Sudden Guilt (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  “I said, are you free today?” Ta’Veya repeated.

  “Look,” he said. “I’m going to hate myself later for saying this, but I got to be honest with you. I met someone.”

  “You met someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?” she asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” Her voice sounded as if she couldn’t believe it.

  “Right.”

  “And now I’m out?” she asked.

  “I thought you blew me off, and then I ended up meeting someone.”

  “Well I didn’t,” she said.

  “I know that now.”

  “How can you do that? I thought we were going somewhere,” she said. “I honestly believed we had a connection. I screwed you in the back of your truck, for crying out loud. I just don’t go around doing that with everybody, for your information.”

  “I know that,” he said.

  Silence.

  “So what do we do?” she asked. “I don’t want to lose you before I even have you.”

  He pondered it.

  “Teffinger,” she added, “I fell in love with you the minute I saw you. As corny as it sounds, I’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Just tell this other woman you had a good time and then let’s get back on track.”

  AN HOUR LATER HE CALLED JENA VELLONE at Channel 8. Most people along the front range knew her as the roving TV reporter, the charismatic blond with the bright green eyes who wasn’t afraid to get into the middle of the mess. Teffinger knew her from the old high school days in Fort Collins when she was the ticklish younger sister of his best friend, Matt Vellone.

  They caught up on things and then he got around to the reason for the call. “There’s a woman missing named Tracy Patterson,” he said. “I want to get her picture on the news and see if anyone has any information. Can you grease that for me?”

  “How soon do you need it?”

  “Let’s put it this way—are we done yet?”

  She chuckled.

  “Let me call you back in ten minutes.”

  “Thanks. I owe you one.”

  “Wrong,” she said. “You owe me one more.”

  He laughed.

  True.

  “As payment you need to take me out and get me drunk,” she said.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Day Seven—May 11

  Sunday Morning

  ______________

  TARZAN GOT UP EARLY SUNDAY MORNING anxious to hear from Del Rae. When she didn’t call for more than an hour he took off his shirt, traded his pants for a pair of shorts, and jogged down the railroad tracks with his cell phone in hand. After a half mile he picked up the pace, letting his lungs burn and his legs stretch, cranking out five-minute miles according to his best guess. He was twenty minutes into it, still headed out, when she called.

  He slowed to a walk and said, “Talk to me.”

  “I don’t have much time,” she said. “I’m out on a jog and the lawyer’s fixing breakfast.”

  “So how’d it go?”

  “Perfect,” she said.

  He slapped his hand on his leg.

  “Details,” he said.

  “Okay, in a nutshell, we tailed you to the hideout and then went in after you left,” she said. “The woman, whatever her name is, was unconscious on the bed. I see you already chopped her hair off.”

  Right.

  He had.

  “The lawyer’s all set to do it,” Del Rae said.

  She didn’t need to explain what it meant. She was talking about the lawyer stealing the woman from the hideaway, dumping her unconscious body in his wife’s car, and then bringing the wife to the hideaway.

  Where the lawyer would kill her.

  And the weirdo would get the blame.

  “When?”

  “Tonight,” she said. “He wants to steal the woman while she’s still alive. That’s part of the justification he’s using to go through with this—that he’s saving someone’s life. Instead of the woman dying, his wife does. The number of victims stays at one.”

  Tonight.

  “Perfect,” Aaron said.

  Del Rae paused. “Not totally perfect,” she said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “He’s got details he’s trying to work out.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, first of all,” she said, “he needs to be officially in Denver when it happens instead of out of town.”

  Aaron didn’t get it.

  That seemed like the opposite of what the guy should do.

  “His thought process goes like this,” Del Rae said. “He told his wife he was going out of town on business this weekend. She may have told that to other people. If he tells the police he was out of town when his wife disappears, he won’t have any plane tickets or concrete proof of business to back it up. The cops will take it for a phony alibi and zero in on him all the more. So he needs to somehow have an excuse to show back up in Denver this afternoon. Once he does that and is actually in town, the police won’t have any reason to ask where he was on Friday or Saturday. I have to agree with his reasoning, as strange as it is.”

  Aaron had no problem with it.

  In fact he admired the guy’s cunning.

  “Fine, let him be back,” he said. “That’s even better for us, actually.”

  “Yes it is.”

  A couple of magpies landed on the tracks ahead. Aaron picked up a chunk of gravel and threw it at them, missing by a mile but coming close enough to scare them into the sky. The dumb things flew about thirty yards and landed back on the tracks.

  What?

  They couldn’t tell he was headed that way?

  “There’s one more thing,” Del Rae added. “This one is a lot more serious. He wants to have a rock solid alibi when the wife disappears. So he wants to be somewhere public with lots of witnesses. He wants me to do the body exchange. He’ll still do the actual killing but wants me to do the exchange.”

  Aaron threw another rock at the magpies, hard this time.

  “No way,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “It’s way too risky,” he added. “I don’t know what kind of shape his wife is in, but we can’t have you dancing with her one-on-one. There’s a million ways that can go wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s going to have to do that part of it,” Aaron said. “Screw the alibi. You can be with him when he does it, and probably should be. That way he’ll get a better comfort level knowing you’re in it as deep as he is. But you can’t do it alone. Screw him.”

  She agreed.

  “There’s no compromising on that,” he emphasized. “Be sure you talk him out of it.”

  She paused.

  He felt it and asked, “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You liar. I can see your nose growing. What is it?”

  “I just hope it’s not a deal-breaker for him,” she said. “Insisting on an alibi.”

  “It won’t be,” he said. “When you get back from your jog give him the blowjob of the century. Keep him focused on the rewards.”

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER Aaron was back home, freshly showered and banging on the skins to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” thinking about the lawyer.

  The attorney better get off this alibi hang-up.

  This was going to end in either one of two ways.

  The lawyer would either kill his wife or Aaron would personally rip his head off one dark night and piss in the hole.

  Either way the lawyer was going down.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Day Seven—May 11

  Sunday Morning

  ______________

  TA’VEYA WAS NOWHERE IN THE HOTEL ROOM when Paige woke. She yawned, stretched, and realized that it was Sunday morning, meaning she had the whole day free, but also meaning that tomorrow kicked off another week. She pulled the curtains back and found the Nissan gone, hopefully on a coffee hunt.
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  The photographs of the two chained women sat on the table.

  Grim reminders.

  She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and studied the Polaroids as the shower warmed up.

  When she closed her eyes the women’s faces disappeared.

  Her face and Ta’Veya’s took their places.

  She shivered.

  She got the shower as hot as she could without melting her skin and stepped in. Ten minutes later she felt brand new. The clock said 8:12 a.m. Ta’Veya still hadn’t returned. Paige turned on the TV for background noise, booted up her Gateway laptop and logged on to the net.

  The plan was to search the local newspapers and try to figure out who the women in the pictures were. She typed in a variety of search phrases.

  Missing since.

  Last seen.

  Abducted.

  Young woman.

  Long brown hair.

  None of the searches brought any luck. Maybe she’d have no choice other than to physically go to a library, get the actual newspapers in hand, and leaf through them page by page, starting with today’s and heading back one day at a time.

  AN HOUR LATER SHE STILL HADN’T HAD ANY LUCK, nor had Ta’Veya shown up, when something strange happened. A man’s face appeared on the TV. At first she thought it was a commercial because the guy had that totally sexy GQ look that could sell anything. But he turned out to be a Denver detective by the name of Nick Teffinger, trying to get information on the whereabouts of a missing woman named Tracy Patterson.

  Last seen on Friday night.

  A female’s face filled the screen, about the same age as Paige, maybe younger.

  Paige stopped breathing.

  It was one of the two women from the pictures.

  Anyone with information should call Detective Teffinger at the number on the bottom of the screen. Paige repeated the number out loud until she found a pencil and wrote it down. When Ta’Veya walked in two minutes later carrying coffee and donuts, Paige gave her the news right away.

  “Isn’t Teffinger the guy who came to my apartment? The one you got all hot about?”

  Ta’Veya nodded.

  “Now I see why,” Paige said. “I’m major jealous.”

  Ta’Veya frowned.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “He dumped me this morning.”

  “He did? Why?”

  “He met someone else,” she said.

  “What a jerk.”

  Ta’Veya shrugged. “It’s partly my fault. I was supposed to call him Friday night, after you and I were done scouting out Tarzan. When I didn’t, he thought I blew him off.”

  “Did you tell him you were busy getting shot?”

  “I don’t think the word shot came up, but I told him enough so he knew I was legit,” Ta’Veya said.

  “And?”

  “And he said he met this other woman and sort of let her know he was interested in developing something with her. He didn’t think it would be right to just yank the rug out from under her the very next day. And he said it wouldn’t be fair to anyone including me if he played me on the side,” Ta’Veya said. “The stupid thing is, now I like him even more than before.”

  Paige understood.

  Not many men would be strong enough to pass up mattress time with the likes of Ta’Veya.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know—something, though, I guarantee you that.”

  “What’s the other woman’s name?”

  “Rain.”

  “Rain?”

  “Right, as in thunder and lightning.”

  “Her parents must have been hippies.”

  THEY BROKE OPEN THE DONUT BOX and dug in while they debated the big issue, namely whether to tell Teffinger that Tarzan was connected to the disappearance of Tracy Patterson, who might still be alive.

  “If we tell Teffinger,” Ta’Veya said, “we lose our dirt on Trane. Once we do that, how do we take care of Mitch Mitchell? Are you going to kill him?”

  Paige pictured the act and didn’t particularly like what she saw.

  “Maybe if I have to, but I’d rather not.”

  “Well, same here,” Ta’Veya said. “Look at it this way. Tracy Patterson is either dead or she isn’t. If she’s already dead, we stay on Trane’s tail until we find her body. Then we use it to blackmail him. If she’s alive, we do the same thing, namely stay on his tail until we find her. Except then we set her free. After she’s safe we blackmail him. Even if he doesn’t actually murder her, he’s done enough bad stuff to the poor woman to go away for a long time.”

  Paige twisted a pencil in her fingers.

  It made sense.

  There was only one potential scenario that bothered her.

  “Assume the woman is alive and we don’t tell Teffinger,” she said. “Then assume that we take longer to find her than Teffinger would have and because of that she dies.”

  Ta’Veya responded immediately.

  “We won’t let that happen,” she said. “He either has her somewhere in his building or somewhere off site. We stay on his tail and see if he leads us somewhere off site. If he doesn’t, then we go in.”

  “You mean into the building?”

  “Right,” Ta’Veya said. “And while we’re in there we’ll check his toolbox and photo drawers too. So do we have a plan or what?”

  Paige ran through the options one more time and didn’t see a better one.

  “When do we start?” she asked.

  “Right now. When do you pick up your gun?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I wish you had it now, this could be a long night,” Ta’Veya said. “Let’s at least stop somewhere and pick up a couple of good knives. Maybe a pair of night vision binoculars too.” She stood up, pulled her T-shirt over her head and walked to the bathroom. “I’m taking a quick shower first. Then we’re out of here.”

  Chapter Fifty

  Day Seven—May 11

  Sunday Afternoon

  ______________

  TEFFINGER CALLED RAIN and asked her to meet him on Bannock Street at the place where she’d been abducted. She showed up in a light-blue sleeveless blouse that rode a couple of inches above her bellybutton. Incredibly taut stomach muscles disappeared into faded Daisy-Duke jean shorts.

  Teffinger fidgeted nervously as she walked towards him.

  He lit a flame in her last night, no question, but what did she think of him by the light of day?

  A long tight hug and deep kiss answered that question immediately.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  He chuckled.

  “Missed me? I didn’t even know you threw anything at me.”

  She punched him on the arm and asked, “Why are we here?”

  He put a serious look on his face.

  “Show me the exact spot you got taken,” he said.

  She grabbed his hand and led him north about forty feet.

  “Here. Why?”

  He didn’t answer and instead checked the scene. To their right, east, was a vacant building. To their left, west, was the street. It had metered parking spaces on each side. If his theory was correct, the man who took her had been parked right there and grabbed her when she got next to his car. That’s why he parked in front of the vacant building.

  Smart guy.

  What was he driving?

  That was the big question.

  “What kind of a car was parked right there?” he asked, pointing to a vacant space.

  She shrugged.

  “I have no idea.”

  “How about there?” he asked, indicating the next space down.

  “Teffinger, I have no idea,” she said.

  “There were cars on the street, though, you remember that much, right?”

  “Yeah, there were cars, but I didn’t pay any attention to them. I had no reason to.” She paused and then asked, “Is this guy going to come after me again?”

  “I don’t see why he would,” he said.

&nb
sp; He grabbed her hand and walked her back to where she had been parked that day.

  “Wait here a second,” he said.

  Then he ran to the Tundra and pulled it into the space where Rain’s attacker had been parked.

  “Okay, walk,” he shouted.

  HE PUT HIMSELF IN THE SHOES OF THE OTHER MAN, hiding on the driver’s side of the vehicle as Rain walked up the street. As she approached, Teffinger looked around and saw no one. He waited for her to pass and then closed in from behind. He swung his right arm around her head and clamped his hand over her mouth—no chloroform saturated cloth in it but close enough. His left arm simultaneously swung around her abdomen and yanked her into him.

  Then he let his instincts take over.

  He lifted her up in his arms and carried her to the side of the car. There he muscled her to the ground where no one would see her. He covered her with his body as she struggled. Thirty seconds later he got off and pulled her up.

  She immediately punched him in the chest.

  “You bastard!”

  “Stop!” he said. “What did you see? After I grabbed you, what did you see?”

  She punched him again.

  “This isn’t funny.”

  He ignored her.

  “Work with me,” he said. “What did you see?”

  It turned out that she saw the underside of his truck and the tires. “Now,” he said, “when you got taken that day, what did you see?”

  She retreated in thought.

  “I remember now,” she said. “I remember seeing the bottom of his car.”

  “Was there space underneath, like mine?” he asked. “Or did it sit lower like a car?”

  “Space,” she said. “It sat higher, like yours.”

  “What about the tires?”

  “They were like yours,” she said. “Knobby—mud and snows or whatever you call them. Not smooth like car tires.”

  Good.

  Very good.

  “What else do you remember?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Think.”

  She did.

  She almost gave up but then said, “Only one other thing. I remember rust. Lots of rust.”