by R. J. Jagger
Ganjon smiled as he watched his accomplice work.
“Welcome to the dark side.”
The lawyer looked up at him, hard. “Just don’t get caught.”
Ganjon felt the need to remind him of just how fortunate he was. “I’m doing you a favor, counselor. The cops are going to think that whoever took her the first time took her this time too. I’ll kill her tomorrow around noon. You just be sure you have a solid alibi when that happens. Then you’re home free.”
The lawyer looked straight into Ganjon’s eyes. “So, what, we’re even, then?”
Were they?
Ganjon had to think about it for a second.
Northway at least tried to kill Kelly before, even though he didn’t quite get the job done. And today’s help was invaluable. Still, the lawyer hadn’t actually taken a life yet. He still hadn’t delivered a package with real pictures.
“We’re even for a while,” Ganjon said. “But you still need to perform, eventually.”
Ganjon wasn’t sure, but it looked like Northway was actually relieved that he hadn’t been let completely out of his deal.
“Okay, fair enough.”
Ganjon removed the keys from the trunk, slammed the lid and walked to the side of the car. This was it.
“Remember, have your cell phone with you all the time,” Ganjon said, “in case I get pulled over and need you to verify that I have permission to use the car. When I get to California I’ll call you and make arrangements to get the vehicle back. No one will ever know.”
“Just don’t get caught.”
Ganjon contemplated it. “I shouldn’t, everyone’s looking for a Camry. But if I do, I’ll keep my mouth shut and you get me a lawyer. Then we’ll think of something that gets me bail and keeps you out of it. I owe you that much.”
The two men shook hands.
“Take care.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Day Twelve - April 27
Friday Afternoon
____________
Teffinger couldn’t stand it anymore, told Sydney that she was in charge of everything until he got back, and took the steps two at a time up to the sixth floor to see how Kwak was coming along in the forensics lab.
Not knowing what happened to Kelly was driving him crazy.
He’d been smart enough to hit the record button on his telephone when he started picking up distant voices from Kelly’s cell phone, then gave the tape to Kwak to see if he could enhance it.
But that was more than an hour ago.
When he walked into the lab three or four people sat around a computer arguing about whether a particular phrase was “take care” or “take her.” They were playing it over and over and Teffinger could barely tell that it was a human voice, much less what the words were.
“Sounds like ducks fighting,” he said.
Kwak looked up at him and said, “Come over here and look at this,” referring to the screen of a second computer, a laptop. It turned out to be a transcript of a conversation between Voice 1 and Voice 2.
He scrolled through it and couldn’t believe his eyes.
“Print me a copy of this, please and thank you.”
As he grabbed the paper from the printer, Kwak warned him, “It’s just a work-in-progress, don’t take it to the bank.”
“Keep working on it,” Teffinger said. Then, “Did I say thank you?”
“Yes.”
Teffinger walked out, “Well there, you have it twice.”
Within five minutes they had a BOLO out on Northway’s car, a white Mercedes sedan, Colorado license plate number CKM 994, possibly heading to California, with a hostage in the trunk. The suspect should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.
Fifteen minutes later, Teffinger and Sydney were in the nosiest helicopter in the world, following I-70 west into the Rocky Mountains, on the hunt for a vehicle that had, at this point in time, an hour and a half jump on them.
The sky was gray and a light rain dripped out of it.
As he studied the cars on the interstate beneath them, putting the binoculars on every one that was white, he remembered the lawyer, Michael Northway, and called back to headquarters to get an arrest warrant out for his ass; on a charge of aiding and abetting the abduction of Kelly Ravenfield, for starters.
“If this guy’s smart, he’ll pull over somewhere until it’s dark,” Sydney commented at one point.
Teffinger nodded.
“My fear is that he going to drive back to wherever Megan Bennett is, take her and Kelly out, pick up his stuff, wait until dark, dump the bodies somewhere, and then take the back roads out of the state,” Teffinger said. “That’s what I’d do.”
Lightning flashed directly outside their window and Teffinger couldn’t have jumped higher if he had been plugged directly into it. Sydney laughed and said, “You should see your face.”
Then the aircraft abruptly dropped, straight down, and bottomed out on a floor of air with a spine-compressing thud. Sydney’s face was a lot more graven now.
“Got some chop,” the pilot said.
No shit.
Teffinger looked straight ahead out the pilot’s window.
The sky was charcoal-gray, swirling and insane.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Day Twelve - April 27
Friday Evening
____________
Kelly heard someone put a key into the trunk lock, coming for her, and braced. A second later the pitch-black world turned to light. She closed her eyes and then opened them a slit. Someone grabbed her hard and yanked her out forcefully, a man, the big one from the parking garage who had been arguing with Northway.
“Get your ass out here,” he said, waving a knife back and forth in front of her face, not more than a few inches away.
He looked insane and his voice sounded vaguely familiar.
He grabbed her head hard, held it like a vise in one hand, and ran the blade down the side of her cheek, drawing a line of blood.
Then he pushed her away and stared at her.
“Walk back, good, good, now stop, right there. Spread your legs, wider, wider, good. Now stay just like that, stay absolutely still. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
She stood there, with her hands tied behind her back and blood dripping off her face, while he lowered himself until he was sitting on the ground.
He leaned back against the car and stared at her.
She looked around. It was dusk and they were in some kind of an old mining field.
Lunar looking mounds of yellow mine tailings dotted the landscape for as far as you could see, each one marking the location of an old abandoned vertical shaft. Roads snaked through the area, no doubt once used to cart away underground treasures. It didn’t look like they had seen any activity for a long time, though, based on the weed infestation. She guessed that the old mine tailings contained heavy metals that the rains leached into the rivers below. So there was a good chance this was a Superfund site and, if so, it was probably well posted as a no trespass area.
No one would be coming around.
She sensed that he pulled in here to hide until it got dark.
Kelly turned her attention back to the man and was awestruck by his muscles.
“I’m not the one who abducted you before, in case you’re wondering,” he said. “That was your Michael Northway friend who rolled you into the river.” He paused, then laughed. “Life’s a bitch, sweetie.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” she said.
He picked up a rock and threw it, then said, “I came real close to taking you and your little friend out that night when you two were getting drunk in that stupid little dive on Colfax. But then I came up with an even better idea. I decided to pay a little visit to Mr. Northway, who still owed me a kill, and make him an offer. We ended up having a little talk in his study. I gave him a choice to kill either you or the other woman, Jeannie Dannenberg. If he did that, I’d call it even
. If he didn’t, everyone would die, including him. He thought that was fair, and chose you.”
Kelly didn’t believe it.
Northway would never kill anyone.
Especially her.
They were friends.
“Bullshit,” she said.
The man grinned.
“He choose you over Jeannie Dannenberg and I’ll tell you why. I already used D’endra Vaughn’s cell phone to send you a warning message. Your lawyer friend just happened to have an alibi the night that I took the Vaughn woman out. Northway wanted me to give him that cell phone. Then after he abducted you, he used it to call your friend, Nick Teffinger. That way Teffinger would think that whoever took you was the same person who killed the Vaughn woman, which in turn meant that it couldn’t be the counselor. So, with you he gets an alibi. With Jeannie Dannenberg, he doesn’t. So don’t take it personal.”
The man shook his head, in apparent respect.
“You got to hand it to the man,” he went on, “he’s got a knack for this shit.”
She was confused.
“But Michael Northway’s not the one who owed you a kill. It was his client.”
The man laughed.
“There is no client, honey, there never was a client. Your lawyer friend is the client.”
No, that couldn’t be true. “You’re wrong. I spoke to the client myself, yesterday.”
The man smirked. “You spoke to me, bitch,” he said, using the same exaggerated voice that the client had used. “That whole thing was a charade, just one more fancy-ass trick concocted by the good Mr. Northway to get you to put pressure on your detective friend to back off.” Then he laughed. “From what he tells me, it worked too. Like I said, the guy’s a genius.”
He stopped talking and studied her, picking up pebbles and flicking them with his thumb.
“Are you the one who abducted Megan Bennett?”
He laughed.
“Brave enough to ask a question,” he said. “I like that. Megan Bennett? Yes, I’m afraid that’s me. In fact, she’s the reason I came to Denver, that plus a little business I needed to get done for a client. While I was here, I decided to pay a visit to D’endra Vaughn and the rest of you.”
“So where is she?”
“Wow, now there’s a question.” He looked at her, almost sympathetic. “I hate to tell you this, sweetie, but you need to worry a little more about you and a little less about her.”
He stood up and she saw something in his eyes that wasn’t there before. He came up to her, his face within inches of hers, reached around behind and unzipped her skirt. Then he slid it down her legs and had her step out of it.
He ripped her panties off.
He reached down and raked his fingers through her pubic hair.
He grabbed her head, like before, and ran the knife down the other side of her face, drawing another trail of blood, even deeper this time.
“I’m not going to kill you until noon tomorrow,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun right now.”
He grinned, insane looking.
“Now run! This is your chance! Run!”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Day Twelve - April 27
Friday Night
_________
They were on the ground in vail, waiting out the storm when Teffinger got the phone call. Thirty minutes ago, just after dusk, a hiker spotted a man chasing a half-naked woman with her arms tied behind her back. This was at the old mining site just northwest of Idaho Springs.
He found the pilot inside the hanger sipping coffee, and said, “We got to go, now!” Moments later they were swooping up into a turret of rain, into a dark and ominous sky, directly into the meat of the storm.
Teffinger put both armrests into a death grip and stared straight ahead.
Lighting exploded around them, so close that the sky actually shook.
Teffinger expected a direct hit at any second.
One that would take them down to a fiery death.
After what seemed like a long time, Sydney shouted, “Look!”
Teffinger forced himself to look out the window.
“What?”
“There, the car.”
Then he saw it; a white car, sideways on an old mining road, apparently stuck in mud, illuminated by the chopper’s searchlight.
“Get us down there!”
They let the chopper touch all the way down this time before jumping out. The pilot kept it on the ground, blocking the car, just in case.
Teffinger ran over to it, weapon drawn, with Sydney two steps behind. No one was in the car. The keys were gone. He saw the trunk up and ran back there to look. No one was there. He ran up front and shot both of the tires, startling Sydney who didn’t expect it.
He fought his way through the rain over to the helicopter.
“Get off the ground, I don’t want him using this thing as an escape vehicle. Keep your spotlight off us. Call for backup.”
The chopper lifted off and everything turned instantly black
A lightning bolt ripped across the sky.
Teffinger saw mounds of mine tailings everywhere.
“Watch your step,” he warned Sydney, getting his voice up so she could hear it over the pounding of the rain. “If you fall in one of those bastards you can kiss your ass goodbye.”
Suddenly something whizzed by his head.
A rock.
It must have been going a hundred miles an hour.
He whirled around but didn’t see a thing.
Damned rain.
Then suddenly something blacker than the night struck him. The gun flew out of his hand, and he landed so hard on the ground that the breath flew out of his lungs. Fists of iron pounded on his head and face from out of nowhere.
A gun fired.
It was Sydney, not firing at them, but using the gun as a light.
Again.
And again.
And again.
The barrel flashed each time, like a slow, eerie strobe light. Shapes came into focus. Before she could fire again, the force pounding the life out of Teffinger jumped off and disappeared into the night.
Sydney fired in that direction.
Bam!
Bam!
Bam!
They didn’t hear anything.
Seconds passed.
Then more.
Then more.
Then, from out of the blackness, they heard a scream.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Day Twelve - April 27
Friday Night
_________
Ganjon, to his utter disbelief, found himself pinned in a shaft, at least twenty feet down. Both arms were locked immobile at his side. He tried to move, desperate, and realized decisively that that was not going to happen. Blood poured into his eyes. He tried to shake his head, to get it to change course but it did no good. He was in water up to his chest.
He called out for help, in a panic.
It felt like his right knee was broken. The pain was terrible, shooting up his spine and straight into his brain.
He called and called and called.
Then something happened.
He heard a man’s voice, far above and faint, but definitely a human voice.
“Where is Kelly Ravenfield?”
He shouted back, “She escaped. She’s safe somewhere. Get me out of here.”
“Where is Megan Bennett?” the voice questioned.
He slipped down further in the hole, bringing the water even closer to his head. He could hear the rain wash down the sides of the shaft.
“Where is Megan Bennett?”
“She escaped.”
“Bullshit! Where is she?”
“She escaped, that’s the goddamned truth!”
No more shouting came from above.
“Hey, are you up there?”
No answer.
He called, again and again and again.
For at least two minutes.
The water was definitely rising. He was certain of that now and struggled with all his might to free his body.
Damned rock!
Then a voice came from above. “Here’s the deal. You’re going to tell me where Megan Bennett is. Then I’m going to send someone out there to verify it. If we find her and she’s alive, then I’m going to call a rescue team in here to get you out. If you don’t tell me where she is, or if she’s dead, then you can rot in there. My report’s going to say you ran off into the night and we had no idea where you went.”
He screamed.
“Get me out of here!”
Teffinger paced above the hole, then kicked rocks into it.
He got on his hands and knees and shouted in, “Last chance, asshole. You tell me where Megan Bennett is, right this second, before I start dropping rocks on your goddamn head!”
A pause.
“Get me out first. That’s the deal.”
He picked up a rock the size of a golf ball and threw it down with all his might.
“There’s your deal!” he said. “How do you like it, huh? Is that good enough for you?”
“Nick, stop!” The words came from Sydney, who shoved him hard in the chest. “Don’t do it! He’s not worth it.”
Teffinger knew she was right but didn’t care.
He pushed her to the ground, picked up another rock and threw it so hard that his arm hurt.
“Talk!” he shouted into the hole. “Where is Megan Bennett? Where is Megan Bennett? Where is Megan Bennett? Do you hear me? Where is Megan Bennett?”
A pause, then, “Okay, stop, I’ll tell you . . .”
“Tell me now!”
“Okay, calm down, she’s south of Denver . . .”
Teffinger got Katie Baxter on the phone and fed her the directions, staying on the line as she tore down I-25 at well over a hundred miles an hour.
“How you doing?” he questioned.
“Two miles to the turnoff,” she said. A short time later, “Okay, I’m getting off.”
