Attorney's Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)
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Venta nodded.
“That’s what happened to me,” she said, and then told her the story.
At the end Mackenzie asked, “Did you ever see Rebecca in this place?”
“Not that I remember,” Venta said.
“And you would remember another blond American, I assume.”
“Absolutely,” Venta said. “But I know there were women there that I never met. It’s possible that we were kept apart on purpose.”
“She disappeared in May of last year,” Mackenzie said. “That’s thirteen months ago. Could anyone survive in that place that long?”
Venta frowned.
“Do you want the truth?”
“Probably not.”
“It would be hard,” Venta said. “But not impossible.”
Mackenzie retreated in thought.
“She’s ten years younger than me,” she said. “I helped raise her.”
THIRTY MINUTES LATER they pulled into the driveway of Mackenzie Vampire’s house, a stucco ranch in a neighborhood west of Coral Gables. The garage was filled with boxes.
“This is it,” Mackenzie said. “All of Rebecca’s files.”
She pulled one down and carried it into the living room.
Venta and London did the same.
“So what are we looking for, exactly?”
“Anything that relates to Bangkok, Denver, law firms, Bob Copeland, cash retainers, or anything else out of the ordinary. We’ll need all her bank statements, day timers, phone records, credit card statements, and stuff like that too. We also need to get into her computers, plus access her emails, if we can.”
Mackenzie’s fingers shook.
“What’s wrong?” London asked.
“She’s still alive,” Mackenzie said. “I can feel it.”
Venta patted her hand.
“Me too.”
They hugged.
Then they pulled London in for a group hug.
“Enough girl stuff,” Venta said. “Let’s get busy.”
33
Day Five—June 15
Friday Afternoon
TEFFINGER WALKED INTO WONG’S on Court Street and immediately spotted Sydney in a booth. Two of the waitresses zigzagged over to say hello and pat him on the arm as he walked across the restaurant.
“How’d you spot me so fast?” Sydney questioned as he slid in.
Teffinger raked his hair back with his fingers. It hung in place for a heartbeat and then flopped back down over his forehead.
“What do you mean?”
“I was watching you when you walked in,” she said. “You spotted me right away.”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know, I just did,” he said.
“Okay, then,” she said. “Let me tell you how.”
“All right—how?”
“Because I’m the only black person in here,” she said.
Teffinger looked around.
She was right.
“I didn’t notice that,” he said.
“That’s because you’re not black,” she said. “The next time we have lunch, we’ll do it in Five Points. Then you’ll notice more.”
Ming walked over, a beautiful little doll of a thing who also happened to be a straight-A graduate student at C.U. Denver, and asked, “The usual?”
Teffinger smiled.
“Please.”
Sydney ordered the same and said, “You should try something different once in a while.”
“Can’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I’m not wired that way. By the way, thanks.”
She cocked her head.
“For what?”
“For whatever it is that I haven’t said thanks for before,” he said. “So take one off the list I owe you.”
She laughed.
“I don’t even know where that list is anymore,” she said. “It got so big I had to move it out of the house.”
He grinned.
“Well, if you ever find it, scratch one off.”
She leaned across the table and said, “I’ll scratch two off if you pay for lunch.”
He paused, giving it ample consideration.
Then he said, “One is enough for right now. I don’t want to upset the balance of the universe.”
OVER THE BEST CHINESE FOOD IN DENVER Sydney told Teffinger an interesting story. She finally managed to get a chance to talk to the person who lived across the street from Alan English, the pilot who got butchered in his bedroom. According to the neighbor, a busybody named Bunny Something-Or-Other, English may have been under surveillance.
“Really?”
Sydney nodded.
“The same car came down the street slowly on several occasions,” she said. “It didn’t belong to anyone who lived on the street. It slowed down to a crawl whenever it passed in front of Bunny’s house, meaning English’s house too. At first she thought he was checking her out, but when she started to pay more attention she found that he always had his face pointed to English’s place.”
“He?”
“Right—a man.”
“Can she ID him?”
“No.”
Teffinger considered it.
Then Sydney made a face at him, which meant that he was chewing with his mouth open.
“Is there any surveillance in the area?”
“I didn’t notice any.”
Sydney put an inquisitive look on her face.
“What?” Teffinger asked.
“So what’s going on with your new squeeze?”
“Venta?”
“Right.”
“I was going to ask her to move in with me this morning but she was still asleep when I left.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
No he wasn’t, not a bit.
“She’s the one,” he added.
She laughed. “The one?”
“Right.”
“Well that’s corny. You sound like a soap opera. The one,” she repeated. “The one. As in ‘the’ followed by ‘one.’”
Teffinger grinned. “Corny or not, that’s how I feel.”
“You just met her Monday.”
“That’s how I know.”
“Let me rephrase it,” Sydney said. “You just met her on Monday, after she stalked you.”
He shrugged and said, “I’ve always wanted my own personal stalker.”
“And now you have one,” Sydney said.
“Right, now I have one.” He leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “But no matter what, I’ll never forget that night when I bounced a quarter off your ass, if that’s what this is about.”
She smacked him on the arm.
“You promised to never bring that up.”
He grinned. “So now I owe you an apology.”
“Yes you do.”
“Put it on the list,” he said.
“That means the list is right back to where it started.”
“Figures,” Teffinger said. “That’s the way my life works.”
TWO MINUTES LATER TEFFINGER’S PHONE RANG. He talked for a moment, hung up and said, “That was Venta. She’s in Miami working on a case, and may or may not be back this evening.”
“Which means no sugar in your coffee tonight,” Sydney said.
He smiled.
That was true.
But it also freed him up to work on Tessa Blake.
He looked at Sydney and said, “Excuse me a minute,” and dialed Venta.
“Got a question for you,” he said.
“Shoot.”
“Do you feel like moving in with me?”
She laughed.
“I already did. Didn’t you notice?”
34
Day Five—June 15
Friday Afternoon
ACCORDING TO HER DRIVER’S LICENSE, the dead hiker was a 20-year-old named Brandy Zucker. The name rang a bell but Jekker couldn’t place it. She had an upscale Cherry Hills address, meaning she came from money.
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That wasn’t good, not one bit.
Kill a whore—what happens is that some underpaid civil servant sniffs around for a couple of days and tries to look busy while he scratches his ass. But kill a rich young white drama queen, and what happens is a whole different kind of hunt, the kind with teeth.
Snap.
Snap.
Snap.
Jekker needed to get her and her vehicle off his property now. Waiting for nightfall was too risky. So he put the woman in the trunk of her car, drove to an old abandoned mine near Idaho Springs and dumped her and her precious little backpack down a narrow vertical shaft. Judging by the sound, she bounced off the walls for at least a hundred feet before landing with a thud.
He drove her car another sixty miles west on I-70, all the way to Vail Pass, and pulled into the edge of a rest area where he had plenty of breathing room. He wiped his prints off everything as best he could and then spotted a female out-of-state trucker. Using his best smile, he talked her into giving him a lift to Vail, another twenty miles west.
From Vail he took the train back to Denver, paying cash.
Then he took a cab to Morrison at the base of the front range, bought a mountain bike, and peddled all the way up Highway 74 to the boxcars.
Everything was as he had left it, including Tessa Blake.
Perfect.
NOW HE NEEDED TO GET TESSA BLAKE the hell out of there, and fast. The place was too hot. The hiker—Brandy Zucker—could have told someone where she was going, meaning the cops might come sniffing around.
But where could he stash her?
Not at his loft.
Not at a hotel, even a seedy one.
It had to be somewhere remote, where no one went, or even had a right to go.
Think!
Think!
But he couldn’t.
What he should really do is kill her. He’d have to do that in the end anyway since she’d seen his face. There was absolutely no way to get around it.
Yeah.
He should just kill her now and get it over with, then dump her somewhere and be free.
He picked up a rock and threw it at a tree, missing, but not by more than a foot. The second time he hit it; and the third and the fourth. Then he hiked over to the boxcar with a spring in his step, anxious to ask Tessa Blake how she wanted to die.
Gunshot.
Knife.
Or razorblade.
It was her choice.
The time had come.
35
Day Five—June 15
Friday Afternoon
THE FIRST PASS THROUGH REBECCA VAMPIRE’S FILES lead to nothing except one frustrating dead-end after another. Everything seemed legit. None of the folders held any evidence of a connection to Bangkok, Vesper & Bennett, Denver, Bob Copeland or oversized incoming cash.
London closed her last file and looked at Mackenzie.
“What are the chances there was a file but someone got to it?”
Mackenzie wrinkled her forehead and said, “It’s possible, I suppose. They were in her office for three weeks before we brought them over here.”
Venta stood up and stretched.
“She might have taken it with her to Bangkok,” she said. “Or not made a file at all. Either way we’re SOL. I’m starved.”
London’s stomach growled.
Venta said, “It looks like I’m not the only one.”
That was true.
Mackenzie worked the phone and thirty minutes later two large bags of semi-decent Chinese arrived. They ate in the kitchen and, halfway through, Mackenzie wanted more details about what the men had done to Venta.
“You really don’t want to know,” Venta said.
“It’s not a matter of want,” Mackenzie said.
Venta finished chewing, then told her.
Afterwards she looked at London and said, “I can’t let Teffinger get a mental picture of me like that.”
London understood.
She really did.
But she said, “Maybe you’re not giving him enough credit.”
“Maybe. But I don’t want to find out just yet.”
WHILE REBECCA VAMPIRE’S P.I. FILES DIDN’T HELP, her bank statements did—maybe. It turned out that the woman made three cash deposits into her operating account during the week preceding her Bangkok trip.
Monday: $4,000.
Wednesday: $4,000.
Thursday: $2,000.
“That’s $10,000 total,” Venta said. “The same as I got. She probably deposited it in chunks to stay under the radar of the IRS.”
“It could have come from existing clients,” Mackenzie said. “She got lots of cash payments. When husbands had their wives followed, they couldn’t exactly write a check from the joint account.”
“I appreciate that,” Venta said. “What we need to do is reconstruct her billing records.”
They did that over two bottles of wine with the radio turned to a hip-hop station, making a spreadsheet of active clients, invoices, payments received, deposits made, and the like. In the end they tied numerous smaller cash deposits to existing clients but couldn’t tie the three bigger deposits to anyone.
It was mystery money.
“It came from Vesper & Bennett,” Venta said. “I’d bet my life on it.”
London grunted.
“You already have,” she said.
36
Day Five—June 15
Friday Afternoon
TEFFINGER DIDN’T HATE every Friday afternoon but did hate most of them. That’s because on Friday afternoons the universe got poised to party, meaning he had less support for the next few days.
Ordinarily he didn’t mind that much.
But this afternoon was different, this afternoon Tessa Blake was still missing, which is why a layer of stress wrapped around him as he paced next to the windows and stared blankly at the cars going down Cherokee Street.
A couple of kids on bicycles caught his eye.
They were so innocent, so young, so wonderfully naïve.
Suddenly his shin exploded with pain and the snake plant toppled over and crashed to the carpet. Faces turned and Teffinger said, “I had the green light.” Ten heartbeats after he muscled the stupid thing upright and scooped the last of the dirt back into the pot, his phone rang.
Thirty seconds later he swung by Sydney’s desk, grabbed her by the arm and said, “Come on, we’re taking a field trip.”
She had that deer-in-headlights look for a split moment, then snatched her purse and fell into step.
“Where are we going?”
“Down the stairs,” he said, rushing past the elevators and heading into the stairwell.
She sped up enough to catch him. Then she smacked him on the back of the head.
“Don’t be a smart ass.”
“Fine,” he said. “West.”
“What?”
“We’re going west.”
A pause.
“Why?”
“Because that’s the quickest way to get to where we’re headed.”
Another pause.
“You’re pressing your luck, Teffinger,” she said.
He turned and smiled over his shoulder as he pushed through the metal fire door into the parking garage. Then he broke into a trot for the Tundra.
LUCKILY THE RUSH-HOUR NUTS hadn’t jammed up the 6th Avenue freeway with bumper-to-bumper insanity yet. Teffinger guided the Tundra at four over the limit into one side of Lakewood and out the other while Sydney punched the radio buttons, only to discover that Teffinger had reset them.
“Hold it!” Teffinger said. “Go back.”
When she did the song turned out to be what Teffinger thought—Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love.”
“Leave it there,” he said.
Sydney listened for a few seconds and then punched to the next station.
“Hey!” Teffinger said.
She ignored him and said, “Remind me to sit down some day and drag you in
to this century.”
He smiled.
“You can scream and kick if you want,” she added. “No extra charge.” Then she reprogrammed the stations to hip-hop.
They looped onto C-470, got off at the Morrison exit, doubled back and then pulled over to the side of the road at the base of Green Mountain, coming a little too close to three people from a highway trash crew wearing florescent orange vests.
The shortest one—an older woman with rounded shoulders and a tanned, wrinkled face—carried a manila envelope.
Teffinger hopped out and introduced himself as the woman handed him the envelope.
He opened it.
Inside he found six photographs.
He sucked in his breath and then pointed the pictures at Sydney.
“You said your name was—”
“—Danielle Witherspoon—”
“—Right, Danielle. You done good, Danielle.”
“So that’s actually her? The missing woman?”
Teffinger nodded.
“It is.”
The woman smiled.
“I was almost positive she was the one I saw on the news,” she said.
“Well you were right,” Teffinger said.
“What’s her name again?”
“Tessa Blake.”
“Tessa Blake?”
“Right.”
She shook her head.
“Wow.”
“Show me exactly where you found this,” Teffinger said.
“Right over here,” she said, walking. “We marked the spot with a rock.”
Teffinger followed, with the corner of his mouth turned up ever so slightly.
“That’s the best way to mark spots,” he said. “I used to use Kleenex but it was hardly ever there the next day.”
The woman looked at him, not knowing if it was a joke or whether he was serious.
Then she looked at Sydney who wrinkled her face and said, “Picture being around him all day long.”
37
Day Five—June 15
Friday Afternoon
TESSA BLAKE CHOSE TO DIE BY GUNSHOT to the back of the head. At her request, Jekker left her alone in the boxcar for fifteen minutes to make her peace. Then he opened the door, holding the .357 SIG in his right hand, and said, “It’s time.”