License to Die (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  “Does this go all the way to the end?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  He fast-forwarded through the whole thing and called Dr. Leigh Sandt, the FBI profiler. “Leigh,” he said. “It’s me, your favorite pain in the ass.”

  “Nick? Is that you?”

  “Afraid so,” he said.

  “It’s Sunday, man. Don’t you ever give it a rest?”

  She had a point.

  He hadn’t painted a landscape in over three months, not even a quick little two-hour piece.

  “Never mind that,” he said. “I have a snuff film I need you to take a look at. The perpetrator’s wearing a mask but we’re pretty sure it’s a guy named Brad Ripley, who coincidentally just got his face shot in. The main thing I need right now is a confirmation that Ripley’s the guy in the film.”

  “Are you telling me you have an honest-to-God snuff film?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Lucky you, the whole thing on film.”

  “This is part of the four-body case,” he said. “The one CNN’s been chatting up.”

  “Interesting,” she said. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to need on our end. The guy’s wearing clothes in the film, I assume. Look around the house, find ’em and bag ’em. If the film’s good enough quality . . .”

  “. . . It is . . .”

  “. . . we’ll be able to match them to the ones in the film based on stitching and dye markings and stuff like that. Also, see if you can find other film with him in it so we can compare body posture and movements. We’ll need the guy’s exact height and weight too. Any idea when the film was made?”

  “Early April is my guess,” Teffinger said.

  “That’s five months ago. Ask around with neighbors etcetera just to see if the guy’s body has changed significantly in that time period, you know, if he went on a diet or pigged out or anything like that.”

  “Done,” Teffinger said. “By the way, did I say thanks?”

  She laughed.

  “No.”

  “Well, remind me to.”

  She smiled. “I’ll add it to the list.”

  41

  Day Seven—September 11

  Sunday Afternoon

  Technically they weren’t breaking into the law firm, since they worked there, but Aspen felt like a criminal nonetheless. She and Christina Tam entered on the 44th floor, since that’s where their offices were, and then walked up to the 45th floor where the dead-files room was located.

  No one seemed to be around.

  Still, they walked down the hall cautiously, watching for office lights, listening for even the slightest whisper of a sound.

  They made it all the way to dead-files room, closed the door quietly, and turned the lights on. Thousands of neatly labeled legal boxes sat on metal racks.

  “The mother lode,” Christina said.

  It didn’t take them long to find the box containing Rachel’s law firm items. Using a ladder, they pulled it off a shelf near the ceiling and muscled it down to the floor.

  “Heavy sucker,” Aspen said.

  Inside, among other things, they found Rachel’s Weekly Planners going all the way back to her first year with the firm. They pulled out the one from this year. On the exterior they found a yellow post-it: “Copy given to investigators 4/6—JAM.”

  “JAM means Jacqueline A. Moore,” Christina said.

  They opened it to early April, when Rachel had disappeared, and worked their way back in time. It turned out that Rachel kept a hodgepodge of handwritten information in the book, including appointments, phone numbers, client-billing start and stop times, things to-do, and whatever else that needed to be jotted down for whatever reason.

  Christina laughed.

  “What?” Aspen asked, curious.

  “I’ll look for the entry that says, Screwed Blake Gray silly this afternoon, and you look for the one that says, Christina Tam is the best associate attorney I’ve ever seen. That girl should get a raise.”

  Aspen smiled.

  “Deal,” she said. “I’ll also look for the one that says, If I ever turn up dead, Jacqueline Moore did it.”

  Unfortunately, they found nothing of use.

  Then they got to February 18. “This is weird,” Aspen said. “It’s a Monday and Rachel has no billing recorded for a period of three hours.”

  Christina studied it.

  “It’s over the lunch hour,” she said. “And look, she drove to Grand Junction later that afternoon, for a trial starting Tuesday. So she was probably packing or doing errands or something.”

  “Or,” Aspen said, “she knows she’s not going to see Blake Gray that evening, since she’ll be out of town, and they decide to grab a quickie at the no-tell motel.”

  Christina laughed, then suddenly grew quiet.

  Voices came down the hallway.

  They froze, perfectly still. As the voices grew louder Aspen recognized them. The female voice belonged to Jacqueline Moore. The other one belonged to Derek Bennett, the senior attorney who was in the meeting with Blake Gray and Jacqueline Moore on Thursday night, when they summoned Aspen to the firm in a limo and interrogated her about why she was on the news.

  She pulled up a mental picture of him—forty-something, slightly pot-marked, eyes too far apart, thinning hair, tall and muscular.

  As the voices approached, Aspen began to make out strings of words.

  “A person’s dead and we’re in it up to our asses, is what I’m saying,” the female said.

  “And like I keep saying, there’s nothing we can do about it now, so let’s just move on,” the male said.

  Then the voices disappeared down the hall.

  42

  Day Eight—September 12

  Monday

  On the car seat next to Draven sat the keys to Mia Avila’s tattoo shop, Draven’s knife, and a half-empty flask of Jack. Normally the Colorado topography on the drive to Pueblo excited him. This afternoon, however, he could only think about getting the two thousand dollars and the note out of the bitch’s safe and then getting the hell out of that damn town once and for all.

  Getting the keys to the shop was easy. They were in the woman’s purse. Getting her to tell him the combination to the safe, however, required more than a little persuasion.

  But he was a good persuader when he needed to be, a very good persuader.

  Right now the little bitch was drugged and tightly secured to the bed. He had almost killed her as soon as she gave him the combination, but at the last second he stopped himself, just in case she was screwing with him and had given him the wrong numbers.

  He’d need her alive, if that happened.

  Swinging by the farmhouse to tell Gretchen he’d be tied up with work today had been a good idea. She’d started to get lonely—horny, too. He took care of both those little problems in style and promised he’d be back this evening. In the meantime, he gave her some more money to buy more things that she’d thought of for the house.

  He could still smell her on his skin.

  He pulled into Pueblo mid-afternoon. In a perfect world he’d wait until dark. But he needed to get this done fast so he had enough day left to get the stripper, Chase, up to the cabin for tomorrow’s client, not to mention having to kill Mia Avila.

  He swung past the tattoo shop and found everything exactly as it had been before. He expected yellow crime-scene tape on the front door but found none. Good. He parked the beat-up Chevy two blocks down the street and doubled back on foot, wearing a dark blue sweatshirt with the hood over his head.

  He slipped on latex gloves, entered through the back door and locked it behind him.

  Not a sound came from anywhere.

  The only break to the silence came from the movement of air in and out of his lungs.

  Perfect.

  He found the safe exactly where the bitch said it would be, in the corner of the back room under a white sheet. It turned out to be a freestanding unit, not bolted t
o the floor, about four feet high and big enough to hold a good-sized dog. It looked to be at least fifty years old. He pictured it starting life in an old western saloon.

  Now to open it and then get the hell out of Dodge.

  He pulled the combination out of his wallet and set it on top of the safe.

  27-42-61.

  He dialed it, being careful to land exactly on the numbers.

  It didn’t work.

  Shit.

  He tried it again.

  It didn’t work again.

  What the hell?

  Sweat beaded on his forehead and he wiped it off with the back of his sleeve.

  This time he tried going to the left first, LRL instead of RLR.

  Again nothing.

  “Bitch!”

  He tried it a dozen more times, varying the number of passes, but couldn’t get the little asshole to open.

  Goddamn it!

  It had taken him over three hours to get here, all for nothing.

  The little bitch would pay for this, big time.

  She wants to play games?

  Well, he could play games too.

  He picked it up to get a feel for the weight. Using a bear hug, he got it off the ground, but barely. It had to be every bit of two hundred pounds, which would have been manageable if the damn thing wasn’t so bulky and awkward. Even if he waited until dark and pulled the Chevy up to the back door, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to muscle it into the trunk, or whether it would fit.

  He kicked it, so hard that a tingle shot all the way up his leg.

  “You little bitch!”

  He covered it back up with the sheet, opened the rear door a slit, peeked outside, saw nothing, stepped outside, and then locked up.

  The sun beat down and he knew he looked suspicious with the hood over his head, but he left it there anyway. He got to the street without encountering anyone and then walked toward the Chevy.

  Then he saw something.

  A Harley sat in front of the car.

  A biker with greasy black hair stood behind the vehicle by the license plate, talking into a cell phone and making animated gestures.

  Shit!

  Draven backed up and hid behind a pickup truck.

  Almost immediately a deep-throated rumble came from a distant street. Several bikes were coming this way.

  Draven headed away from his car, walking as inconspicuously as he could. By the time he turned down a side street, three more Harleys had pulled up to his car.

  43

  Day Eight—September 12

  Monday Morning

  With an early-morning jog under his belt, and a bowl of vitamin-packed cereal in his gut, Teffinger got to the office by seven, already fine-tuning a mental checklist of the things he wanted to get done today. He was almost positive that Brad Ripley was the man in Tonya Obenchain’s snuff film, meaning that one of the four murders was solved. The big question now is whether Ripley had killed the other three women as well.

  Yesterday, Teffinger and Katie Baxter had spent hour after hour tearing Ripley’s house apart, looking for other films. By the time Teffinger felt fairly comfortable that there weren’t any more, he was astonished to find that it was almost midnight.

  “Sorry, Katie,” he said, looking at his watch. “It looks like I worked you to death today.”

  She cocked her head.

  “Are you sorry enough that I should sleep in tomorrow?”

  He grunted.

  “Actually, I was hoping you’d come in early. Say 7:15.”

  She actually rolled into the office at 7:14, gave him a dirty look, and walked over to the coffee machine. “Here’s the problem, Nick,” she said. “You love Monday mornings. Sane people, like me for instance, don’t.”

  Actually, she spoke the truth.

  Monday mornings meant five uninterrupted days of hunting.

  He held a white bag up and dangled it. “Donuts,” he said. “White cake with chocolate frosting.”

  She pulled one out, took a bite, and said, “No, thanks, I’m on a diet.”

  Two minutes later, Sydney showed up, said hello to Katie, ignored Teffinger, and headed straight for the coffee.

  “You look like I feel,” Katie told her.

  “We need a nicer boss,” Sydney said, giving Teffinger a sideways look. “Someone who respects our First Amendment right to sleep.”

  They ended up huddled at Teffinger’s desk, the only ones in the room, pounding down coffee and coming up with a game plan.

  Then they split up.

  Thirty minutes later, Teffinger walked down 17th Street in the heart of Denver’s financial district, holding a Styrofoam cup now empty of coffee. The city bustled around him, smelling like tar and perfume. He swung into an Einstein Bros, stood in a short line, handed the cup to the guy behind the counter, and asked for a refill.

  “This isn’t our cup,” the guy said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Teffinger said. “But I really need coffee.”

  “Do you need it enough to pay for it?”

  He shrugged and pulled out his badge.

  “Einstein was my great grandfather,” he said. “He’d want me to have the coffee for free.”

  The guy smiled and filled the cup.

  “You should have told me right off the bat you were related.”

  Teffinger nodded.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I thought the resemblance was obvious. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.”

  He threw a five-dollar bill into the tip jar and walked out.

  Ten minutes later, he entered the lobby of the Cash Register Building on Lincoln Street, paused briefly to see if he was in the mood to get jammed into an elevator, determined he wasn’t, and opened the door to the stairwell. Seventeen stories later, with burning thighs, he entered the clean-lined contemporary lobby of Brad Ripley Concepts, a space replete with floor-to-ceiling glass, stainless steel, eclectic textures, and splashes of color.

  A young blonde sat behind the reception desk.

  She fluffed her hair as he walked over.

  “You’re the guy from the news,” she said. “The detective working on the four women who got killed down by the railroad tracks.”

  “Guilty,” Teffinger admitted. “What’s your name?”

  “Tammy.”

  “Well, Tammy, let me tell you why I’m here.”

  Then he told her, as gently as he could, that her boss was dead. Someone had shot him in the face.

  He found the kitchen, filled up with coffee, then went into Ripley’s office and closed the door while the news of the man’s death ricocheted through the halls. The name of Ripley’s snuff victim—Tonya Obenchain—didn’t seem to exist anywhere in Ripley’s office.

  It wasn’t in his Rolodex or day planner or computer or emails or anywhere else.

  Meaning what? That Ripley chose the woman out of the blue as a random encounter? That she just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time?

  Wait.

  This is interesting.

  His day planner had the word SAVE written in red ink on April 3 and April 4. Tonya Obenchain disappeared on April 3. That’s when you killed her, you little shit.

  He walked around the floor until he found the receptionist, Tammy, and asked her to come down to Ripley’s office. Then he shut the door behind them.

  “You want to be my deputy?” he asked.

  She looked at him weird.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you help me, but you don’t tell anyone what we’re doing or talking about.”

  She looked stressed but intrigued.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Teffinger smiled.

  “Good,” he said. “Now, just suppose for a minute that Brad Ripley had a dark side. A very dark side that he wanted to keep secret. Where around here would I find it?”

  44

  Day Eight—September 12

  Monday

  Aspen cranked out billable hours Monday morning, intenti
onally not doing anything that could get her in trouble, except for calling Nick Teffinger to set up a meeting.

  He suggested lunch and said he’d pay.

  “It’ll give me a chance to dispel those nasty rumors that I’m the cheapest guy on the face of the earth,” he added. Someone in the background said, Those aren’t rumors, Teffinger. They’re etched-in-stone facts.

  He suggested Wong’s, a Chinese place on Court Street, because he solved most of his cases using their fortune cookies.

  She got there first, shortly before noon, and claimed a booth with her back to the wall and a good view of the entrance. Teffinger showed up a few moments later, wearing jeans, a gray cotton shirt, and a sport coat. An elderly waitress hugged him as he looked around. He spotted Aspen and, as he walked over, she decided that he was close enough to her in age, if he decided to make a move.

  “You’re still alive,” he said, slipping into the booth. “I like that.”

  He looked good, really good, magazine-cover good.

  “That’s the first thing I check every morning when I wake up,” she said.

  He grunted and picked up the menu.

  “Anything you want, up to three dollars,” he said. She must have had a look on her face because he grinned and said, “Okay, four.”

  They ordered.

  Then he got her to tell him her life story.

  Halfway through the meal, she decided it was time to get to why she’d called the meeting. “I have to tell you what I’m going to tell you because you need to know,” she said. “But no one can know that I told you. If the word gets out, I’ll lose my job.”

  Teffinger was okay with that.

  “I think two of the lawyers in my firm might be mixed up in Rachel Ringer’s death.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Who?”

  “They’re both senior partners,” she said. “One is a woman by the name of Jacqueline Moore. The other is a man named Derek Bennett.” Then she told him about the conversation she overheard in the hallway yesterday.

  He seemed interested, but not as much as she expected.

  “I’m working another angle,” he said. “Between you and me, we’re pretty sure we know who killed one of the four women, namely Tonya Obenchain. What we’re trying to figure out now is if he killed the other three as well.”