by R. J. Jagger
Walking the rest of the way, she had one thought and one thought only, namely that the only person in the world who knew Taylor Lee’s whereabouts was dead.
Taylor was in the process of rotting to death.
That was last night.
Now it was morning.
She got dressed, headed to Larimer Street and knocked on the office door of a man she didn’t personally know but who was reputed to be the best private investigator in Denver.
A man named Bryson Wilde.
No one answered.
She tried the knob.
It was locked.
She knocked again, “Anyone home?”
Silence.
She left and headed down the street for breakfast. When she returned, the door was unlocked. She stuck her head inside and saw a man making coffee. He had a solid physique, evident even under a grey suit, with black wingtips down below and thick blond hair up top, combed straight back. His eyes were green. His face was tanned and belonged on the cover of a magazine.
“Are you Bryson Wilde?”
“Yes.”
“I really hope you can help me,” she said. “I have something desperate going on.”
Wilde looked like he was about to turn her away.
Instead he said, “Do you want some coffee?”
Yes.
She did.
She couldn’t pay him up front.
She’d have to save up.
He didn't care.
He was more interested in the coffee.
She was just about to explain the situation when she had a question. “If I tell you things, do you keep them confidential?”
Yes.
He did.
“How do I know?”
He shrugged.
“You know because I just told you,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”
She exhaled.
“A friend of mine was abducted,” she said. “She was taken to a dark place and handcuffed. A man was keeping her there; he was doing it to force me to do something. I ended up killing him. That’s why I’m coming to you instead of the police. It was mostly self-defense, but I’m a lawyer and really don’t want it on my record.”
“You’re a lawyer?”
She nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“Jina Savannah,” she said. “I need you to find her before she dies. I figure you can do that as well as the police.”
Wilde lit a pack of matches and studied her through the flames.
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“Taylor Lee.” She pulled a photo from her purse and pushed it across the desk. “That’s her.”
105
Day Four
July 18
Friday Morning
Wilde expected the photo to show the face of a stranger. The woman was familiar. He’d seen her somewhere before.
“She’s pretty,” he said.
“Yes.”
Pretty was actually too light a word. Men would crawl through a field of broken glass just to smell her neck, that’s the kind of woman she was.
Shinny brown hair, styled with bangs like Betty Page.
Lips as hot as Havana asphalt.
Green eyes.
Mid-twenties.
Expensive on every level.
Suddenly he realized who it was.
She was Neva—the woman who saw Night Neveraux leaving Grace Somerfield’s house Saturday night. She was Wilde’s client, with brown hair now instead of strawberry. He must have had a look on his face because Jina asked, “Is everything okay?”
He cocked his head.
“Is her name Neva?”
“No, it’s Taylor, Taylor Lee.”
“Does she go by the nickname Neva?”
“No, why?”
Wilde almost blurted out, She’s a client of mine. She told me her name was Neva. He also remembered promising her 100 percent confidentiality.
“Sorry,” he said. “She looks like someone I know. So, her name’s Taylor Lee.”
“Right.”
“Tell me everything you know about where she was being kept.”
The woman recanted that she was taken to the place last night and wore a blindfold the whole time, which wasn’t taken off until she was inside.
“Describe the inside.”
Jina wrinkled her face.
“It was pitch-black,” she said. “He shined a flashlight on Taylor. That’s all I really remember seeing, her face lit up with that flashlight. It was so eerie and surreal.”
“What else do you remember?”
“Nothing.”
“Think.”
She did, then shook her head.
“Nothing.”
Wilde pressed her for details, asking specific questions—how far the drive was, whether it was straight or twisty, whether she heard other cars, how far was it from the trunk of the car to where Taylor was being held, whether she heard any animals or people or cars or sounds, et cetera.
She remembered a few things but not many.
“Let me think about it.”
“Her time’s running out.”
“I understand. Give me a number where I can call you later.”
She did.
Then left.
From the window, Wilde watched her walk down Larimer Street and disappear around a corner.
He was positive that Taylor Lee and Neva were the same person. Maybe Neva was wearing a strawberry wig when she came to see him. Maybe she was an actual strawberry at that moment and dyed it brunette afterwards.
He didn’t know.
It didn’t matter.
The two women were the same, that’s what mattered.
Neva said she was a lesbian.
Was Jina Savannah her lover?
Was she the one Neva was trying to protect?
Suddenly the door opened. Alabama busted in, ran to the rack, grabbed Wilde’s hat and tossed it to him.
“Come on, we got to get out of here.”
“Where have you—”
“Not now,” she said. “There’s an arrest warrant out on Night Neveraux for the murder of Grace Somerfield. There’s another one out on you for aiding and abetting her after the fact.”
“Raven.”
“Right, Raven,” Alabama said. “Hurry up.”
Wilde grabbed his gun and a handful of matchbooks, then put his hat on. They ran down the hall towards the back of the building as heavy footsteps came up the stairs from the street.
106
Day Four
July 18
Friday Morning
Zongying took Durivage downstairs and retrieved a cylindrical tube from behind a stack of boxes under the stairs. She carefully pulled out an old canvas and gently unrolled it on a wooden bench. It was clearly in Renoir style and had an ancient aura to it.
“How do you know it’s original?” Durivage asked.
“Jessica Dent authenticated it.”
Durivage raised an eyebrow.
“How’d she do that?”
“That’s what she did,” Zongying said. “She had degrees in both art and history, neither of which were worth much until she met a woman in the black market.”
“How’d you get a hold of it?”
She shrugged.
“Jessica was the cautious type,” she said. “She had it in her possession to authenticate and appraise it. It was an important piece and she was nervous having it at her place. On occasion, she’d used me and another friend—a woman named Constance Black—to hold onto things for her. I happened to have it at my house when she got taken by that madman and ended up getting her stomached carved on.”
Durivage pictured it and shook his head.
“You said before you thought a cop did that to her,” he said.
“Right.”
“You told me the name of the guy in charge.”
“Warner Raven.”
Right.
Warner Raven.
Durivage
scratched his head.
“Who gave Jessica the painting to authenticate?”
“I don’t know.”
“He never came looking for it?”
“I’m sure he did,” Zongying said. “He didn’t know anything about me, though.”
“Interesting.”
Durivage wrinkled his face.
“Maybe Raven’s the one who gave it to her,” Durivage said.
Zongying laughed.
“He couldn’t afford a painting like this,” she said.
“Maybe he didn’t buy it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Raven’s a homicide detective,” Durivage said. “Maybe he stumbled across it when he searched a house—maybe a victim’s house, or maybe even a suspect’s house. Maybe he decided to stick it in the trunk of his car when no one was looking.”
Zongying tilted her head.
“That’s actually possible.”
“Play it out,” Durivage said. “He has the painting but isn’t sure if it’s real or how much it’s worth. Somehow, he learns that Jessica’s in the business. He gives it to her for review. She tells him it’s authentic but is still working on how much it’s worth. In the meantime, she gives it to you.”
“Okay, go on.”
“Now that he knows it’s authentic, he begins to worry about Jessica being a loose end, a loose end that lives in the same town as him, to be exact,” he said. “He gets visions of her blackmailing him down the road. So he kills her and makes it look like a madman did it, someone from his past. The only problem is, when he goes to her place to get the painting back, it’s gone.”
“Wow.”
“Right, wow.”
107
Day Four
July 18
Friday Morning
Jina was at her office when the phone rang and a voice that she never expected to hear again came through, the voice of Blanche Twister, the university professor.
“I had a strange thought last night,” she said.
Jina didn’t care.
She was still half convinced that Twister was the woman in the cab, the person pulling the strings of the first “client” who tried to trick her into giving up the scroll.
“Look—”
“Just hear me out,” Twister said. “The scroll you have doesn’t identify the starting points. We talked about the possibility that maybe there was a second scroll, one that had only the starting points but nothing else. In effect, you had to have both scrolls to locate the treasures.”
Right.
Jina remembered the theory.
“’I’ve come up with another thought,” Twister said. “Maybe there is no second scroll. Maybe the starting points were very prominent landmarks at the time. Maybe they were the kind of things that couldn't be forgotten.”
Jina exhaled.
“Like what?”
“Well, at that point in history, there were a number of temples, forts and pyramids along the northern Nile,” Twister said. “Maybe they were used as the starting points. Maybe the first five prominent structures that they came to, they used the western most point of the structure, or something like that, as the starting point.”
Jina ran her fingers through her hair.
She didn’t care right now.
Her thoughts were on Taylor, who was somewhere in a dark place dying.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Well, I just thought I’d mention it.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“I wasn’t the woman in the cab,” Twister added.
“Okay.”
108
Day Four
July 18
Friday Morning
Friday.
This was it.
This was the day Nicole would die.
To be even more exact, this was the day Nicole would die at the hands of Warner Raven. It was also the day she’d get words carved into her stomach. Wilde was ninety-five percent sure of Raven’s guilt last night. The arrest warrant this morning brought his certainty up to a hundred. It was nothing more than a vehicle to get Wilde off the streets even though, technically, it was justified.
Alabama’s story about last night further confirmed it.
She hid on the floorboard in the back seat of Raven’s car, taking every perceivable caution to not get spotted by Raven or his strange night partner, Johnny Pants, which wasn’t easy given that there was almost no talking. They ended up in a pitch-black railroad yard northwest of the city. There the men got out and slipped into the darkness. Alabama tried to follow but got separated. After an hour, she got the hell out of there and spent a long time walking before she came to a public phone where she could call a cab. When she got back to Wilde’s place, he wasn’t home. She got up at sunrise, left a note on the refrigerator door, and then headed to the office to see if he was there.
He wasn’t.
She went out for breakfast.
When she came back, he was there.
Now they were on the run. They rented a car in Alabama’s name and headed for the railroad yard Alabama got driven to last night. “Nicole’s there somewhere,” Wilde said. “After I confirm it, I’m going to kill Raven with my bare hands. Same thing for his little asshole partner, Johnny Pants.”
“I wonder what Pants’ role is in all this.”
“I don’t know but he’s definitely in it throat deep,” Wilde said. “They’ll come for Nicole tonight. I’ll be waiting for them.”
“Carve something in Raven’s stomach,” Alabama said. “Make it look like the madman did it.”
Wilde nodded.
Good idea.
Very good idea.
They were heading farther and farther out of the city.
Wilde told Alabama about the visit from Jina Savannah this morning, including the fact that her missing friend, Taylor Lee, was actually Neva.
“I don’t get what’s going on,” he said.
“Something.”
“You’ve got that right.” A beat then, “Now that you got me thinking about this railroad yard, I’m starting to wonder if Taylor Lee is being kept in a boxcar.”
“You think?”
He shrugged.
“It’s possible,” he said. “Jina got thrust over the guy’s shoulders for a short climb up some stairs or a ladder before they entered the room where Taylor was being held. A boxcar would have a ladder. Also, Jina remembered the sound of a rolling steel door.”
Alabama wrinkled her forehead.
“You’re thinking,” Wilde said.
Yes.
She was.
“I don’t think you should kill Raven,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Once you get that dirty, there’s no way to ever get clean again.”
Wilde wasn’t impressed.
“I’ve killed before.”
“That was the war,” Alabama said. “This is different.”
“Is it?”
109
Day Four
July 18
Friday Morning
The railroad yard was a graveyard of decommissioned gondolas, flatbeds and boxcars waiting to be parted out or cut for scrap. Most of the cars—there were hundreds of them—looked to be thirty, forty or fifty years old, long past their useful lives.
Rust was the name of the game.
Wilde’s heart raced.
“Nicole’s here somewhere.”
They made a quick pass on foot up and down the rails, calling out Nicole’s name but getting no response. The sun beat down. The heavy yard metal and gravel soaked it up and shot it straight into Wilde’s pores.
“Hot,” he said, wiping his forehead.
Alabama grunted.
They started at the far end and began to go through the cars one at a time. Lots of the doors were rusted shut and had to be pried open with a crowbar.
One after another, they searched.
So far there was no Nicole, no smell of fresh urine, no spent food conta
iners or other signs that someone had been held in captivity.
Wilde’s hands were covered with rust and grease.
An unhealthy portion of that had migrated to his face.
He’d never been so dirty or sweaty.
His suit was ruined.
Pigeon droppings were everywhere.
So were mice, rats and lizards.
“Keep a lookout for rattlesnakes,” he told Alabama.
Hour after hour, they searched.
Then they ran out of cars.
Wilde sat down on the shady side of a gondola and leaned against the wheel.
“She’s got to be here,” he said. “How did we miss her?”
Alabama sat next to him.
“We didn’t miss her. She’s not here.”
“Then what was Raven doing here last night?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was just scoping the place out to move her here tonight.”
Wilde bowed his head in his hand.
“I’d give everything I own for a glass of ice water. We should have stopped somewhere and got supplies.”
“We didn’t know it would take this long.”
True, but still—
He looked to the left and spotted a solitary boxcar off by itself, three or four hundred yards down a side rail. It looked slightly crooked as if it had derailed and then got abandoned in place.
He stood up.
“Come on. One more.”
Alabama frowned at how far it was.
“You got to be kidding.”
He headed that way.
“If I was going to stash Nicole somewhere, that’s where I’d do it.”
When they got there, Wilde saw something interesting, namely a fresh padlock on the door.
He shot it off.
Muffled sounds came from inside.
Wilde slid the door open.
Inside he found Taylor Lee slumped on the floor with her wrists handcuffed over her head. He pulled a gag out of her mouth and she gasped for air.
She had no food or water.
The temperature had to be a hundred and ten.
She was alive but not by much.
Alabama hugged her and told her she was safe now while Wilde inspected the handcuffs. “I’m going to have to shoot these off,” he said. “We’ll get a ricochet and not necessarily a good one. Alabama, you wait outside.”
