Nick Teffinger Thrillers - Box Set 1 (Specter of Guilt, Black Out, Confidential Prey)

by R. J. Jagger

  “What do you mean? Your life’s screwed up—”

  Pantage stood up and looked out the window.

  “We need to be smart,” she said. “We need to get all this information to Teffinger without implicating ourselves.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll hire an attorney,” she said. “What we say will be privileged. She can then transmit everything to Teffinger without specifically mentioning our names.”

  Renn-Jaa tilted her head.

  “Her?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you already have someone in mind?”

  Pantage nodded.

  “Kelly Ravenfield,” she said. “She has Teffinger’s ear.”

  Renn-Jaa shook her head.

  “She’s trying to get Teffinger,” she said. “I can see her letting it slip that you and me are her clients. She can get a leg up that way.”

  Pantage shook her head.

  “If she purposely betrays our trust, Teffinger wouldn’t look very favorably on it. She’d just be shooting herself in the foot. Besides, Teffinger already graduated from third grade, meaning he’s going to put two and two together anyway.” She looked at her watch. “Let’s see if we can get Kelly to meet us for lunch. He’ll know we broke in. My concern is that we never formally admit it.”

  Renn-Jaa smiled.

  “This has nothing to do with anything,” she said. “You just want an excuse to meet Kelly.”

  77

  Day Five

  July 22

  Friday Morning

  Teffinger’s night of so-called sleep dripped with dreams of scorpions. He didn’t realize why until he woke up and remembered the arm tattoo of the man who stalked Pantage yesterday. He got the coffee pot charged up and let it do its thing while he took a three mile pre-dawn jog through the silent streets of Green Mountain, then headed to work with a bowl of cereal in his lap and a thermos of the good stuff laying on the passenger seat.

  En route he called Pantage to be sure she survived the night.

  The call woke her.

  She was fine.

  “You were quite the little ride last night,” she said.

  “I could say the same.”

  He was the first one to work as usual. When he opened the door and flicked on the fluorescents, something happened he didn’t expect. The light above his desk hummed like a flock of angry mosquitoes. He walked down to the chief’s office and turned on the lights. No humming came from above.

  He smiled.

  How’d the man figure it out?

  He was half tempted to switch them back but decided he didn’t have time right now, later, but not now. Instead he got the coffee dripping and searched the net for scorpion tattoos in hopes of finding an identical match to the suspect in question.

  Nothing popped up.

  He pulled up a listing of tattoo shops in Denver and found that most of them opened at ten, meaning it was too early to start calling.

  He printed off a copy of the suspect’s tattoo and tacked it on the wall behind his desk. While he was at it he printed off a copy of Michael Northway walking through the streets of New York and stuck that up too.

  His phone rang and Sydney’s voice came through from New York.

  “You were right,” she said. “The woman with Northway was a lawyer. Her name’s Michelle Twist. She’s a partner in a big firm here in Manhattan by the name of Block, Winters & LaJunge. Northway isn’t a member of the firm. I went through all the bio photos and he’s not there.”

  “Good work.”

  “Thanks but here’s the big question. Now what?”

  Teffinger chewed on the options.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “I’m going to email you photos of D’endra Vaughn, both alive and dead. Stake out the base of the law firm’s building and see if you can catch the lawyer—”

  “—Michelle Twist—”

  “—Right, her, see if you can catch her coming out. Get her alone. If she comes out with someone else, back off. The key is to get her alone, the sooner the better but tonight at her house or apartment if that’s what it takes. When you get her alone, show her the photos and explain the background. At that point, hopefully she’ll give you the name Northway’s using and where to find him, even if he’s a client. Tell her your conversation with her never existed. No one will know what she tells you. All you want is the information.”

  “What if she doesn’t cooperate?”

  “That will depend on whether she says that Northway’s a client or not,” he said. “If he’s a client and she refuses to give him up, quite frankly I don’t know what we’re going to do. But if he’s not a client, if he’s just a friend or lover or something like that, then make it clear that we’ll be forced to determine whether she’s harboring a fugitive. Remind her that’s a felony.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Hopefully we don’t get to that point,” he said. “Give her every opportunity to talk off the record.”

  Silence.

  “You still there?” she said.

  He was.

  “Northway has a way with women,” she said. “She’ll tip him off and he’ll disappear again. Maybe we should just lay low and stay in the shadows. Do we have enough to tap her phone?”

  Teffinger raked his hair back.

  It flopped back down.

  “Doubtful,” he said. “Show her the photos. Hopefully they’ll convince her to do the right thing.”

  “That’s your plan? To hope she does the right thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has it ever worked before?”

  “No but there’s always a first time.”

  78

  Day Five

  July 22

  Friday Morning

  Yardley woke on a raggedy mattress in a strange room with her left wrist in a metal cuff chained to the bed frame. The first rays of light were just beginning to creep into the sky. An old blanket covered the window, nailed to the plaster. No sounds came from anywhere, not from inside or outside. She was in a cabin or farmhouse away from civilization.

  She didn’t call out.

  She quietly tried to work the cuff off her wrist.

  It was too tight.

  The chain was secured with padlocks at both ends. The bed frame was thick, heavy metal. She was a hundred percent stuck. There was no way out.

  Cave had her.

  She was still dressed in the same clothes as last night. She hadn’t been roughed up or raped.

  Pee.

  That’s what she needed to do, not in ten seconds, now.

  Next to the bed was a bucket half filled with water.

  Was that her bathroom?

  Apparently so.

  Next to it was a roll of toilet paper.

  Next to the toilet paper was a jug of drinking water and a box of crackers.

  She listened intently for signs of Cave, got none, then used the bucket as quickly as she could, before he could interrupt her.

  She called out.

  “Cave.”

  No one answered.

  No sounds came.

  “Cave, are you here?”

  Silence.

  She dragged the bed to the window and pulled the blanket to the side. Outside was prairie topography. A dilapidated barn occupied a position fifty yards to the left. The boards were loose and many had fallen off. Whatever red paint once existed was now peeled and flaked. The base was choked with weeds. No discernible path or road led to it.

  She pulled the blanket off and tried to open the window.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  To many layers of paint kept it locked.

  She wrapped the blanket around her hand and punched the glass out, then chipped away at the jagged ends. A cool morning breeze entered the room.

  Not a single sound filtered in from the outside world.

  She pulled the bed farther to the window, getting the end of the chain directly under it. Then she climbed out and dropped to the ground. Thre
e feet, that’s how far she could extend from the side of the house. That didn’t get her to where she could see around either corner. The only visible universe was more prairie.

  She called out.

  No one answered.

  Wherever she was, it was remote.

  Cave could make her scream as loud as he wanted. The end of her voice wouldn’t come within a mile of a human ear.

  Suddenly she heard a car, very distant but heading her way.

  Cave was coming back.

  She tugged wildly at the chain.

  The shackle cut into her wrist.

  The skin broke.

  Blood dripped out.

  She pulled harder.

  79

  Day Five

  July 22

  Friday Noon

  By most talk the Blue Ricochet Eatery & Pub on Walnut was more worthy of the pub part of its namesake than the other part. The lights were dim, the waitresses wore little schoolgirl outfits and the male patrons didn’t complain. Pantage wandered in there on a drunken bar-hopping night three months ago and ended up leaving with the drummer of a band she’d never heard of. It wasn’t until the next day that she learned the band had played at Red Rocks earlier in the evening.

  She opened the front door and stepped inside at 12:05.

  The interior was a cave but she knew the layout and headed for the restroom, which was almost as dark as the rest of the place. The lock for the door was broken so she held it shut with her foot as she did what she came to do.

  That was better.

  She was a human again.

  She checked her face in the mirror and fluffed her hair.

  This was it.

  It was time to meet the enemy.

  With adjusted eyes she spotted Renn-Jaa in a dim corner booth sitting across from a blond.

  As she walked over things got bad.

  She hoped the blond wouldn’t be as attractive as her law firm bio photo.

  In fact it was the opposite.

  She slid in next to her, gave her a peck on the cheek and said, “We finally meet. I’m Pantage Phair.”

  Kelly studied her.

  “Kelly Ravenfield,” she said. “I was hoping you’d be ugly.”

  “Back at you.”

  “Black hair, blond hair,” Kelly said. “Teffinger has a real yin-yang thing going on, doesn’t he?”

  “So it seems.” Pantage spotted a penny sitting on the edge of the table and picked it up. “You want to flip for him?”

  Kelly smiled.

  “I can see what he sees in you,” she said. “So what’s this mysterious meeting about? Why am I here? Are you going to drag me out into the alley to settle things with a good old fashioned cat fight?”

  “Nothing that dramatic.”

  They ordered salads, got informed by a ponytailed waitress with a full-sleeve tattoo that they “might want to avoid the produce today,” and changed to soup.

  “That comes from a can, right?” Renn-Jaa said. “It’s not mixed up in a 55-gallon drum in the back or anything, is it?”

  No.

  It wasn’t.

  “Okay then, the soup.”

  Pantage explained why they were here, namely she got picked up by a gladiator at the Tequila Rose on Friday night, the club’s videotapes showed he had been stalking her, so she and Renn-Jaa had broken into his loft to see if they could find anything.

  “That was a risky move,” Kelly said.

  “Stupid is more like it,” Pantage said. “Anyway, we downloaded his laptop onto a flash drive last night. It turns out he’s taken a hundred or more pictures of me all over town, dating back to at least two weeks prior to Friday night.”

  Kelly put a serious expression on her face.

  “That’s Van Gogh’s MO.”

  “Precisely,” Pantage said. “I need to get the flash drive to Teffinger without being implicated in any type of criminal activity. Me and Renn-Jaa are hiring you as our attorney.”

  “There needs to be a reason,” Kelly said.

  Pantage nodded.

  “We know that,” she said. “The reason is this. We’re going to give the flash drive to you and it comes with the request for a legal opinion which is, Was it okay to break into the gladiator’s loft and download the information contained on that flash drive, or did we commit an illegal act?”

  Kelly smiled.

  “I think I could probably answer that for you, given enough time to do the research.”

  “I thought you could,” Pantage said. “Now, if it turns out that Teffinger somehow ends up with the flash drive off the record, then that’s what happens. Our hope is that after he knows what he can find, he’ll think of a way to get a legitimate search warrant and then inadvertently stumble on the laptop. Don’t mention our names to Teffinger though.”

  “He’ll know.”

  “We don’t care if he figures it out,” she said. “What we care about is the fact that legally we have a confidential communication taking place here, by which I mean it’s fully within the attorney-client privilege, by which I mean no one loses their license.”

  Kelly nodded.

  “Devious,” she said. “Beauty and brains. I think I may be in trouble.”

  “You’ll take the case?”

  “Of course. Did you bring the flash drive with you?”

  “Yes; and a retainer. Is ten dollars enough?”

  “That sounds fair.”

  Pantage looked around for her purse.

  It wasn’t on the table.

  It wasn’t on the seat next to her.

  Then she remembered.

  She set it on the back of the toilet when she was in there ten minutes ago.

  She headed for the restroom with a terrible feeling in her gut. When she got there the feeling exploded into something much worse.

  The purse wasn’t there.

  It was gone.

  80

  Day Five

  July 22

  Friday Morning

  The Ink Box was sandwiched between a gay video arcade and a medical-marijuana joint in a seedy stretch of Broadway of the south edge of the city. Teffinger parked on a side street, made double sure the doors were locked and headed over.

  Inside with her feet propped up on a desk was an attractive woman in her early twenties, heavily pierced and inked, with raven punk hair, wearing a short white tank and low-riding jeans, reading a magazine.

  “You’re Angel,” Teffinger said.

  She nodded and said, “You’re not what I expected.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “What’d you expect?”

  “I don’t know but not you,” she said.

  Residual pot hung in the air. Hip-hop spilled out of a black Bose radio on the desk. “I have that same exact radio in my bedroom, except mine’s white,” Teffinger said.

  “Small world.”

  “Mine doesn’t get that station though.”

  “Next time you come bring it with you and I’ll fix it for you.”

  “That’d be nice.”

  She ran her eyes up and down his frame.

  “You’re what we call a clean canvas,” she said. “We should dirty you up before you leave.”

  “You think?”

  She nodded.

  “Can I show you something?”

  “Sure.”

  She stood up, pulled the tank over her head with a sexy slither, and tossed it on the desk. Perky attributes emerged, as good as Teffinger had ever seen. The woman shook them.

  “See this right here?”

  She pointed to a tattoo on her left breast.

  It was a scorpion.

  The tail looked exactly like the tail on the man who was stalking Pantage yesterday.

  She took Teffinger’s hand and put it on her breast. “Go ahead and touch it,” she said. “It doesn’t bite.”

  He squeezed.

  “Nice.”

  She sat on the desk and dangled her feet.

  �
��I dance down at B.T.s,” she said. “A guy came in one night, saw this bad boy right here and asked me where I got it. He wanted one just like it on his arm. Two days later he showed up and I inked it on him.”

  “Did you find the records on him yet?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m still looking,” she said. “This was two years ago. We don’t do paper anymore, everything’s on the computer. We back up onto flash drives but to be honest we’re not very good at labeling them.” She pulled the top drawer of the desk out and pointed to eight or ten sticks. “I’ve gone through three of them so far with no luck. You want me to keep going?”

  Yes.

  He did.

  “I’m going to lock the front door,” she said. “Otherwise there will be a hundred potheads from next door barging in here looking for a lap dance.”

  “You give lap dances here?”

  “Yeah but don’t spread it around,” she said. “Twenty dollars. I’m going to give you a free one after we find the information you want.”

  It took twenty minutes, twenty topless minutes, but the time was worth it.

  The guy’s name was Jack Plant.

  His address was over near Washington Park.

  Teffinger folded a printout of the invoice and shoved it in his back pocket.

  Angel put her arms around his neck and rubbed her chest against him.

  “Time for that lap dance, cowboy.”

  “I’d like to but—”

  She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards a door that led into a back room.

  He stopped, pulled out his wallet and gave her two fifties. “That’s for the work you missed while you were taking care of me. I’ll get that lap dance from you down at B.T.s some night.”

  “You go there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I work Friday and Saturday nights.”

  “I’ll hunt you down.”

  “I’ll bet you will.”

  81

  Day Five

  July 22

  Friday Morning

  Yardley screamed for help as the drone of the approaching car got louder. No voices responded, no faces magically appeared, nothing sane happened. Her initial thought was to stay outside and make Cave kill her there, in hopes that someone was off on a distant ridge with a pair of binoculars. Then she pictured Cave dragging her in through the window over the jagged glass and tearing her flesh to shreds. She climbed in, left the bed where it was and cowered under it.