Client Trap (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  “Ouch.”

  “By itself, that’s not weird,” Raven said. “But here’s the strange part. The night after this guy ran off the road—the very next night—his lawyer went downtown and drank Tequila until he closed a bar. They found his body the next morning on the ground by his car. He got stabbed in the spine three times.”

  “Ouch. Robbery?”

  “That’s the theory,” Raven said. “Apparently his wallet was missing.”

  “That is freaky,” Dakota said, “that they both died within 24 hours of each other. But you’re not suggesting that the voodoo priestess put a spell on them or something, are you?”

  “I’m just telling you what happened,” Raven said.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Day Three—July 14

  Wednesday Morning

  ______________

  AT ONE IN THE MORNING, Dalton cut off I-25 onto I-70 eastbound, tired as hell. He had the window down. The cold Rocky Mountain air howled in his ear and kept him awake. In another fifteen minutes he’d be at the machine shop.

  The radio was off.

  Traffic was light.

  A major change had come to his life.

  G-Drop was dead.

  It was G-Drop’s fault, pure and simple. All Dalton wanted him to do was to back off Samantha Dent and realize he was jacked up and killing her. But G-Drop got confrontational and took a swing. Dalton landed a warning punch to his face. G-Drop should have backed down but the drugs were in control. He did exactly what he shouldn’t, and attacked full force. Dalton didn’t attack back but did land enough punches to make a point about where things were heading. That’s when G-Drop spotted an iron pipe, swung it at Dalton’s head and connected with his shoulder. The pain shot straight into Dalton’s brain.

  And he couldn’t control his fists.

  G-Drop ended up on the floor.

  No longer moving.

  Maybe dead, maybe not—unconscious, for sure.

  Dalton untied Samantha.

  She immediately picked up the iron pipe, raised it as far above her head as she could, and brought it down with a terrible vengeance directly on the man’s skull.

  It cracked and indented.

  She smashed it again.

  Then she dropped the pipe, crouched in the corner and stared at the body.

  DALTON PUT HIS ARM AROUND HER until she calmed down enough to get dressed.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  Good question.

  There was a lot of blood on the floor so they mopped it up, not perfectly, but at least to the point where it wasn’t visible. Then they lined the bottom of Dalton’s trunk with black plastic garbage bags. The body went in next.

  It barely fit.

  Dalton wanted to drop Samantha off at her house before he dumped the body but she wouldn’t hear of it. “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you,” she said. “We’re doing it together.”

  He argued.

  She argued harder.

  They drove a long way into the mountains and parked on a desolate road. Then they carried the body into the darkness until their strength was gone—at least three or four hundred yards off the road.

  They drove back to Denver in silence.

  Dalton dropped Samantha off at her house.

  They hugged.

  “Do you have dishwashing gloves?” he asked.

  She did.

  “Okay, put them on and get a garbage bag,” he said. “Don’t get any fingerprints on the bag—that’s what the gloves are for. Wash your clothes, tear them up and put them in the bag. I’ll call you tomorrow with a plan on how to best dispose of them.”

  She nodded.

  Then hugged him.

  Tight.

  “I killed a man,” she said.

  “Either you did or I did. Either way, it doesn’t matter.”

  NOW DALTON WAS HEADING BACK to the machine shop. In a perfect world, he would have put Lindsay Vail back in the dungeon before he left to dump the body. But that hadn’t been an option, because of Samantha’s presence. He got back at 1:15 a.m., parked in front of the structure and immediately headed to the back.

  The dumpster was a black silhouette in a black night.

  He muscled the lid up.

  “Lindsay.”

  No response.

  “Lindsay, wake up.”

  Silence.

  He reached in but couldn’t feel her.

  So he hoisted himself up the side and jumped in, expecting to find her tucked in the corner.

  She wasn’t in the left one.

  Or the right.

  His forehead broke into a sweat as he searched the entire interior.

  Rapidly.

  Thoroughly.

  She wasn’t there.

  She was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Day Three—July 14

  Wednesday Morning

  ______________

  TEFFINGER WASN’T SURE whether to drive out to the marina and confront Raven Lee head on, right now, this morning, or whether to stay in the shadows and let Coyote keep her under surveillance.

  Sydney, however, had an opinion.

  “If they knew who the guy was, or where he was, I’d grab them by the throat and shake them until they talked,” she said. “But if Coyote’s right, they don’t know either of those. So there’s nothing there to get, at least not yet. If we leave them alone, maybe they’ll actually figure something out.”

  Teffinger gave her a sideways look.

  “I hate it when you’re right,” he said.

  “Luckily it doesn’t happen that often,” she said.

  “Actually, I think this is the first time.”

  “In that case, I’m one up on you.”

  He chuckled.

  Then said, “What I don’t get is why they’re hunting the guy. If we could figure that out, I’ll bet a lot of things would fall into place.” He stood up. “Do me a favor and find out everything you can on Raven Lee’s co-conspirator, what’s her name?”

  “Erin Asher—”

  “—Right, Erin Asher.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “Where you going?” Sydney asked.

  “On a voodoo hunt.”

  A HALF HOUR LATER, TEFFINGER HIKED UP the stairway to Radcliffe & Snow, finding the climb longer than he remembered. The receptionist said, “Hello again,” and stood up. “Shaken, not stirred, right?”

  Teffinger chuckled.

  “Actually, I wouldn’t know the difference. And I doubt that Bond would either.”

  She smiled, disappeared, and returned twenty seconds later with a cup of creamed coffee.

  “It’s stirred,” she said.

  He took a sip and said, “It tastes shaken.”

  “No, it’s stirred.”

  Teffinger made a concerned face.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Did you shake the cream before you poured it in?”

  “It probably shook a little when I picked it up.”

  “That’s probably what I’m tasting,” he said.

  She grinned and said, “Are you here just for the coffee or something else?”

  “Just the coffee,” Teffinger said. “But as long as I’m here, let’s see if Jeff Salter will talk to me for a moment.”

  IN JEFF SALTER’S OFFICE, Teffinger got right to the point. “What I want from you, on a strictly confidential basis, is a list of every person you can think of who would be happy if Ripley was dead.”

  “Why me?”

  “Who would know better than you?”

  “I guess no one, at least from a law firm perspective,” Salter said. “But Ripley and I were strictly law partners. We didn’t socialize outside the firm. So just appreciate that my list will be within those parameters.”

  A half hour later, Teffinger had a piece of paper with fifteen names on it and quick handwritten notes that he wouldn’t be able to read an hour from now.

  Salter looked
serious.

  “Remember, you wanted a list of the people who would be happy to see him dead, and so that’s what I gave you. If you want my opinion as to whether any of those people could or would actually kill him, the answer is no. Not in a million years.”

  “Got it.”

  “My understanding is that this is strictly off the record,” Salter added.

  “That’s correct,” Teffinger said. “I was never here.”

  “It’s not in my interest to make any more enemies than necessary,” he added.

  Teffinger understood.

  And appreciated the cooperation.

  “If you think of anyone else, call me.”

  He took the stairwell down.

  In the lobby, he walked over to the information desk. A bored middle-aged security guard looked up at him. Teffinger handed him the coffee cup and said, “I took this out of Radcliffe & Snow by mistake. Can you see that it gets back up to them?”

  “Sure.”

  On the way out, Teffinger saw the guy drop the cup in the trash.

  BACK AT HEADQUARTERS, Sydney told Teffinger what she’d found out about Erin Asher so far: 27, architect, no priors, clean credit history, homeowner.

  Teffinger sipped coffee as he listened.

  “Little-goody-two-shoes,” he said. “So why would someone like her be investing all kinds of time and money and brain damage to find out who the pirate is?”

  He wadded a piece of paper and tried to toss it into the middle of the snake plant. It hit an edge and fell to the carpet.

  Then he had a thought.

  A wild thought.

  Sydney must have seen it because she asked, “Now what?”

  “Okay, this is just a wild-ass theory but it goes like this,” he said. “Erin Asher was victimized by the pirate at some point in the past. Then, one day by a miracle, she sees his picture in the newspaper. Now she wants to find out who he is so she can kill him.”

  Sydney chuckled.

  “I want whatever it is that you’re smoking,” she said.

  “I’m serious,” Teffinger said. “So how can she find out who he is and keep it absolutely confidential? She can’t call us, obviously. So what she does is hire an attorney. That way she gets the attorney-client privilege, which she wouldn’t get if she hired a P.I. The attorney would never be able to tell anyone that Erin was even a client, much less what she was hired to do.”

  Sydney chewed on it.

  “I see holes,” she said.

  “Shoot.”

  “First, there’s no evidence that Erin Asher was ever victimized by anyone, much less the pirate,” she said. “Second, she’s not the kind to kill; she has too many good things going on in her life to risk it all on revenge.”

  “I got plugs for your holes,” Teffinger said.

  “Shoot.”

  “First, maybe Erin Asher never reported the incident, or maybe it happened to someone else, like a sister or a friend,” Teffinger said. “Second, she doesn’t see herself as risking anything because she thinks she’ll never be caught.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Day Three—July 14

  Wednesday Morning

  ______________

  RAVEN SPENT THE MORNING going through the CD of Lindsay Vail’s computer and making an alphabetical spreadsheet of every name she could find, together with addresses and phone numbers when available. She called the ones she could find phone numbers for, explained she was trying to locate the man implicated by the police in Lindsay Vail’s disappearance, and asked if they would give her their email address so she could send them a photo and see if they recognized the guy.

  Surprisingly most of the people cooperated.

  She scanned the pirate’s photo from the newspaper.

  And pasted it into the body of her emails.

  Mid-morning she called the Ink Spot—the tattoo shop where Erin worked while going to college—and spoke to a man named Joe Cotter. “You don’t need to send me an email,” he said. “I saw the guy’s photo in the paper. I’m pretty sure he got a tattoo here at one point.”

  Raven’s pulse raced.

  “From Lindsay Vail?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Cotter said. “This was a while back.”

  She pressed for details but Cotter’s memory was vague.

  Then she asked if she could drive down and talk to him.

  Sure.

  If she wanted.

  THE INK SPOT TURNED OUT TO BE A SEEDY hole-in-the-wall shop in a decayed section of northern downtown, too far from both LoDo and the 16th Street Mall to get the trendier foot traffic. The building looked like it hadn’t had a code inspection in twenty years. Two raggedy Harleys squatted outside.

  The wooden door was wide open.

  Meaning no air conditioning.

  Raven stepped in.

  Three men were talking.

  All were heavily tattooed.

  Two of them wore biker vests. The third man, no doubt Cotter, was about fifty. He had thinning gray hair braided into a ponytail and wore a white wife-beater shirt. They stopped talking and looked at her. The man in the white shirt said, “Are you the one I talked to before?”

  Raven walked over and shook his hand.

  “Yes, I’m Raven Lee.”

  “Give me ten minutes,” he said. “There’s coffee over there if you want.”

  Actually she did.

  She drank it outside and took a walk around the block. The two Harleys rumbled down the street and pulled up next to her. The bigger guy said, “Cotter’s free now. You want a ride back?”

  She didn’t.

  But didn’t want to piss him off, either. She needed Cotter’s cooperation and couldn’t afford a bad report.

  “Sure.”

  She hopped on and he twisted the throttle; not hard enough to throw her off the back, but hard enough that she grabbed on to him.

  JOE COTTER WAS ALONE when she got back to the shop.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” she said.

  “No problem.” His eyes ran up and down her body. “I don’t see any ink.”

  “That’s because I don’t have any.”

  “That’s what we call a clean canvas,” he said. “I could put a big red skull on your forehead if you want. Only fifty bucks.” She pictured it and must have had an expression on her face because he chuckled and said, “Relax, I’m just messing with you.” A pause, then, “It’s actually seventy-five bucks.”

  She grinned.

  “You’re too much.”

  “I try to be.” Then he got serious. “Like I was telling you, I saw the article in the paper about Lindsay. It’s a shame. If you ever find this guy, let me know because I’m going to personally rip his head off and pee in the hole.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.

  “I’m serious,” Cotter added.

  She had no doubts.

  “So you think he got a tattoo here at one point?” Raven asked.

  Cotter nodded.

  “That much I’m pretty sure of,” he said. “If I recall right, it was his own design, something in the nature of a woman hanging upside down from her feet with snakes and spiders crawling all over her body and biting her to death.”

  Raven pictured it.

  “But you didn’t call the cops when you saw his picture in the paper,” Raven added.

  True.

  “We’re not exactly on what you would call the best of terms.”

  “Understood. So how did Lindsay end up here?”

  Cotter scratched his beer gut and said, “She had a biker friend named Ninety-Nine who used to bring her in for a piece now and then. She didn’t have much money so I let her work the desk and sweep up for payment. She started hanging around and I ended up showing her how to put the ink on. She was an absolute, one hundred percent natural. Within two years she was as good as me and a whole lot better looking. Guys would ride two hundred miles to get a tattoo from me and then switch over to her once they laid eyes on her and saw p
ictures of the work she did.”

  Raven asked if she could have another cup of coffee.

  Then poured one.

  “So what do you have in the way of paperwork that might help me put a name to this guy?” she asked.

  Cotter groaned.

  “Follow me.”

  IN THE BACK STORAGE ROOM, stacks of boxes were labeled by year. “These are our carbon copies of receipts.” He took the top off the closest box and showed her. They were thrown in, unorganized. Some had complete information—name, address, phone number, tattoo title, tattoo artist, amount charged, etc. Most had only half that, or less.

  “These are the people who got a receipt,” Cotter said. “Lots of people didn’t want to mess with them, so we don’t have any records, unless they paid by credit card.”

  Cotter let her take the boxes for the four years that Lindsay worked there; and even carried them out to the 4Runner.

  “Call me if you find him,” he reminded her.

  SHE WAS A BLOCK AWAY when she had a thought and went back. Cotter was walking out of the restroom zipping his fly. “You said Lindsay had a biker friend named Ninety-Nine,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “Any chance he would know who the guy is?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Ninety-Nine is now Minus Six.”

  Raven’s confusion must have showed because Cotter added, “He’s dead.”

  Chapter Forty

  Day Three—July 14

  Wednesday Morning

  ______________

  AFTER LEAVING THE MACHINE SHOP, Dalton was too nervous to go home. He didn’t know where Lindsay Vail was and didn’t know if she spotted his wallet under the bench and went through it while he was out buying McDonald’s.