Foreign Affairs (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)
Page 10
Fallon studied him.
“You have a seriously devious mind,” she said.
Teffinger nodded.
He was about to say, You have no idea, but spotted something that looked like a public restroom a half-block down the street and said, “Is that what I think it is?”
“That depends on what you think it is.”
He headed that way.
“I’m going to check it out.”
“Hold on,” she said, and gave him a couple of coins. “You’ll need these.”
TEFFINGER’S SUSPICION WAS CORRECT. It wasn’t just a standalone public restroom, but an insanely modern one. For a few small coins, the door opened and he got up to fifteen minutes in a very clean place. A sign warned that after fifteen minutes, the door would automatically open and an automated sanitation process would begin. Teffinger didn’t need fifteen minutes. He only needed one.
“I love this town,” he told Fallon. “It’s like someone designed it around me.”
She smiled.
“We had too many people marking their territory before these,” she said, “especially at night.”
Teffinger chuckled as if he just heard a joke.
“What?”
“This reminds me of a girlfriend I had once. At a party, I went outside to take a piss. She saw it later, where my name was written in the snow. She left me.”
“Well that seems extreme,” Fallon said.
“Not really,” he said. “It wasn’t in my handwriting.”
She punched him in the arm.
“Got you,” Teffinger said.
She rolled her eyes and said, “Look at you, all proud of yourself.”
“Yes I am.”
THE CAVEMAN TAXI DRIVER, Anton Fornier, emerged from the apartment building five minutes after he entered. As they followed, Teffinger said, “That was quick. We need to get a list of the tenants in that building.”
Fallon agreed, then laughed.
“What?” Teffinger asked.
“Not your handwriting.”
THEY SPENT THE NIGHT on the houseboat, with Fallon down below in the stateroom with a gun by her side, and Teffinger under a black tarp between two storage units on the bow.
Listening.
Waiting.
Ready to pounce.
Ready to catch the killer once and for all.
Alive if possible.
His thoughts wandered. Tracy White was dead because of him. He could have captured the guy last night but didn’t, meaning Michelle Berri might end up being yet another victim of his incompetence. Should he move to Paris? Should he derail this whole stupid plan of setting Fallon up as bait? He needed to call Sydney Heatherwood, to hear her voice again and make sure she was okay, and tell her about Fallon. He needed to call the Carr-Border gallery and see if his landscapes were selling. Even more so, he needed to set a blank canvas on an easel and get the smell of turpentine in his nose. He was thirty-four; would he ever have kids?
Sleep.
Sleep.
He needed sleep.
So badly.
As of two in the morning, no one had shown up yet to kill Fallon.
Teffinger closed his eyes just to rest them for a few seconds.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Day Five—July 16
Friday Morning
______________
WHEN DEJA WOKE BEFORE SUNRISE, Alexandra wasn’t in the hotel room. She showed up ten minutes later, looking stressed. “Where were you?”
“Talking with some people.”
“Who?”
“Just some people.”
“I thought we were in this together.”
“We are, but there are still a few things you’re better off not knowing.”
“Like what?”
Alexandra ignored her, looked at her watch and said, “Let’s go, we’ve got to catch a puddle jumper to Luxor.” An hour later they were in a bumpy sky, strapped into a noisy two-prop deathtrap, following the Nile Valley south. The valley was basically one long continuous oasis, striking in its beauty.
Alexandra, it turned out, had a change of heart as to how to proceed. Instead of trying to retrace Remy’s steps to figure out how he came up with a map, she wanted to take a long shot.
“Are you afraid of snakes?” Alexandra asked.
Yes.
“Heights?”
Yes.
“Small enclosures?”
Yes.
Alexandra chuckled.
“Then one of us is going to remember today for a long time.”
“THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS is broken into two sections,” she said, “the East Valley and the West Valley. The East Valley is the important one. Over sixty tombs have been discovered there over the centuries, including King Tut’s, which was found in 1922. The West Valley, by contrast, was hardly ever used. Only one tomb has been discovered there.”
Okay.
“As a result, the East Valley has been the subject of repeated exploration and mapping,” Alexandra said. “In recent years, that’s included ground-penetrating radar. On several different occasions, explorers have officially declared that all of the tombs have been discovered. And though they still keep being found, the frequency is less and less. In my opinion, the East Valley still has a few nuggets to be found, but not many.”
“So how are we going to find something if all these explorers haven’t been able to?”
Good question.
“Okay, let’s drop back a couple of thousand years and put ourselves in the shoes of the rich guy who robbed the tomb that got discovered six months ago,” Alexandra said. “If we get caught, we’re going to be subjected to a horrible death. Plus they’ll force us to reveal where we stashed everything. That means they’ll take it back from our son’s burial site, meaning he won’t cross over into immortality. So, the incentive is extremely high to not be caught.”
Agreed.
“I mean, extremely high.”
Agreed again.
“The last thing we want to do is to get caught.”
Deja rolled her eyes.
“I get it.”
“You don’t want to get caught, do you?”
No.
She didn’t.
“Okay,” Alexandra said. “So what do you do, to not get caught?”
Deja didn’t know.
“Tell me,” she said.
“No, you figure it out.”
THEIR SEATS RATTLED and the props occasionally misfired. Vegetation and sugarcane fields hugged the denim-blue waters of the Nile below. Otherwise the topography was barren desert.
Uninhabitable.
Mean.
Unforgiving.
Dangerous.
“Okay, I have it,” Deja said. “We kill all the men we used to break into the tomb so they can’t talk.”
Alexandra smiled.
“Of course we do that,” Alexandra said. “But that’s only the beginning. What else?”
“I don’t know, tell me.”
“Tell yourself.”
Deja cocked her head. “You have a mean streak in you. Do you know that?”
SHE PONDERED IT but didn’t come up with anything. Then she did, maybe. “Okay,” she said, “I think I got it.”
“Go on.”
“If they suspect us, and dig up the son and find the stuff, we’re dead.”
Right.
“So we need to be sure they don’t find the son.”
Right.
“So what we do is have a traditional burial plot where they would expect it to be,” Deja said, “except we leave that one empty. Then we bury him somewhere else—somewhere they won’t find him.”
Alexandra smiled.
“Go on.”
“But we wouldn’t want to use anyone else to help dig the second site, partially because they might tell someone, but mostly so that they don’t go back later and rob it,” Deja said. “That means that we have to dig the second site ourselves with our own two hands.”
Right.
Keep going.
“But that will be hard work,” Deja said. “So we need to find something that’s already dug, like a cave or something.”
“Bingo.”
“And it will need to be far away from the main areas of activity so that no one stumbles on it.”
Double bingo.
“And since no one has stumbled on it yet in the East Valley where all the exploration and mapping has taken place, it must be in the West Valley, or possibly even west of that.”
Triple bingo.
Alexandra gave her a high five and said, “Congratulations, you’re now the official owner of an archeological mind.”
FROM LUXOR INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT they took a cab into the city, ate a healthy lunch and bought supplies.
Backpacks.
Flashlights.
Water.
Rope.
Food.
Sunscreen.
Hats.
A folding shovel.
A snakebite kit.
And more.
Then they were ready.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Day Five—July 16
Friday Noon
______________
MARCEL DURAND DRAGGED HIS P.I. BODY out of bed shortly before noon on Friday and pointed his forgettable face outside to find a café table in the sun and load up with coffee and food. Last night had been a bust. He watched the houseboat for hours from the shadows across the river.
It never felt right so he didn’t make a move.
Maybe tonight.
Maybe in a month.
Time would tell.
He couldn’t shake the irony that of all the illegal things he had done over the years, the one thing he didn’t do—namely, kill the boxer—might be the thing that brings him down.
The caffeine worked its way into his blood and the sunshine went to his brain.
He thumbed through the morning paper.
Then his phone rang and the voice of a woman came through. “I’d like to meet with you regarding a potential project, if you have time,” she said.
He had time.
He had time indeed.
AN HOUR LATER he knocked on the door of a nice house in the Luxembourg Quarter. A curvy brunette, still striking even in her forties, opened the door and let him in.
She was Emmanuelle Atwood.
“Anton Fornier said you could be trusted,” she said. “Is that true?”
Durand cocked his head.
“Have you ever heard of me before Anton mentioned my name?”
No.
She hadn’t.
“There are two reasons for that,” he said. “One, I keep my client’s secrets secret. And two, I even keep myself a secret. I’m not in the phone book and never have been. I work only through referrals and word of mouth. Whatever it is you tell me, and whatever it is that you want me to find out, all that stays entirely between you and me. I don’t even talk to my plants about it. In return, I’m the priciest P.I. you’ll ever meet. I work only on a cash basis paid upfront and I don’t make any promises except that you’ll get my best efforts.”
“Which are considerable, I assume.”
Durand nodded.
“In my totally unbiased and humble opinion, oui.”
She lit a cigarette.
“If I hire you, I’ll need to tell you about some delicate matters,” she said. “I don’t want anything written down. I don’t want any notes that someone might stumble across in one or five or ten years. I don’t want anything anywhere, except in your head.”
Durand pulled a pencil out of his pocket and broke it in two.
“There,” he said.
“Did Anton tell you why we want to hire a P.I.?”
“Yes.”
“So you know what will happen next, if you can find the man we’re looking for?”
Yes.
He did.
“So if you take the job, you’d almost be an accomplice,” she said.
True.
“Which gives me all the more reason to be absolutely sure that whatever gets said between us stays between us.”
The woman studied him.
“I’ll need two referrals,” she said.
Durand stood up.
“Then you’re out of luck,” he said. “Because I don’t tell anyone who my clients are, ever. Nor do I contact them and ask if they’ll talk to other people.”
The woman tossed her hair.
“Sit down,” she said. “That was the answer I was looking for. How much of a retainer do you need?”
He told her.
She disappeared into a back room, returned a minute later and handed him an envelope. He folded it in half and stuffed it in his back pocket without looking inside.
“Okay, here’s what’s going on,” she said.
Then she told him a story about a Blue Moon escort who got suffocated by a mystery man.
Durand frowned during most of it and at the end said, “This is going to be tough. You need to appreciate that upfront.”
She stood up and escorted him to the door.
“You’ll find him,” she said. Then she wrote a phone number on a piece of paper, folded it into fourths, and handed it to him. “This will be good for a while. Use it only when you have to, and call from a payphone.”
Durand stuffed it in his wallet.
Then he wrote his number on a piece of paper and left.
FROM BLUE MOON, DURAND WENT to Verdant Park, to see if the blond prostitute was there, the one who said she was twenty-five but looked forty.
She was and smiled as he walked towards her.
“You dyed your hair.”
Durand shuffled his feet. “This is sort of weird,” he said. “But I was wondering if you wanted to go out sometime, you know, maybe get dinner or something like that.”
She studied him.
Durand could read her thoughts—she was figuring out if he was trying to get sex for free—so he said, “It would just be a date, nothing more. I won’t put the moves on you or anything.” She looked as if she’d heard that before. “I promise. We’d get some food, take a walk, something simple like that. Get to know each other a little.”
She exhaled and asked if he had a number.
He did and wrote it down.
She took it and said, “I’ll think about it.”
“Okay, great.”
He turned and walked away.
She wouldn’t call.
He already knew that because she never asked his name.
Chapter Forty
Day Five—July 16
Friday Morning
______________
FRIDAY MORNING, Teffinger stayed hidden in the houseboat while Fallon headed to the office, just in case the killer was waiting to see if a man emerged. In the lower quarters, he did pushups, crunches, squats and jumping jacks until his body ached. Then he showered and took a cab to the victims’ house. He stretched out in Michelle Berri’s bed and let the empty silence wash over him, to embed the reality that she was a flesh-and-blood human being and not just a case, a human being who was still missing.
He reflected on Tracy White.
The first time they met.
The way she smiled.
When he closed his eyes he could see her down at headquarters sitting at a scratched wooden table, working with the sketch artist; and he could feel the beating of his heart as a clearer and clearer picture of the killer emerged.
Damn it.
That was such a long time ago.
He pulled the two pictures out of his shirt pocket, the pictures of the first victim, Amanda Peterson, the 22-year-old waitress who got her eyes gouged out, a green-eyed beauty brutally cut down before her life even started.
How did the killer choose her?
Did he see her on the street?
Did he bump into her at a club?
Something like Rex?
Teffinger grunted. He had asked these quest
ions a hundred times, no, a thousand. He never gave himself an answer. Why did he keep asking the same stupid things over and over? He needed fresh questions.
HE CALLED DR. LEIGH SANDT, the FBI profiler from Quantico, Virginia. She actually answered and the sound of her voice made Teffinger pull up the image of a classy woman, about fifty, with fitness-club legs—the kind of legs men kill for, Tina Turner legs.
“It’s me,” he said.
“Nick?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you—still in Paris?”
“Yes.”
“That means some poor French woman is getting her feet pointed at the ceiling by an American,” she said. “So what’s the latest victim’s name?”
Teffinger chuckled.
“Fallon.”
Fallon?
Right.
“She sounds yummy,” Leigh said.
Fallon.
“She’s half the reason I called,” Teffinger said. “I’m thinking about staying in Paris. Maybe join the CIA, if they have an office here. Do you have any connections?”
Silence.
“You wouldn’t be happy in that group,” she said. “Don’t get too enamored with Paris. Living somewhere isn’t about the buildings, it’s about the people. The people who make up your life are all in Denver.”
“Not all of them.”
“Slow down and think about it Nick, that’s all I’m saying.”
“She’s hot, did I mention that?”
“Put the little guy away and think it through.”
“The little guy?”
“You know what I mean.”
THEN HE TOLD HER the other half of the reason he called. He wanted to know if she had any way of finding out whether other women around the world outside the United States or Europe—say Japan or Australia or Thailand—got their eyes gouged out and reinserted backwards.
A pause.
“That would be a huge project,” she said, “and it would take a truckload of time. If you’re looking for another case to cross-reference in the hopes of finding a common denominator, you won’t get it in time to help the missing woman—what’s her name?”