Dark Hunger (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by Jagger, R. J.

  Got you.

  “Her name’s London,” Tripp told the cat. “Do you like that? Personally, I think it’s sort of cool.”

  London.

  London Fontelle.

  Are you a vampire, darling?

  Or just a friend of Rave Lafelle’s?

  He spotted a pen and notepad next to the phone on the nightstand, wrote the information down and stuffed it in his wallet.

  Then he went through the closet.

  The woman had some clothes hanging, but not many. Probably only what came out of the suitcases. The rest of her stuff turned out to be in the middle dresser drawer—thongs, bras, socks and T-shirts, primarily. Tripp stuffed one of the thongs, a white one, into his left front pants pocket.

  “Don’t tell,” Tripp said to the cat.

  Then his cell phone rang.

  He looked at the incoming number.

  Jake VanDeventer.

  Weird.

  They weren’t supposed to hook up until later.

  “We got trouble,” VanDeventer said. “How soon can you get over here and pick me up?”

  Trouble?

  How could there possibly be trouble?

  They weren’t doing anything today except staying low and waiting for tonight.

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Okay,” VanDeventer said. “Stop at a gas station first and fill the tank.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here.”

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Day Seven—April 18

  Monday Afternoon

  ______________

  RAVE DIDN’T FIND MUCH OF INTEREST in the short time she had to snoop around inside Twist’s loft before Parker picked her up. She did find one thing, though—namely a reference to a woman named Suzanne Wheeler from “Montreal.” There was no address or phone number, but this had to be the person Parker referred to who did the genealogy work.

  The person who was working on Rave’s file.

  Which was one of the three stolen by the slayers.

  Suzanne Wheeler.

  Rave memorized the name but didn’t write it down.

  When Parker showed up, Rave played him the two songs she wrote this morning. The expression on his face was one of awe, but he wasn’t as happy as Rave expected him to be.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, really, I can tell,” she insisted.

  He paused.

  Then he said, “You’re going to be huge. You’re going to outgrow me.”

  She laughed.

  “Are you serious?”

  He was.

  So she got serious too.

  “Don’t even worry about it,” she said.

  “I already have a picture in my mind,” he said. “Concerts, recording studios, managers, parties, fans—the whole superstar thing. I’ll be squeezed out.”

  She put her arms around him.

  And pulled him tight.

  “That will never happen, Parker,” she said. “I swear.”

  “You mean it?”

  “With all my life,” she said. “Now, show me New York.”

  PARKER SHOWED HER NEW YORK.

  Times Square.

  The Statue of Liberty.

  Wall Street.

  “I don’t want to go back to Denver,” Rave said as they walked through the heart of the city; two people in a crowd of a million. “I want to stay here. I feel safe here. There’s nothing left for me in Denver at this point.”

  “What about your gig at the Old Orleans?”

  “I’m going to call Tim Pepper and see if we can get out of it,” she said. “If we can’t, I’ll finish up, obviously. But I only have Tuesday through Saturday left, in any event. Then I’m booked for a month in Los Angeles. I’m assuming that Vegas will start within a month or two after that. Will you come with me to L.A.?”

  “You want me to?”

  She squeezed his hand.

  “We need to stay together, Parker,” she said. “I don’t want to be apart from you.”

  He chuckled.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You know why you want to move to New York, don’t you?” he asked. “It’s Twist. She has a hold on you.”

  Rave considered it.

  True.

  But only to an extent.

  “Twist is nice but she isn’t you, Parker,” she said.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Day Seven—April 18

  Monday Afternoon

  ______________

  THE EARLIEST THAT PETER POINDEXTER could meet was around one o’clock, when he’d be in the Fisherman’s Wharf area. Teffinger and London got there at noon and had fresh crab for lunch. The fog lifted, patches of blue sky emerged, and the temperature climbed into the sixties. They wandered around the marina—checking out the fishing boats and watching the seagulls fight over fish guts. Ten minutes later the reporter showed up.

  He turned out to be a crusty, sailor-looking man, about sixty, with a three-day shadow on his face, and gray hair slightly out of control.

  Teffinger liked him right away.

  They ended up sitting on a dock, dangling their feet over the edge.

  “I used to fish these boats when I was a kid, during the summers, back in high school,” Poindexter said. “That was more years ago than I’m going to admit. Last year, I went out for a day, just for grins. Nothing had changed. They still eat sardines out of cans, piss over the side, drink like wild banshees and shoot seagulls.” He looked at London and then said to Teffinger, “I like your woman. Be good to her. Take it from someone who’s been there. So, you want to know about the Barbara Rocker case, right? Is that the deal?”

  “That’s the deal,” Teffinger said.

  THEN HE EXPLAINED THE SITUATION in more detail than he had over the phone this morning, including his run-in with Mark Yorke.

  “That guy’s a flaming incompetent,” Poindexter said. “It’s all politics, that’s how he got that high to begin with. Yorke couldn’t catch VD in a Singapore whorehouse.” He looked at London and said, “Excuse the French.”

  Teffinger jumped in.

  “One of your articles mentioned that a couple of persons of interest were questioned early in the case,” he said.

  “True.”

  “Do you recall who they were?”

  Poindexter retreated in thought and scratched his head.

  “Not offhand, but I’d have it in my notes,” he said.

  “So what were the circumstances?”

  “One of the guys was someone she’d been drinking with at the club that evening,” Poindexter said. “The other guy was someone who cruised past her house a couple of days before she disappeared.”

  Teffinger raised an eyebrow.

  “Tell me about him.”

  Poindexter shrugged.

  “There wasn’t much to it, really,” he said. “Barbara Rocker lived in a beach house that daddy bought for her. Well, beach house isn’t the right term. The house itself actually sits on a bluff across the bridge, north of the city. It feeds off a public road, but has a long gated driveway with a lot of cameras. After she disappeared, the videos were pulled and the same car was seen driving by the place twice. The police ran the plates and it turned out to be a rental from Hertz out at the airport. The guy turned out to be staying in a hotel. When the cops talked to him and asked what he’d been doing on the road, he said he was driving around looking for houses for sale and getting acquainted with the area.”

  “And?”

  “And, as I remember it,” Poindexter said, “the guy didn’t have an alibi for the time Rocker disappeared. However, no one from the club had ever seen him. And, it turned out, he was some rich diamond miner from Johannesburg; so he actually had enough money to buy the kinds of properties he was scouting around for. Plus, he had no motive whatsoever. So he dropped off the radar screen real quick.”

  Teffinger frowned.

/>   He hoped for more.

  But now saw it was nothing.

  THEN HE RAISED AN EYEBROW and said, “Were there other houses for sale on that road at that time?”

  Poindexter laughed.

  “Now that is something I would have no idea of,” he said. “Why?”

  “You said the guy drove by twice,” Teffinger said.

  “Right.”

  “If there was a property for sale, I could see why he might drive down the road twice,” Teffinger said. “But if there wasn’t, I don’t know why he would.”

  “He could have gotten lost,” Poindexter said. “Those roads twist more than a hundred snakes.”

  Teffinger considered the theory.

  Then he said, “When a guy is that rich, time is everything. Guys like him don’t get lost.”

  Poindexter chuckled.

  “You can tell that about the guy? Without ever having met him?”

  “I’ve met plenty of guys like him,” Teffinger said. “Were the two passes on the same day or different days?”

  “Different, if my memory’s correct.”

  “Can you do me a favor? Check your notes and let me know what the guy’s name is.”

  Poindexter called his wife at home and asked her to pull the file from the basement.

  Five minutes later Poindexter’s phone rang.

  He answered, listened, said “Thanks,” and hung up.

  Then he looked at Teffinger and said, “Jake VanDeventer. That’s confidential, though. The police slipped me his name on the side.”

  Teffinger nodded.

  And said, “Don’t worry.”

  They talked for two minutes.

  Then Poindexter had to run.

  Teffinger gave the man a hundred dollar bill and said, “Take the wife out to dinner for pulling the file.”

  AFTER POINDEXTER LEFT, London asked, “Now what?”

  Good question.

  “Now we find a realtor,” he said. “I want to know if there were any other properties for sale on Barbara Rocker’s road last February. If there weren’t, I’m going to get real interested in Mister Diamond Miner.”

  “But he has no motive, Teffinger,” she said.

  True.

  That was the problem.

  “Why would some rich guy from Johannesburg come all the way to San Francisco and kill some woman that he couldn’t possibly know?” London added.

  Teffinger shrugged.

  He didn’t know.

  “Some guys don’t like to pee in their own backyard,” he said. “Sometimes it’s nothing more complicated than that.”

  London punched Teffinger’s arm.

  “Thanks for the visual,” she said.

  “You’re welcome for the visual,” he said. “And I’ve got more, if you want ’em.”

  FROM FISHERMAN’S WHARF, Teffinger and London rented a Saturn and drove north across the Golden Gate Bridge to Barbara Rocker’s beach house, which had since been sold to a third party. The road weaved parallel to the coastline and fed multi-million dollar estates that sat on cliffs and overlooked the Pacific.

  A mile or so down the road from Rocker’s place, they came across a house for sale by realtor Jim Hansen, “Specializing in Fine Coastal Estates.”

  Teffinger pulled to the shoulder, killed the engine, called him, and explained the situation.

  Hansen said, “February of last year?”

  “Right.”

  “There were two properties for sale on that road,” he said.

  The words shocked Teffinger.

  “There were?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Hansen chuckled.

  “Because I was the realtor on both of them,” he said.

  “Did someone named Jake VanDeventer look at either of them?”

  “VanDeventer … VanDeventer … the name rings a bell …”

  “He’s from Johannesburg,” Teffinger added.

  “Right,” Hansen said, “the diamond miner. Yeah, I remember him now, a tough looking guy. He reminded me a little of a cowboy out of one of those old black-and-white westerns. He looked at the Fitzgerald property but didn’t like it. He was looking for something a little more contemporary.”

  “Thanks,” Teffinger said. “I really appreciate your time.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “By the way, do I know you? You sound familiar.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Teffinger hung up and slumped behind the wheel.

  “Dead end,” he told London. “We’re back to square one.”

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Day Seven—April 18

  Monday Evening

  ______________

  THE DIRECTIONS FROM DENVER TO LAS VEGAS are simple: take I-70 west until it ends, turn left, and keep going until you see the lights and hear the hollering. Tripp was at the wheel, keeping the vehicle exactly at the speed limit, leaving Grand Junction in the rearview mirror and heading into the deeper desert of western Colorado.

  Jake VanDeventer sat in the passenger seat.

  Reading a book called Lawyer Trap that someone left behind at a rest stop.

  “Is that thing any good?” Tripp asked.

  VanDeventer looked up and said, “It’s got a good bad guy in it.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jack Degan.”

  Tripp chuckled.

  Jack Degan.

  “He sounds tough. I always wanted to be a bad guy in a book,” Tripp said. “Does he look like you or me?”

  VanDeventer flipped back a number of pages until he found the passage he was looking for and said, “Not hardly. Here’s what the book says about him—Jack Draven know if he was an Indian, a Mexican, or just a really dark white man. Nor did he give a shit. Most people took him for an Indian on account of the high cheekbones, the thick black ponytail and the scar that ran down the right side of his face, all the way from his hairline to his chin. It had been there ever since he could remember. He had no idea how he got it, but did know that he wouldn’t erase it even if he could.

  “Nope, that’s not you or me,” Tripp said.

  VanDeventer agreed.

  And continued reading.

  HE WAS RELAXED NOW, in stark contrast to when he called Tripp earlier this afternoon. Tripp had to admit, in hindsight, that VanDeventer hadn’t exaggerated when he said they had trouble. A TV news report had flashed a composite sketch of VanDeventer as a person of interest in connection with the murder of Forrest Jones, who was found with a wooden stake through his heart. Obviously the female detective in Ohio got a much better look at VanDeventer than she should have.

  After seeing the news report, VanDeventer’s plan was simple.

  Get out of Denver.

  At least for a day or two.

  And do it without using a bus, train or plane.

  So now Tripp was driving him to Las Vegas.

  Tripp would rent a room.

  VanDeventer wouldn’t be on the registry or use a credit card.

  VanDeventer would spend the night with Tripp.

  Then, in the morning, VanDeventer would buy a cash bus ticket to L.A. He’d hang out there, poised to head back to Denver in a heartbeat if Tripp needed his help.

  “WE’RE GOING TO GET TO TOWN ABOUT MIDNIGHT,” Tripp said. “I’m thinking that we should head over to the Spearmint Rhino and get stupid.”

  The Rhino?

  What’s that?

  Tripp chuckled.

  “Haven’t you ever been to Vegas before, man?”

  “No.”

  “The Rhino’s one of the best strip clubs there,” Tripp said. “Premium, Grade-A ass. Friendly ass. Very friendly ass.”

  “I thought you were getting sweet on that woman. What’s her name—?”

  “Brittany.”

  “Right, Brittany,” VanDeventer said.

  “That’s my point,” Tripp
said. “I’d be with her tonight, getting some, if I wasn’t out here in the middle of the desert driving in the wrong direction.”

  VanDeventer grunted and went back to reading.

  Two heartbeats later he looked over and said, “If you really meant what you just said, I have a proposition for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Did you mean what you just said?”

  “I did.”

  “Okay, then call her up right now and see if she wants to fly out tonight,” VanDeventer said. “If she does, you guys can get a second room somewhere so she doesn’t see me. I’ll pay for everything, both rooms, her flight out, the whole thing.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Dead.”

  Tripp called Brittany.

  She listened, hung up, checked with the airlines and phoned back ten minutes later.

  “There’s a flight I can catch,” she said. “It arrives in Vegas at 11:23 p.m.”

  “Good,” Tripp said. “When you get in, take a cab to the Mirage and call me on the way.”

  “This is so romantic.”

  Tripp hung up.

  “Done deal,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “You’ll enjoy that better than the Elephant,” VanDeventer said.

  “The Rhino.”

  “What Rhino?”

  “It’s called the Rhino, not the Elephant.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You should get your nose out of that book,” Tripp said. “You’re missing some of the best scenery on the face of the planet.”

  VanDeventer looked out his window.

  And through the windshield.

  Then went back to reading.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Day Seven—April 18

  Monday Night

  ______________

  PARKER DIDN’T GET RAVE BACK to the loft until after dark. Twist was waiting for them, barefoot, in a simple, short white dress, looking even more incredible than last night. No one else was in the room. Twist hugged Parker and then gave Rave a long sensuous kiss on the lips.

  “You taste like New York,” Twist said.

  “Is that good or bad?”