by R. J. Jagger
“Of course I do.”
He must have seen something in her face, because he added, “And stop thinking bad thoughts about the client. I can guarantee you that he’s not involved in any wrongdoing.”
She felt herself nod.
“And neither am I, for that matter,” he added. “So stop worrying. This whole thing’s going to settle out and everything’s going to get back to normal. Trust me.”
“Trust a lawyer?”
“No, trust a friend.”
Chapter Seventeen
Day Five - April 20
Friday Morning
___________
Teffinger’s alarm clock pulled him out of sleep with all the subtleness of a freight train. It sat safely on the other side of the bedroom, on the dresser, where he couldn’t smash it with his fist—an old college trick.
It was only four in the morning.
Why’d he set it so early?
Then he remembered.
Megan Bennett.
He washed his face, popped in his contacts, and then checked to see if anyone left any messages on his home phone, office phone or cell phone. Fifteen different people had been told to call him immediately if Megan Bennett showed up.
No messages meant that she was still missing.
Not good.
Today would be critical.
He ruffled his hair with his fingers, threw on gray sweats and jogged out into the chill of the night. He lived in a split-level house near the top of Green Mountain, third house from the end, backing to open space. That meant that flat streets were scarce, which meant that if you wanted to run around here you’d either be going up or down.
He didn’t particularly like either.
He started off too fast, as usual, but then eased into a sustainable pace as he began to wake up. The rest of the world still slept. Cats prowled and the occasional backyard dog, which would have completely ignored him by light of day, let out a good stiff warning bark just in case he was thinking about doing something stupid. Every once in a while he caught a whiff of pine scent, which reminded him of camping trips when he was a kid.
He ran through the darkness, clicking off the streetlights, letting his legs stretch and his lungs burn, thinking about how to find Megan Bennett.
One hour later he was showered and shaved and sitting at his desk downtown, the only living being in the room, with a cup of very hot, incredibly good coffee in front of him. He was wide-awake. The lack of sleep last night might start to weigh on him sometime this afternoon, but right now the caffeine was moving him forward just fine.
Megan Bennett.
Most missing persons turn out to be statistics if they don’t turn up in the first thirty-six hours or so.
The oversized industrial clock on the wall said 5:45 in the morning and continued to twitch the seconds off even as he looked at it. Megan Bennett had been missing about thirty hours at this point.
The hour of truth was coming.
He grabbed a fresh notepad and uncapped a blue pen. Then he jotted down the things that needed to be done today on the case, in no particular order of priority.
Paul Kaak, who Teffinger called at him last night and asked to come in early this morning, showed up at the requested time, six-thirty. He had a half-eaten donut in one hand and a white bag in the other, presumably with more of the same.
He looked grumpy.
“You owe me one,” he warned.
“I owe you ten,” Teffinger agreed. “Thanks for coming.”
Kwak extended the bag.
“Donut?”
Teffinger paused, seriously considering it.
“They low-cal?”
“Absolutely,” Kwak said, patting his big old truck-driver’s gut. “That’s how I keep this baby looking so fine.”
Teffinger grinned, pulled one out, white cake with chocolate frosting, and took a bite. Delicious. “So you can do this?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Kwak said. “You got the tape?”
“Yep.”
“Then let’s have a look.”
Kwak cued up the videotape that Teffinger obtained from the Total last night, the one that showed the car pulling up to the pay phone that someone had used to call Megan Bennett from the night she disappeared. He downloaded it into a computer and then manipulated it with some type of software. What started out as a vague moving vehicle in the rain now showed up as a fairly clear stationary picture of a car on a 20” flat-panel screen.
“Looks like a Toyota,” Kwak offered, printing out a copy for reference.
Teffinger nodded, not really knowing one way or the other. “They all look the same to me,” he said, which was true.
Kwak looked as if that was an understatement “That’s because they are,” he said. “Everyone out there building cars nowadays uses the same little cookie-cutter formula. There’s no guts in the boardroom anymore, no Carol Shelbys, that’s the problem.”
Teffinger nodded.
“You know what a donkey is?” Kwak questioned.
“No, what?”
“It’s a horse built by a committee.”
Teffinger smiled and repeated it to himself.
It was worth saving.
“There are too many committees building cars, nowadays,” Kwak went on. “It’s not like it was in the fifties and sixties when cars were actually different. When something came down the road back then, you could tell from a block away whether it was a Vette or a Mustang or a Goat or a Bird. I remember in eighth grade, I could tell you the name of every car on the street.”
Teffinger didn’t totally agree. After all, no one would mistake a Hummer for a Mini Cooper, but he understood Kwak’s point. “Those days are gone,” he offered.
Kwak nodded, returned to the computer’s main screen and clicked open another software program, something derivative of the insurance group’s Auto Theft Book.
“Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”
He pulled up a checklist and marked a few of the search items—Car, Four Doors, Passenger Side—and punched enter. The screen filled up with about thirty vehicle photos, all profiled from the passenger side, page 1 of 23.
Within five minutes Kwak matched a car to the one from the Total videotape.
“Toyota Camry,” he said. He pulled up earlier models of the same vehicle until he found a change in the body style. “Could be this year’s model, last year’s or the year before that,” he concluded. “They used the same body style for all three years.”
Teffinger was impressed.
“That’s one slick program,” he said.
“You like that, huh?” Kwak questioned, obviously pleased with himself.
He nodded.
“Very nice.”
“It sure beats the old hit-and-miss books we used to use,” Kwak said.
Then he pulled up a screen that showed the color schemes that were available for Toyota Camry for the last three years. “Okay, we’re getting a black and a dark blue exterior color available for all three years,” he said. “The car we’re looking for could be either one, it’s too hard to tell with this black-and-white video.”
“That’s good enough,” Teffinger said. Then an additional thought popped into his head. “Is there any way to tell if we’re looking for a rental?”
Kwak took a bite of donut, chewed with his mouth open, examined the reference print and shook his head negative. “Not from this,” he reported. “If we had a view of the glass, we’d probably be able to tell, since most rentals have some kind of decal on the window that tells you who to call if you lock the keys inside. It could be a rental but there’s no way to tell from what we have.”
Teffinger nodded.
“Okay. Good enough.”
He looked at his watch, almost seven. Katie Baxter should be in soon. “Thanks Paul, I owe you one.”
“Just find the woman.”
Teffinger realized that he hadn’t refilled his coffee cup once since Kwak arrived a half hour ago. He walked back
down the stairs to homicide, poured a fresh cup and slurped it at his desk. Katie Baxter showed up a few minutes later, before he could think of anything new to jot down, and he brought her up to speed.
They both agreed that Megan Bennett had to be the department’s priority item today.
“What I’d like to do,” Teffinger said, “is start generating a list of male drivers, six feet and taller, who own a black or dark blue Camry, no more than three years old.”
“Drivers not more than three years old? That seems improbable.”
“No, the car isn’t more than three years old.”
She smiled.
“I knew what you meant but someone has to mess with you.”
He shook his head.
Then she got serious and he watched her as she thought about it. “What we’ll need to do is get a list of Camry owners first, which is easy. But then we’ll have to pull their drivers licenses and get their heights. That’ll take a little time.”
He nodded.
“Perfect, because that’s exactly what we have—little time.”
That complete, Teffinger was ready to move on to the next subject. “I’m thinking that we also want a press conference, to get a picture of Megan Bennett and a Toyota Camry on the news, starting with the noon news today if we can move that fast.”
Baxter agreed.
“You going to be the talking head?”
He didn’t mind the cameras, in fact he liked them. Also, it might make an impression on Kelly if she saw him on TV.
Kelly Ravenfield.
Why was she so much in his thoughts lately?
“I wouldn’t care,” he said, “because I know exactly what I want to say. But if it starts getting political, and everyone starts jockeying for position, I’m not going to have time to deal with it. I’ll tell you what. Can you talk to the Public Information Officer and the Chief and get it in motion?”
“Will do.”
“If it falls into my lap without too much trouble, I’ll be happy to do it,” Teffinger said. “If it gets dramatic and starts generating a bunch of closed door meetings, just pull my name out of it.”
“Will do.”
She looked at him weird.
“What?” he questioned.
She looked down at his coffee cup and he followed her eyes to it. It sat there, empty as could be, and he just realized it had been like that for more than fifteen minutes.
He shook his head.
“I’m cutting back,” he said. “Didn’t you get the memo?”
“You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because whole economies will get out of sync,” she said. “People in distant places are depending on you.”
He smiled.
“I never thought about that.”
“They have children to feed,” she added.
Later that morning he stopped in unannounced at RK Safety Consultants, where Megan Bennett worked. The offices were located on a second-floor walkup, above a bar and grill in LoDo. Only one of her coworkers was there, a man in his late twenties by the name of Andrew Andrews. He was bald on top and shaved the sides to match. He had an easygoing, friendly manner, and seemed to have just a touch of a gay edge to him. Not that Teffinger cared; live and let live as far as he was concerned.
The office was filled with a variety of meters and pumps, plugged into outlets to keep charged. The space also had a wall of reference books, computers, printers, and five or six desks covered with papers. There was a dartboard on the north wall, two darts sticking in the wall, and a hockey stick leaning up in the back corner. It was clearly a place for work and not for impressing clients.
“We’ve all been interviewed over the phone, by someone called . . . Sydney . . . I think,” Andrews told Teffinger.
“Detective Heatherwood,” he said. “I’m aware of that and in fact have read her reports word for word. We appreciate your cooperation. What I’d like to do at this point is look through Megan’s desk, and her computer, just to see if there’s anything that might be of help.”
The young man nodded towards the last desk in the back.
“That’s hers,” he said.
Teffinger walked over to it and looked around while the young man booted up Megan’s computer. Everything on the desktop and in her drawers appeared to be work-related. Nothing struck him as important to her disappearance.
“No pictures of guys,” he said, looking at the young man. “Was she seeing anyone that you know of?”
Andrews shook his head.
“She met some guy on the 16th Street Mall last week that she got a little excited about but they never exchanged numbers or anything. She’s had some bad experiences with guys,” he explained. “It seems to take her some time to warm up. And by the time she does, the guy’s moving down the road. I keep telling her that guys don’t like waiting around for it.”
Teffinger understood perfectly.
“I used to have a three-date rule,” he confessed. “If they hadn’t put out by the third date, poof, I was gone.” Then, “Of course, I don’t do that anymore, I’m a lot more mature now.”
The young man looked interested.
“So now how many dates does it take now before the big poof?”
For some reason he thought of Kelly, her slightly crooked smile, so damn nice. Was she the next woman he’d make a serious play for? Yes, she was. He just realized that this second. The thought almost startled him, as if it had been thrust on him by some outside force, and he really hadn’t had much say in the matter one way or the other.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m still managing to do fairly well early on.”
The young man laughed. “So as far as the three-date rule being gone, what you’re saying is that it’s gone in theory.”
“No, it’s gone for real,” Teffinger replied. “I just haven’t had the opportunity to prove it yet.”
“Someone get me a shovel, please.”
On Megan Bennett’s computer, they pulled up her directory and read the file names. Only one appeared to be of any interest, titled Personal, but all the sub-files dealt with taxes, recipes and other equally unhelpful stuff. Then they logged onto the Internet and read her e-mails. There was nothing of help there either.
He plopped down in the swivel chair and tried to think.
Now what?
Finally he said, “The guy she met on the mall last week, what was his name?”
“She never said.”
“Mmm.” Teffinger cocked his head, thought about a few other things, then found himself coming back to it. “What’d she say about this guy?”
The young man seemed to retreat to wherever it was that that memory was stored. “Let’s see, they were both eating lunch near each other and somehow they started talking. He was an FBI agent, which impressed her.”
Teffinger raised an eyebrow.
“An FBI agent?”
“Yes,” Andrews confirmed. “Oh, right, now I remember. Somehow she mentioned that she went to Ohio State University. It turns out that this man actually worked on a case of an OSU woman who was murdered back when Megan went to school there. It was a pretty famous case on campus. I guess he told her there were two other OSU women who disappeared and were never found and were believed to have been killed by the same person who killed the first one.”
“Really?”
The young man nodded. “That freaked her out. Anyway, this guy made an impression on her but, like I said, it was a one-shot deal.”
“Did she describe this guy, physically that is?”
“No. She just said he was nice.” Then, “She would most definitely have gone out with him, if he asked.”
Teffinger looked at him. “Would that have bothered you?”
The young man laughed. “Me? Dude, I’m gay. I thought you knew that and that’s why you’ve been hitting on me.”
Teffinger must have had a look on his face.
The young man laughed and said, “Dude, re
lax, I’m just messing with you.”
Suddenly his cell phone rang and Baxter’s voice came through. “Nick, where are you?”
She sounded panicked.
He knew immediately why she called. The press conference had been scheduled for eleven o’clock. He looked at his watch, 10:50. “Shit,” he said. “I’m on my way.” Then, as he was running out of the office and down the stairs, “Do me a favor and get the number of the FBI office that covers Columbus, Ohio.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“I’ll see you in ten minutes.”
Chapter Eighteen
Day Five - April 20
Friday Morning
___________
Yesterday had been a major bitch. Megan Bennett, during her great escape attempt out there in the goddamn rainstorm, managed to bury the front end of the Camry right down to the axle. It took two filthy hours out of Ganjon’s life to undo that little trick.
Plus the sex with the woman yesterday had been disappointing. It’d been like screwing a Raggedy Ann doll. The way he’d build it up in his mind over the past few weeks, she’d be fighting him off like crazy. The lack of resistance was a major frustration.
Afterwards she said, “Hope you like Hepatitis C, asshole.”
That was yesterday.
Today, at least so far, was a hundred percent better. Megan Bennett admitted that she had just been jerking him around with the Hepatitis C comment. Also, she was the one to actually initiate the sex this morning, after he showered her. No more limp noodle. Obviously, the whole thing was just a desperate attempt to try to ingratiate herself on the hopes that he’d be stupid enough to think that she actually liked him.
He wasn’t that obtuse but still it was nice. He was already thinking about tonight. Maybe he’d look around in the kitchen and see if he could find some candles.
They had cereal and milk for breakfast. Then, after she promised to behave herself, he tied her hands behind her back and took her out for a walk in the foothills to get some exercise. The sky was one of the brightest blues he’d ever seen. Sunlight washed over everything and the temperature couldn’t have been more perfect.
