Confidential Prey (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  “We?”

  “Yeah, we. I’m your new best friend.”

  Two hours later, she called him.

  “Got a response,” she said. “First, one of the people he killed was a woman named Ashlyn White. She was a lawyer in San Francisco and was his most recent kill. He abducted her in the underground parking lot of her office building three months ago, on May 3 to be precise. She has a Kanji tattoo on her right buttock that means, Love. He slit her throat with a box cutter and buried her three feet deep at Baker Beach in the cypress trees on the bluff. She’s still there as far as he knows. He took her engagement ring and ending up giving it to his girlfriend at the time. She later left him but kept the ring.”

  Teffinger’s heart raced.

  This was detailed.

  This was real.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “Nothing on her. He said the other victim would probably be more meaningful to you because she was from Denver. It was a woman named Booklyn Parks.”

  Brooklyn Parks.

  The words cut with the force of jagged glass in Teffinger’s brain. Brooklyn Parks was the younger sister of Evan Parks, a high school track buddy back in the day. Brooklyn had a habit of jumping on Teffinger’s back and wrestling him to the ground. She was three years younger and there were lots of older girls in line before her, so what she wanted to happen never did, at least at that point in time. They kept in touch over the years and finally, five years ago on a drunken night, everything fell into place.

  When Teffinger closed his eyes he could feel the velvety touch of the woman’s skin and hear the laughter in her voice.

  He snapped the image out of his head and said, “What’d he say about her?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, what’d he say?”

  “He said he abducted her in the parking lot of the Mirage in Las Vegas on September 15th of last year,” she said. “He drove her out into the desert on a dirt road about thirty miles northwest of Las Vegas. Then he set her loose and let her run. He kept trying to run her over with his car until he finally got her. He dragged her body into an arroyo and left her there for the bugs and the sun.”

  Teffinger’s hands shook.

  “Where are you right now?”

  “Home.”

  “Which is where?”

  “I have a loft by Coors Field.”

  “I’m going to Las Vegas,” he said. “Do you want to come?”

  She did.

  She absolutely did.

  “Give me your address and meet me down at street level in ten minutes.”

  4

  Day Thirteen

  August 15

  Monday Afternoon

  It was 121 degrees in Vegas when Teffinger and Raverly landed at McCarran International Airport late Monday afternoon. A man in plain clothes and a long black ponytail intercepted them at the gate and introduced himself as homicide detective Johnnie Greywolf Dey-Keya.

  Teffinger liked the man immediately.

  His cheekbones were high and his teeth were white. He had the grip of a demon and the eyes of a hunter. Not unsurprisingly, those eyes fell a lot more on Raverly than they did on Teffinger.

  Ten minutes after deplaning, they were whisking back into the sky in a small lime-green helicopter, heading north, with a middle-aged woman in the pilot’s seat.

  Dey-Keya brought them up to speed.

  “It turns out that a vehicle registered to the woman you talked about, Brooklyn Parks, ended up getting towed out of the Mirage’s parking lot on October 3 after appearing to be abandoned. It went to our impound lot. I checked it after you called and didn’t find anything that would suggest a struggle.”

  “No blood or anything like that?”

  “Right,” Dey-Keya said. “A case was never opened on the woman.”

  “So there was no missing-person investigation or homicide investigation or anything along those lines?”

  “Correct. If we find her body, obviously that will change.”

  “What about surveillance cameras in the parking lot?”

  “They don’t keep the tapes that long.”

  Teffinger looked out the window.

  They were paralleling a surreal mountain range. Unlike the Rockies, these mountains had no trees or greenery. They were barren, wind-chiseled, desolate deathtraps with no redeeming value other than an as a reminder of how inhospitable the earth could be. Rattlesnakes and scorpions might be able to live there but not much else.

  Teffinger put his hand on the pilot’s shoulder and said, “Don’t crash.”

  She patted his hand.

  “Haven’t in over a day now,” she said.

  Teffinger knew she was kidding but looked at Dey-Keya just to be sure.

  The man nodded.

  “You crashed two days ago?”

  “No, not two days ago, yesterday.”

  “You’re messing with me,” Teffinger said.

  “Wish I was,” she said. “They say that when you fall off the horse you need to get right back on it. What you see up here is me getting on a horse.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “It just dropped,” she said. “It was some kind of mechanical failure.” She pointed to the right. “There it is.”

  He looked.

  Sure enough, there on the brown desert dirt was a tangled mess of charred metal with some virgin splashes of lime-green.

  Dey-Keya slapped him on the back.

  “You should see your face,” he said.

  Ten minutes later Raverly said, “That looks like a road.” It wasn’t much, hardly more than an occasional indentation on an otherwise clean desert pallet, but it was enough that they followed it west.

  It dead-ended where the mountains started to rise.

  “This has to be it,” Teffinger said.

  They circled in search of an arroyo or body or anything that looked like it didn’t belong.

  Ten minutes passed.

  Nothing showed up.

  “Set it down,” Teffinger said.

  “Are you serious?”

  Ground level was the same temperature as the business end of a Cuban cigar. Heat radiated through Teffinger’s soles and baked the bottoms of his feet.

  He had no hat or sunglasses.

  The horizon line wiggled behind a plume of rising heat.

  Whatever search was to be had here wouldn’t be a long one.

  They split up.

  Raverly headed up the road.

  “Where you going?”

  “If he was going to play cat and mouse with her, I don’t think he would have come out this far where the terrain gets so uneven. I think he would have hung back where everything is flatter and there was less chance of getting his car stuck.”

  It made sense to a point.

  “Maybe, but she would have run this way, trying to get to higher ground.”

  The heat pounded them with mean fiery fists.

  The search turned up nothing.

  Then Raverly shouted, “Got something!”

  Teffinger pushed through the heat in that direction and found her standing to a slight indentation in the ground, possibly a shallow arroyo at one point but now mostly filled with dirt.

  Out of that dirt stuck a hand.

  It was mostly bones, long picked clean at this point, but definitely a human hand, connected no doubt to a human body beneath the surface.

  Teffinger looked at Dey-Keya and said, “Are your crime lab guys any good?”

  “They’re the best.”

  “Get them out here.”

  5

  Day Thirteen

  August 15

  Monday Night

  The meticulous crime scene investigation dragged on hour after hour after hour. In the end they had a woman’s body silently scooped from the dirt in a state of almost total decay. The bones from her ribcage to her skull were severely shattered, consistent with being hit by a car at high impact. Although her face was unrecognizable, the pendan
t around her neck wasn’t.

  It belonged to Brooklyn Parks.

  Other than the woman’s body, they found nothing. The scene didn’t cough up a scintilla of evidence as to who killed the woman. There were no cigarette butts, no empty coke cans, no dislodged car parts, not a single thing of use, not from the place where the body was found all the way back to the nearest piece of asphalt.

  They had a victim and not an ounce more.

  At the end of it all, it was too late to catch a flight back to Denver. Teffinger and Raverly checked into separate rooms at the Cosmopolitan. Teffinger drank his weight in water, showered and laid down on the bed just to rest his eyes for a few minutes.

  When he woke up it was evening.

  The sun was almost gone and the city’s neon was in full force.

  The room had a small balcony overlooking the strip.

  He stepped onto it and let a light breeze blow on his face.

  Then his phone rang. It was Sydney Heatherwood, the newbie to the homicide department, one year into her adventure. Teffinger pulled up an image of a young mocha face and tight athletic body.

  “I’m out here in San Francisco working with a detective by the name of Andy Peterson,” she said. “He’s had the crime unit and cadaver dogs working the bluffs at Baker Beach all day. We’re finally hitting pay dirt, right now, even as we speak.”

  “You got a body?”

  “We do indeed,” she said. “It’s buried three feet down, just like your good friend Mr. K said. It belongs to a woman but other than that I can’t tell you too much about it right now.”

  “Good job.”

  “I just watched. They did all the work.”

  “You sound weird.”

  “It’s winter out here,” she said. “There’s fog and rain and wind. I don’t know who invented this place but they sure screwed it up.”

  Teffinger smiled.

  “Figure out how the guy picked the lawyer to be his victim. Why her out of everyone in the world? Figure out if she was a wrong place wrong time girl or something more deliberate and calculated. Figure out the motive.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Thanks, I owe you one.”

  “One? What kind of math are you using?”

  He dialed Raverly’s room and said, “I’m going to go scrounge up a beer somewhere. You want to come along?”

  She did.

  She did indeed.

  They headed north on Las Vegas Boulevard, watched the Bellagio fountains dance to a Celine Deon song, then crossed over to Paris and played the pass line at a craps table long enough to get four complimentary drinks, Bud Lights for him and screwdrivers for Raverly. He was $100 up at that point, tossed the chips on the waitress’s tray as she passed and told Raverly, “Forty-eight hours.”

  He expected her to not understand.

  She knew what he meant, however.

  He was referring to the time left before Mr. K struck Denver.

  “How are you going to stop him?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Outside the strip was chocked with headlights five lanes thick in both directions, moving slower than the walkers. Horns honked, motorcycles revved, drunken party voices shouted and faces hung out windows.

  “You need to get North to tell you who his attorney friend is out in L.A.,” Teffinger said. “Then we need to get him to tell us who his client is.”

  Raverly chewed on it.

  Her expression wasn’t enthusiastic.

  “You’re asking for two separate attorneys to breach their trust,” she said. “I’ll try but we better be working on a plan B in the meantime.” A beat then, “It might be easier to follow the telephone trail. If we could get North’s records, that would show who he’s talking to in L.A. Then if we could get that person’s records, it would show who he’s talking to.”

  Teffinger kicked a coke can.

  “Our guy’s too smart to not have thought of that,” he said. “He’s probably using a payphone and if he is using a cell, I’m sure he’s distanced himself from it. It’s probably a disposable or prepaid, purchased for cash, or something of that nature. There are a hundred ways to do it. Go to Google and type in anonymous cell phone and you’ll find half of them right there.”

  “Still, it’s worth trying.”

  “It is and I’ll set it in motion. Maybe he wants to be caught and he’ll get sloppy on purpose. That’s not what my gut tells me but you never know. The only thing I know for sure is that this guy is 100 percent legit and has coughed up two bodies to prove it.”

  Suddenly something happened that Teffinger didn’t expect. Raverly grabbed his hand and held it as they walked.

  “We need to get him talking some more,” she said.

  “I was thinking the same thing, except shouting instead of talking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Talking implies control and deliberation,” he said. “I need to get into his emotions and twist them. I need him to spit things out before he gets a chance to think them through.”

  Raverly squeezed his hand.

  “The system’s not built for that,” she said. “There’s too much back and forth.”

  “Exactly,” Teffinger said. “That’s why we need to change the system.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I need to start talking to him directly.”

  “How are you going to do that? Just shut him off unless he calls you direct?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I don’t know that he’ll go for it,” she said. “There’s another option, though. We already know he’s taken a shining to me. He probably wouldn’t mind talking to me as long as he felt there wasn’t too much risk.”

  Teffinger put his arm around her waist.

  “No. You’re already too close to the fire.”

  “Screw the fire,” she said.

  They let themselves get soaked by the buzz of the strip. Teffinger kept his arm around the woman’s waist, occasionally moving his fingers a bit.

  Her muscles were taut.

  “There’s something you should know about me,” he said.

  “That sounds serious.”

  “It sort of is,” he said. “Someone’s out to kill me.”

  Raverly came to a stop and looked at him.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Two weeks ago I picked up this girl hitchhiking. She was broke and from out of town and just got dumped by her boyfriend. It was storming out and she was soaked and cold. I tried to get her a hotel but she had this thing about not taking charity. Finally I convinced her to at least sleep on my couch for the night.”

  “I remember that storm. I watched it for over an hour.”

  “Then you know how bad it was,” Teffinger said. “My whole neighborhood was in blackout when I got home. Nice guy that I am, I talked her into taking my bed and letting me sleep on the couch. She didn’t want to put me out but finally relented. When I woke up the next morning, she was dead in the bed. She’d been stabbed in the side of the head with a knife that was meant for me. Whoever did it thought they were killing me.”

  “Damn.”

  “Right, damn,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about it. The poor girl, I don’t even know who she was. She told me her first name—Atasha—but I never even asked her last name. She didn’t have any identification her purse, no driver’s license or anything. All she had was makeup, a couple of candy bars and $27.32 in cash.”

  “Did she say where she was from?”

  “New York, on her way to Seattle,” he said. “I’ve spent hours trying to trace her with no luck.”

  “What a nightmare.”

  “Actually, it is; and I don’t want it spreading in your direction,” he said.

  “Well, maybe I do,” she said. “Do you have any idea who wants you dead?”

  “Nothing concrete,” he said. “The best guess is that it relates to an old case; maybe a brother or relative of someone I ended up
catching, something like that. We’re pulling files but nothing’s jumping up and shouting yet.”

  Raverly ran a finger down his cheek.

  “You were all sexy out there in the desert today, sweating and everything,” Raverly said. “Did I mention that before?”

  Teffinger shifted his feet.

  “No, you must have forgotten.”

  “Well bad, bad me. Let’s get back to your room and I’ll make it up to you.”

  6

  Day Fourteen

  August 16

  Tuesday Morning

  The earliest flight to Denver took off just as the Nevada sun rose over the desert. Teffinger put the armrests in a death grip and concentrated on the structural stress of the aircraft. The wheels lifted, the heavy vibration disappeared and the ground dropped away at a crazy speed.

  Raverly patted his hand.

  “Imagine that, you’re still alive.”

  He grunted.

  “Tomorrow’s the day,” he said. “I feel like time’s a python and it has me in a stranglehold. The chief is going to want a full briefing. Then he’s going to want to get a plan in motion for tomorrow night. That means mobilizing people, which in turn means meetings, lots and lots of meetings—meetings I don’t have time for, to be precise.”

  “Blow them off.”

  “Play it out,” he said. “I blow them off, the guy takes his kill, and then I get the blame for not being a team player. On the other hand, if I can get all the noise out of my life and concentrate, I’ll have a better chance of figuring out who he is. That’s the key, not to blanket the city with a shotgun, but figure out who he is and introduce him to a rifle shot.”

  “So it comes down to whether you want to cover your ass or catch a killer.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s it, to a point. When you get right down to it, if I cover my ass all I’m doing is being selfish. I’m putting myself before the wellbeing of the next victim.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to catch him.”

  “No you’re not,” she said. “We are.”

  “Yeah, right. I forgot. We.”