, then unwrapped the rope from around his chest and secured it around Alabama’s. Wilde and January pulled her up.
She put Wilde into a bear hug.
From the shaft Wilde heard muffled words.
They came from River.
“Pull me out. Hurry up.”
Wilde walked over and shined the flashlight down.
The beam wasn’t very big.
“It was just an accident that Alabama landed on that,” Wilde said. “You didn’t even know it was there.”
“I thought she was dead.”
“No you didn’t,” Wilde said. “You were burying her alive.”
“That’s not true. Pull me out. We had a deal.”
“That’s right,” Wilde said. “The deal was you go your way and I’ll go mine. So go your way. I’m not stopping you.”
Suddenly Alabama was next to him.
“Wilde, you can’t leave him there.”
“He tried to kill you.”
“I don’t care. Don’t do it.”
He exhaled, deciding.
Suddenly a shape darted at them.
Wilde saw it in his peripheral vision.
It was January charging with stiff arms, intent on pushing Wilde or Alabama or both of them into the shaft.
He grabbed Alabama’s waist and swung her to the ground.
The shape went over them.
Wilde grabbed the woman’s ankle with his right hand.
Her momentum propelled her forward and her torso disappeared into the shaft. She pushed wildly against the shaft wall, screaming.
Wilde dragged her out.
She rolled away from the hole and curled up in a ball.
Wilde grabbed the rope, dropped it down to River and said, “Tie it around your chest.”
River didn’t answer.
Wilde leaned over and shined the light down.
River was gone.
It wasn’t clear if he lost his footing or whether a rock fell on him from January’s commotion or something else happened altogether. The only thing that was clear was that he was gone.
132
Day Six
July 26, 1952
Saturday Night
Wilde liked the name Secret better than Emmanuelle so that’s what he called her. Saturday night he took her to the Bokaray. She wore a short black dress and white panties. In her left hand was a glass of wine. In Wilde’s was a double-shot of whiskey, his third.
They had a table in the corner.
The dance floor was sardine tight.
The band was good.
Perfume and cigarettes permeated the air.
Secret leaned close.
“I’m going to tell you something but you have to promise not to repeat it,” she said.
He shrugged.
“Whatever.”
“It’s sort of a completion of what I started to tell you the other day,” she said. “It’s about me and my agent, Sam Lenay.”
“Right, him.”
“River got his hooks into Lenay. To this day, I still don’t know how, but he did. Lenay brought me into it to get a job done. My job was to seduce a woman named Carmen Key.”
“Waverly’s sister?”
She nodded.
“She was going to be in a bar that night,” Secret said. “My job was to seduce her and get her to the roof of a certain building, supposedly to make out.”
Wilde raised an eyebrow.
“Are you a lesbian?”
“No.”
“Was she?”
“Yes,” Secret said. “I did what I was told, to help Lenay. I got the woman to the roof then slipped away.” She took a drink of wine. “The next day, I found out she got put in a red dress and dropped off the roof. I didn’t know that was going to happen. All I knew is that I was supposed to get her up onto the roof.”
“Did you know someone would be up there waiting for her?”
“Not specifically but I guess I assumed it. The dead woman’s sister, Waverly, ended up coming to town. I made it my mission to help her but I never told her my role in it. To this day she thinks that I was only a witness.”
Wilde considered it.
“That’s fair,” he said. “You didn’t know you were doing anything wrong when you did it. After it happened, you couldn’t undo it. About the best you could do at that point was help her. What about Lenay? Certainly he knew who was behind it—”
“He claims he didn’t,” Secret said. “He was being blackmailed but he didn’t know by who.”
“Blackmailed for what?”
“He’d never tell me,” Secret said.
“Waverly almost killed Bristol.”
Wilde cocked his head.
“She couldn’t kill anyone. She doesn’t have what it takes.”
“I’m glad you think so,” Secret said. “She got suckered into a trap. At the last minute, right before Bristol was going to shoot her, Jaden shot him. She did it with Waverly’s gun.”
“Are you serious?”
“You can’t tell anyone,” she said.
“I won’t.”
“It happened in a rental car,” she said. “They cleaned it up as good as new and turned it back in.”
Wilde lit a smoke.
“So I guess that means they took Bristol’s body out first.”
“That’s true. They buried him up in the mountains.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” Secret said.
“That’s pretty intense.”
“Jaden knew a lot of stuff about Bristol,” Secret said. “His firm was bidding for a Hong Kong project. He was strong-armed. He was told to withdraw his bid or else a woman he was seeing would be killed.”
“Strong-armed by who?”
“My guess is River,” she said. “River working for one of the other bidders. Anyway, Bristol was a stubborn man. He didn’t do it. Then it went down. His girl—a woman named Kava Every—was killed. She was dropped off a roof in a red dress.”
“That’s River.”
“River or Gapp,” Secret said. “Anyway, it wasn’t until then that Bristol took it seriously. He withdrew the bid before anyone else got killed.”
“So Waverly almost killed an innocent man.”
“Not entirely,” Secret said. “Bristol killed a woman in Cleveland, a woman named Bobbi Litton. He did it for Jaden. He did it the red-dress way, to make it look like a copycat.”
“Damn.”
“Right, damn,” Secret said. “Anyway, Jaden was indebted to him. When Waverly started closing in on Bristol, Jaden was his spy. She drew Waverly into a trap. The only thing that went wrong is that Bristol turned on Jaden at the last second. If he hadn’t done that, he’d still be alive today.”
“Interesting.”
“Jaden told all this to Waverly after the fact. That’s how I kn
ow, she told me.”
Wilde downed his drink and set the empty glass on the table.
“I’m going to get a refill,” he said. “You want another wine?”
She nodded.
“That’d be nice.”
He got up, then leaned down and got his lips close to her ear.
“While I’m gone, I want you to think about whether you have any more secrets to tell me. I want everything on the table.”
She smiled.
“Sure.”
She watched him disappear into the crowd. Then a memory grabbed her, a memory exactly one week old, a memory so vivid and clear that it was as if she was really there.
* * * * *
The night was cool.
She was in Denver to visit with Waverly. They’d been to the El Ray Club and had more alcohol in their guts than was healthy.
The night was over.
They were walking down the street.
“I got to pee,” Waverly said. “Wait here.”
She ducked into an alley.
“Are you really going to do that?”
“Just hold on. I’ll only be a minute.”
“I can’t believe you sometimes.”
It was then that Secret needed a cigarette and needed it now. She checked her purse. It was empty. Waverly didn’t smoke.
Cars were parked on the street, one after another.
Traffic was thin to non-existent.
No one was around.
Secret started checking out the dashboards of the cars on the off chance someone had left a pack sitting around. The fourth car down, she spotted a pack. The door was locked but the window was rolled down a ways. It was tight, but she got her arm in. Then she brought her body all the way against the car to get an extension. The pack was at the end of her fingertips. She couldn’t get it. She pulled her arm out, frustrated, then spotted a rock. She broke the window, reached in and grabbed the pack.
Then she heard a voice.
“Hey, that’s my car!”
She turned.
The words came from a woman.
The woman was alone.
She was drunk.
“I’m just borrowing a smoke,” Secret said. “I’m sorry. I’ll pay for the window. I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Damn right you shouldn’t have done that.”
The woman charged.
Fists flew.
Then a head slammed into the curb.
It was the head of the other woman.
She laid there, sprawled out, not moving.
Waverly ran over.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“She wouldn’t stop, I tried to stop—”
Waverly kneeled down and checked the woman. She felt no pulse. She detected no movement of her chest. She brought her face close to the woman’s mouth and detected no movement of air.
Then she stood up and said, “She’s dead.”
They stood there for a few heartbeats, frozen, then ducked into the alley.
No cars came.
No people came.
They dragged the body into the alley, back far, way into the deepest shadows.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Waverly said. “I have a red dress at home. I’m going to go get it. You stay here. Then we’re going to take her to the roof and drop her off.”
“Why?”
“Because then you didn’t kill her,” she said. “The guy who killed my sister killed her.”
They got the body to the roof, made sure the woman was dead, changed her into the red dress and dropped her off. They disposed of her clothes in a dumpster three blocks away.
“There’s a PI in town by the name of Bryson Wilde,” Waverly said. “Tomorrow, what you need to do is hire him. Pretend you’re a witness to the murder. Pretend that the guy who did the killing may have seen you. Pretend that you’re in danger. Pretend that you want Wilde to find out who the killer is.”
“Why? I don’t get it.”
“Because Wilde will have a pipeline into what the police are finding out,” Waverly said. “If they start getting close, Wilde will know it, then we’ll know it.”
Secret exhaled.
“Okay.”
* * * * *
Wilde emerged from the crowd, set a fresh glass of wine in front of Secret and slid in next to her.
“So, are there any more secrets I should know about?”
She looked like she was in thought.
Then she grabbed Wilde’s hand, brought it under the table and set it on her leg above the knee.
“That’s for you to find out,” she said.
He inched his hand up.
“It looks like I have no alternative but to do a little exploring.”
She opened her legs, just a touch.
“It looks that way.”
Every book by R.J. Jagger is a standalone thriller.
Read them in any order.
Nick Teffinger Thrillers
Witness Chase
Bad Client
Lawyer Trap
Pretty Little Lawyer
Attorney’s Run
Never Dead
Client Trap
Ancient Prey
Dead in Hong Kong
A Twist of Sin
Reverse Run
Lawyer Kill
Kill Theory
Bryson Wilde Thrillers
The Scroll Lawyers
The Shadow File
A Way With Murder
WANT MORE THRILLS?
Check out this preview of Kill Theory
1
Day 1—September 21
Monday Night
DRESSED IN ALL THINGS BLACK, Nick Teffinger—the 36-year-old head of San Francisco’s homicide detail—slipped into the darkness behind Condor’s house and reminded himself one last time of the seriousness of what he was about to do. In ten seconds, if he proceeded as planned, he’d be forever dirty.
He took a deep breath.
A cool, salty breeze rolled off the Pacific and wove through the San Francisco nightscape.
Rain was coming.
Condor’s house was a stately Victorian perched on Nob Hill, the coordinates of choice for the affluent and relevant. City lights twinkled below and stretched all the way to the bay.
Teffinger pushed hair out of his face.
It was thick and brown and longer than most. He tucked it under a black cap, put on latex gloves and stepped to the nearest window to see if it was locked.
It was.
So was the next one.
And the next.
Then he found the one he wanted. He lifted it up, got the screen out, then muscled his six-foot-two body through, ending up in a laundry room where he quietly listened for sounds or vibrations.
The interior was dark.
He powered up a small flashlight and headed into the guts of the structure one silent step at a time. He didn’t have a gun or knife. It would be bad enough if he got caught. It would be fatal if he ended up killing Condor, even in self-defense. If a confrontation occurred, he’d beat the man with his fists just enough to make his escape. If he got shot, well, that would just be the price.
He bypassed the kitchen and living room and headed for the den.
A LAPTOP SAT ON A CHERRY DESK. Teffinger fired it up and copied the folder files onto a flash drive while he searched the drawers. Pens, pencils, notepads, a stapler—that’s what was there, nothing of relevance. He powered off the computer, stuck the flash drive in his pocket and turned his attention to the matching cherry credenza.
An inbox on top held unpaid bills.
One of them was a cell phone statement.
Teffinger left it sealed, searched for the paid ones and found them in a folder inside the credenza. Unfortunately, the individual calls weren’t itemized. He wrote down the account number and returned the bills to exactly where he got them.
He heard a sound and froze.
Now it wasn’t there.
Silence.<
br />
That’s all there was now, just silence.
He concentrated harder.
Still nothing.
Only the passing of air in and out of his lungs.
He turned his attention back to the credenza, searching faster now, and found an expandable file labeled PRIVATE in black magic marker. Inside were several manila folders with names handwritten on the tabs.
Paris Zephyr.
Jamie van de Haven.
Pamela Zoom.
Samantha Payton.
Brenda Poppenberg.
Syling Hu.
Teffinger’s heart raced. Not only were these the SJK victims but they were organized in the exact order the women had been killed.
Oh yeah.
He opened the first one—Paris Zephyr—and found a plethora of newspaper articles and information printed off the Internet, both on the murder itself and on the trial of Kyle Greyson, who turned out to be not guilty.
The other files were similar.
Teffinger put everything back exactly as he found it.
This was good.
Very good.
Beyond-beautiful good.
This was worth getting dirty for.
Now, if he could just find the souvenirs, that would be the clincher.
They weren’t in the credenza.
He listened for sounds, got nothing, and headed upstairs to the master bedroom.
Thunder crackled in the distance.
The storm was close.
UPSTAIRS HE FOUND SOMETHING he didn’t expect, namely a telescope on a tripod, set up by the window and pointed outside. Teffinger walked over and looked through, careful to not bump it.
What he saw he could hardly believe.
2
Day 1—September 21
Monday Night
A 15-METER GO-FAST picked Jonk up in Hong Kong after dark Monday night and headed west into the open waters of the South China Sea, slicing effortlessly through black chop as it left the twinkling lights of sci-fi skyscrapers in its wake. Jonk sat in the back with his 29-year-old, six-foot body jarring and his shoulder-length, spa-blond hair whipping, wondering what the hell Jack Poon wanted.
The twin engines were deafening.
The slapping of the hull against the water was even more so.
