Bad Client (Nick Teffinger Thriller)

by Jagger, R. J.

  Noise.

  Noise.

  Noise.

  After the meeting that never ended, she pointed the Porsche north on I-25 and spent the rest of the day crisscrossing back and forth through farmland, being told that no one knew anything about a driver of a van with black glasses, and watching her business card get stuffed into the pocket of one gas station attendant after another.

  THAT EVENING SHE SWUNG BY STEPHEN’S HOUSE, spread the map of Denver out on the granite countertop in his kitchen, and sipped a glass of wine while she showed him the location of the phone calls and the farmland areas she’d been working for the last couple of days. He had the flat-panel TV in the adjacent family room turned to a Rockies game, with the sound low but not off.

  When she first started talking he concentrated more on the game but then increasing focused on her story. He wore his hair loose instead of in the ponytail and kept pushing it out of his face.

  He paced as she talked, not saying a word but in heavy thought.

  Then he cut her off.

  “You’ve turned yourself into a target,” he said.

  “Not really,” she said. “If someone from a gas station sees him and calls me, he won’t know anything about it. But if someone knows him, and gives him my card and says I’ve been snooping around asking about him, I’ll only be a person of interest. I’m hoping enough of an interest for him to call me.”

  Stephen drained the rest of his wine and looked like he was about to throw the glass against the wall. Instead he softly and deliberately set it on the counter.

  “You underestimate this guy,” he said. “And I can’t let you do that. That’s why I’m going to have to pull you off the case.”

  The words shocked her.

  “What?”

  “It’s for your own good,” he said. “I can’t have your blood on my hands. We agreed upfront that you’d keep a low profile. You went way past that line, so it’s over.”

  She shook her head.

  “No, I can’t stop now. I’m too close.”

  “I’m serious, you’re off the case.”

  She started to protest but he held his hand up in a “Stop!” motion. He was not only serious but wasn’t going to change his mind. “Now we need to get you some protection,” he said. “I’d let you stay here but it won’t look so dandy if another woman moves in two months after my wife disappears.”

  She stood up and scowled at him.

  “You know what? Screw you, Stephen.”

  SHE BURNED RUBBER LEAVING HIS DRIVEWAY and then screeched past the too-perfect houses. Before she got to the gate she called him with her cell phone. When he answered she said, “If you think I’m off this case you’re living in fantasyland.”

  Then she hung up.

  Chapter Fifty

  Day Eight - July 18

  Tuesday Morning

  _____________

  WICKERFIELD STAYED IN THE TREES all night, shivering his ass off and slipping in and out of a fitful sleep. By morning no one had come back to the house and he was getting more and more convinced that the break-in was the work of kids. So he went back in, verified that the place was still as he left it, kicked off his shoes, and let his body fall into the middle of the bed.

  He woke around noon, still groggy but feeling a hundred percent better. He showered, ate cereal topped with strawberries, and was in the study answering e-mails and working on his third cup of coffee when the phone rang.

  He picked it up in a good mood.

  The rock star was returning.

  “Yo,” he said.

  “Yo,” a man’s voice said. “That’s cute.”

  He didn’t recognize the caller.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s the boogieman in your closet, asshole,” the man said. “Listen carefully because you’re going to live or die depending on what you say in the next two minutes. First of all, I know you’re the person terrorizing Denver, so let’s just get that out in the open right off the bat.”

  “Who . . .”

  “Shut up and listen!” the man said. “Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass if you kill every stinking bitch in the city. But here’s what you’re going to do to get me off your ass. There’s a woman called Janelle Parker. Get a pen and write her name down.”

  Wickerfield did, with a shaking hand.

  “She’s in the Denver white pages, the only Janelle Parker there, and lives near Wash Park. She’s twenty-eight, a photographer, cute too. You’re going to like her. You be damn sure that she’s your victim when you pay your next little visit this weekend. Take her out on Friday, Saturday or Sunday. I don’t care which, but one of them. Now, here’s the part of the deal you can’t refuse. After you do that, you’re never going to hear from me again. You have my word on that. But if you don’t, then I’m going to place a little call to Nick Teffinger. He’ll get a nice picture of you too, one of the ones I took from your house yesterday. So my advice to you is don’t screw up.”

  The line went dead.

  Wickerfield threw the pen. It flew across the room and smashed into the flat-panel TV.

  “Damn it!”

  He pulled out the phone book and frantically turned to the P’s. There she was.

  Janelle Parker, the only one there, just like the guy said.

  “Okay, think!” he told himself. Do it? Or just get the hell out of Dodge, right this second, while the getting is good?

  HE GRABBED HIS WALLET AND RAN to the Camry, knowing it was better to be anywhere in the universe right now other than here. He couldn’t have been more than a mile down the road when a cop came from the other direction. He instinctively looked at his speed and was shocked to find it was eighty.

  A look in his rearview mirror confirmed that the cop was turning around with the light bar flashing.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Day Eight - July 18

  Tuesday Afternoon

  _____________

  CANYON ROAD IN SANTA FE IS A NARROW LANE that twists and picks its way among adobe structures, rich green trees and bright flowers. In most places it narrows so much that the traffic runs only one direction. Teffinger found a parking spot for the 4Runner on a side street and he and Sydney walked back to where the action was.

  He knew the place well.

  At one time it was the place for artists to live, the colony. The artists sold their work directly out of their studios. The road developed an increasing reputation as a place to buy quality art at starving-artists’ prices. The buyers came, the display areas increased in size and the houses eventually turned into full-fledged galleries. Now it was one of the best places in the western United States to buy high quality art.

  About halfway up the road they came to the gallery they were looking for. It had two large windows, one on each side of the front door. Each held a couple of paintings. In the right window there were two large abstracts, contemporary pieces, with thick paint, bright colors, framed in bright white wood, totally in-your-face.

  They did nothing for Teffinger, unless cringing counted.

  But in the left window there were two southwest landscapes, laid loosely with an impressionistic brush, with colors true to life and considerable attention paid to the interplay of dark and light.

  “I could live with that,” Teffinger said, nodding.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Sydney agreed.

  The work inside was equally impressive. Sydney moved around the gallery from one piece to the next, as if they were M&Ms and she couldn’t eat them fast enough. There were sculptures too: a horse-drawn wagon falling over a cliff, an Indian warrior deflecting an enraged eagle, a nude woman carrying a water jug on her right shoulder.

  Teffinger was drawn to one painting in particular, an exciting southwest landscape filled with brush and gullies and foothills and mountains, all under threat of a impending afternoon storm.

  “I like it,” Sydney said.

  Teffinger nodded and twisted the price tag so he could read it: $3,500; reason
able enough, given the quality.

  AN ELEGANTLY DRESSED WOMAN in her twenties sat behind a contemporary desk working a computer, ready to answer questions if they had any, but otherwise content to leave them alone. She had short, stylish blond hair and wore lots of turquoise jewelry.

  Teffinger walked over to her and said, “You’re Jacquelyn Davis-Wade.” The woman looked at him and seemed drawn to his eyes. “One’s blue and one’s green,” Teffinger offered. “Some kind of genetic mutation, I imagine.”

  “I’ve never seen that before,” she said. “From an artistic point of view, it’s sort of cool. So who are you and how do you know my name?”

  “We’re detectives from Denver,” he said. “Nick Teffinger and Sydney Heatherwood. You were attacked last year. We believe that the man who assaulted you is doing the same thing up in Denver. We’re hoping we could talk to you and maybe get some information to help us.”

  She fidgeted.

  “How’d you find out about me?”

  “An FBI profiler by the name of Dr. Leigh Sandt is helping us out and found out about you through some database research,” he said. “The man in Denver is playing a dice game with his victims, then suffocating them with a plastic bag if they lose. From what we understand, that’s pretty much what happened to you.”

  She nodded.

  “The bastard.”

  Teffinger sat down on the edge of her desk. “We’ve already met with Detective Harrison. We’ve reviewed the file and he showed us your statements,” he said. “But for me, there’s no substitute for hearing the story firsthand. I know it’s painful, dredging up all these old memories, but we need to catch this guy.”

  “Is this the guy on CNN? The one who sends the letters?”

  “It is.”

  “I’ve been following that,” she said. “There’s nothing in the news about dice and plastic bags.”

  Teffinger agreed.

  It was recently discovered information.

  They were trying to keep it quiet.

  She nodded, convinced.

  “Okay,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

  Teffinger, as usual, wanted to know everything, every single last little detail. So he let her tell the story in her own words first, then brought her back to the beginning and this time asked a hundred and one questions.

  It happened in the gallery, shortly after closing. The man hid in the back room and grabbed her from behind, knocking off her glasses. He wore a ski mask. He tied her to a chair and then draped a garbage bag over her shoulder. He said they were going to play a little game, she was going to choose a number and he was going to roll the dice. If she didn’t choose right then he’d wrap the bag around her head.

  “He actually rolled the dice,” she said. “That’s when the cleaning people opened the front door—they have the keys—and he bolted out the back.”

  “So you never saw his face?” Teffinger asked, just to be absolutely sure.

  “No, but I’ll never forget his voice.”

  Interesting.

  Very interesting.

  That little fact hadn’t been in her prior statement.

  He smiled and then hugged her around the shoulders.

  “Jacquelyn Davis-Wade, you done good.”

  “Get me a voice to listen to,” she said. “I’ll tell you if it’s him or not.”

  BY THE TIME THEY WRAPPED UP, it was way too late to head back to Denver. Sydney called a number of hotels and soon discovered that Santa Fe in July is pretty much a reserved town, unless you wanted to stay at a dive. The best she could find in any place decent was one room, a last minute cancellation.

  “Two beds or one?” Teffinger asked.

  “Two.”

  He shrugged.

  “If we do it, we can’t tell anyone,” he said. “HR would have a heart attack.”

  She cocked her head. “Okay, but don’t even think about bouncing a quarter off my ass.”

  He raked his hair back.

  “Rain told you that I told her about that?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Women talk, caveman. Get a clue.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Day Nine - July 19

  Wednesday Morning

  _____________

  JACKIE WAS ASLEEP when someone rolled her over and straddled her. She opened her eyes. The room was still dark but with enough light to make out Tarzan, with his long blond hair and rugged jungle looks. At first she couldn’t quite place him. Then she remembered last night, bar hopping, all wound up and pissed at Stepper for trying to take her off the case. She remembered walking up to Tarzan, a complete stranger, and whispering in his ear.

  She recalled the incredible passionate sex.

  “Morning, glory,” he said.

  “Morning, yourself,” she said, stretching her arms above her head.

  “You wanted me to wake you at six-thirty,” he said.

  That was true.

  She remembered now. It was a workday and she had piles of neglected papers on her desk.

  “I made some coffee,” he added.

  “Well aren’t you the nice one?” She pulled his head down and kissed him. This time, unlike last night, he took his time with her, building her up deliberately and skillfully until she couldn’t stand it anymore.

  THE FIRST THING SHE DID when she got to the office was rip Stepper’s retainer check into tiny little pieces and stick them in an envelope. Then, to make a statement, she called a courier service to have the envelope hand-delivered to Stephen’s office. She’d already earned a good portion of the retainer but screw it.

  She didn’t want his money.

  As far as dropping the case, though, that wasn’t going to happen. She started the job and she’d finish it, with or without him. If he didn’t have the balls to save his own ass then he at least ought to be grateful that she did.

  She was pounding out a trial brief for Judge Anderson, to bring him up to speed on the latest developments in sexual harassment, all of which favored her client, when the phone rang.

  “Jackie Jax,” she said.

  “Ms. Jax, this is Bob from the gas station.”

  She recognized him by the scratch in his voice and pulled up an image of a middle-aged man who smelled like smoke and looked as if he knew his way around cow dung.

  “Bob, I remember you,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You have those beautiful blue eyes. So what’s up?”

  Bob told her. A man came in for gas this morning, driving a van. He didn’t wear glasses, but Bob told him anyway that a lawyer from Denver was trying to find someone in the area who drove a van and wore black glasses. The man said he sometimes wore sunglasses and maybe the lawyer was looking for him. So Bob gave him her card and the man said he’d give her a call.

  “If you gave him my card, how’d you know my phone number?” Jackie asked.

  “I remembered your name and that you’re a lawyer. You’re in the phone book,” he said.

  “Yes I am,” she said. “Thanks. I’m probably going to be in the area this afternoon. If I am, I’ll stop by and say hi.”

  AN HOUR LATER SHE WAS HEADING FOR THE DOOR when it opened and Stepper walked in holding the envelope.

  “Got your package,” he said. “I pity the guy who eventually marries you.”

  She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or smack him. So instead, she told him about the phone call from Bob. “I’m heading out there, right now.”

  “What for?”

  “To drive around the area and look for a van.”

  “That seems like a long shot, even if you were still on the case.”

  She cocked her head. “Well if you have any short shots I’ll be glad to take them.”

  Stephen looked at her, as if pondering a decision.

  “You’re really not going to drop this, are you?”

  She shook her head. “Apparently not.”

  He studied her. “You’ve always been
too damn cocky for your own good.”

  “Look,” she said, “since I’m not going to drop the case in any event, why don’t you get on your own team and help me out. I’ve got a gut feeling that this guy’s shadowed you at one time or another and that you might recognize his face if you saw it again. So come with me, right now. If we find a van and the driver seems like someone you’ve seen, then bingo, we got him. It’s that simple.”

  He studied her.

  “God you’re a stubborn thing,” he said.

  She grabbed his tie and pulled him towards the door.

  “You have no idea.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Day Nine - July 19

  Wednesday

  _____________

  THE COPS SHOWED UP MID-MORNING and checked in with Wickerfield to let him know they were going to be conducting additional investigation out in the field. He took the opportunity to hand them the speeding ticket he got yesterday—eighty in a forty-five. They apologized and agreed to take care of it in appreciation for all the cooperation he was giving. Then they spent an hour in the field. He sensed that they were just trying to stay in motion because they’d run out of anything solid to do. Either that or they were trying to rattle him. Either way, he watched them with the binoculars just to be sure that they didn’t get too excited about anything.

  They didn’t.

  When they left he worked the web to see what he could find out about Janelle Parker, who may or may not be his next victim. He wasn’t sure yet whether he would actually yield to the blackmail scheme or just call everything quits and get out of the country, maybe even as early as tonight. But it couldn’t hurt to scope the woman out.

  Maybe he’d learn something to tip the scales one way or the other.

  She turned out to be a photographer and, in fact, recently came out with her first book, titled Denver After Dark. She had a nice author website that showed several photos from the book as well as the upcoming one, titled Secrets of the Desert. According to the Tour Information page of her website, she was scheduled for a book signing at the Ragged Page Bookstore in Cherry Creek this evening at 7:30, and another one in the LoDo branch on Friday.