by R. J. Jagger
“Right,” he said. “Lots of people knew Rachel. The more curious question I have involves a dead woman by the name of Samantha Stamp, also known as Chase. She was a dancer at a strip club called Cheeks. But that’s not what interests me. What interests me is that she also worked part-time at a place called Tops & Bottoms. Have you ever heard of that place? Tops & Bottoms?”
The smug expression fell off.
Teffinger could tell that the man was trying to decide if he should lie or not.
“Why do you ask?”
“Because we talked to the proprietor of that establishment. Certain names came up during that conversation. Yours was one of them.” He sipped coffee, letting the implications hang. “The rumor is that you like to stick pins in the girls.”
Bennett shot out of his chair, his hands balled in fists, and violently pushed a pile of papers off the desk.
They landed halfway across the room.
Teffinger didn’t move.
Instead he took another sip of coffee.
“Get your ass out of my office!” Bennett said. Then he looked directly at Sydney. “That means your ass too.”
Teffinger stood up, drank the last of the coffee and set the cup gently on the desk. Then he looked Bennett directly in the eyes. “You really shouldn’t talk to ladies like that. It could come back to haunt you.”
Sydney didn’t speak much on the walk back to the car. Then, right after they almost got run over at Welton by a car bursting through the wrong end of a yellow light, she said, “I think it worked.”
Teffinger agreed.
“He’s running scared. Hopefully scared enough that he’ll think twice about doing anything else stupid. I almost decked him when he talked to you that way,” Teffinger added.
“I want to be there when we catch his ass,” she said. “I want to look him right in the eyes.”
On the drive back to the office, Teffinger flicked the radio stations as he pulled his phone out to call Aspen Wilde. He paused at a song he’d never heard before. The singer had a nasally voice that sounded like Bob Dylan. The lyrics were something about a pump that didn’t work because the handles got taken by the vandals. He waited until it finished, then dialed Aspen.
“I don’t know if you heard,” he said, “but me and Sydney were at the firm just a little bit ago, meeting with Derek Bennett. We put some heat on him.” He filled her in on the details, including the fact that he’d been careful to keep her out of it. “Here’s the reason I’m calling. The guy’s a powder keg and he’s going to start exploding. If you hear of him doing anything out of the ordinary, and want to tell us about it, that would be fine with us.”
“Done deal,” she said. “Count on it.”
“Thanks.” Teffinger almost hung up, but said, “Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” he added. “Just keep your ear to the ground. And don’t let anyone know you’re doing it. Things are going to start getting really dicey from this point on.”
82
Day Twelve—September 16
Friday Afternoon
Aspen brought Christina Tam up to speed on the noose that Teffinger was dangling around Bennett’s neck. Then they took turns going up to the 45th floor, ostensibly to visit the dead-files room but actually to see if anything weird was happening in Derek Bennett’s neck of the woods.
Nothing was, nothing obvious at least.
Bennett was in his office with the door closed.
Mid-afternoon, Aspen took a stroll down the 16th Street Mall to clear her head, hugging the sunny side of the street. The city vibrated, with lots more people around than usual, poised on the edge of the weekend.
A deep blue cloudless sky floated overhead.
She ended up sitting on a bench by California Street.
Someone sat down next to her.
When she looked over, she couldn’t believe who it was—Jacqueline Moore, Cruella, in the flesh.
Clearly this wasn’t a chance encounter. The power lawyer must have discovered that Aspen was feeding information to Teffinger. She was here to fire her.
“We need to talk,” Moore said. The tone of her voice was serious. Aspen bit her lower lip and tried to appear as if she wasn’t afraid.
“Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”
Moore didn’t answer.
Instead she looked around. Her hair appeared to be slightly disheveled and her makeup wasn’t as crisp and sharp as normal. Her blouse sagged out of her skirt and could have been tucked in better. The normal confident look in her eyes wasn’t there.
“I’m leaving the firm,” she said.
Aspen studied her, to see if this was some kind of a joke, but found no lies.
“You are?”
Moore nodded. “As soon as I leave here I’m heading back to the office to type up a resignation. With the grapevine the way it is, I have no doubt that everyone will be celebrating by the end of the day.”
“Why are you leaving?”
The woman let out a nervous chuckle, as if there was so much to the answer that she didn’t even know where to begin. “That’s not the question,” she said. “The question is, why am I telling you before anyone else?”
Aspen cocked her head.
Good point.
“Okay, why?”
“Because I want to be sure I get a chance to warn you before all hell breaks loose. You need to get out of the firm. My advice to you is to go and go quickly, while you still can.”
The words hit like a two-by-four.
“Why? What’s going on?”
Moore shook her head. “I can’t get into it. Just trust me. Your life is in danger.” Then she stood up and looked at Aspen one last time. “I’ve done what I could to warn you. If something happens after this, it’s not on my shoulders.”
Then she walked away.
Aspen sat there for a few moments and then stood up and walked in the direction away from the firm. She called Teffinger from Civic Center Park and told him what had just happened.
“My suspicion is that this is some kind of fallout from the heat we put on Bennett,” he said. “Something’s going on and I have no idea what it is. But I do know that things are in motion and that I can’t have you in harm’s way. I don’t want you snooping around anymore.”
“But . . .”
“No buts,” he said. “At this point you’re officially out of it.”
“But I’m your only inside source.”
“Forget it,” he said. “It’s not going to happen. If I were you, I’d think very seriously about getting out of the firm. Right now. Today. In fact if you don’t, you’re crazy.”
She headed back to the firm, walked into Christina Tam’s office, closed the door, and filled her in on everything. Then added, “I had a stray thought, walking back here.”
“Oh? What kind of stray thought?”
“It relates to the dead guy in New York—Robert Yates,” she said. “Do you remember when we were talking about who might have a motive to kill him, if he was successful in taking over Omega and then merging it with Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I thought of someone else who has a motive.”
“Who?”
“Derek Bennett.”
Christina tried to find the connection but couldn’t. “I don’t follow,” she said.
Aspen stood up. “I got to make a run to the restroom. You’ll figure it out by the time I get back.”
But Christina didn’t figure it out, so Aspen told her. Bennett spent almost all of his time working on Omega cases, his bread-and-butter client. In the antitrust suit brought by Omega against Tomorrow, Bennett had been Omega’s pit bull, the dirty dog who didn’t play fair, the driving force behind the mega-judgment in favor of Omega and against Tomorrow. If Robert Yates succeeded in his goal of gaining control of Omega and bringing it under the umbrella of Tomorrow, then he’d control Omega’s legal work.
Robert Yates, of c
ourse, hating Bennett the way he no doubt did, wouldn’t give Bennett an ounce of work to save his life.
Bennett would be washed up.
Even Blake Gray wouldn’t be able to protect him.
Robert Yates, no doubt, would demand that Bennett be completely removed from the firm as a condition of giving the firm any further work.
“So Bennett killed him. He was smart enough to look into the future and figure out that he was boxed in. So he took Yates out as early as he could, before anyone could figure out that he had a motive.”
Christina worked out the details, looking for an inconsistency or a flaw in the theory. “How the hell do you think this stuff up?”
Aspen grunted.
“I don’t know. It just comes to me.”
“You’re in the wrong business, lady. There’s only one thing that doesn’t make sense. Bennett was in Denver when Robert Yates got killed, so he couldn’t have done it.” She smiled. “Other than that little fact, very good theory.”
Aspen stood up, put her hands on the desk and leaned across. “Let me rephrase it,” she said. “Bennett killed Yates. By hiring someone to do it.”
83
Day Twelve—September 16
Friday Afternoon
Draven found a perfect grove of trees in the open space about a half mile behind Davica Holland’s house. He looked around one last time, still saw no one even remotely close, and then lay down flat next to a log. A stick pushed against his stomach. He pulled it out and threw it to the side.
There.
Perfect.
This would work.
He got up long enough to pull a pair of Bushnell binoculars out of the backpack, then flopped back on his belly and pulled in the view.
Damn!
Davica Holland was in the backyard by the pool, reclined in a lounger, facing his direction, pointing her chin at the sun, totally naked, nicely tanned.
Her feet were comfortably apart. He studied the area between her legs and decided that he was actually seeing her pussy.
The corner of his mouth turned up.
“Sweet.”
The woman was hot—not just mildly hot, sizzling. He already knew that after he snatched her, before he turned her over to the client, he’d spend more than a little quality time with her, maybe even a full day, in fact, definitely a full day, maybe two.
He could already feel his cock between her legs and sandwiched between her tits.
“Oh, man.”
She shifted in the lounger, pulling her arms over her head to tan her armpits; so nice, so incredibly sexy.
He pulled the lens away from her long enough to train on the house, looking for a way in. From what he could tell, there were at least three doors on this side of the house. Also, there was a window well on the south edge of the structure, near the back. He could hop down into it and be out of sight, then pry open the window with a crowbar.
There were lots of options.
The big issue is whether she had an alarm system. He hadn’t seen any signs in her front yard warning of one. Even if she had one, he’d probably be able to get to her pretty fast if he came for her while she was sleeping. Then he could get her out the back, through the open space to his car, and be gone by the time anyone pulled up to the front of the house.
He trained the binoculars back on her.
She was masturbating now.
Keeping the binoculars in his right hand, he shoved his left hand down his pants and rubbed his cock, picturing his cum on her face.
In one minute he was rock hard.
He maintained control, timing it so that he came exactly when she did.
Later that afternoon, Draven was back at the farmhouse, throwing rocks at squirrels and anything else that moved, when Swofford called. “The client’s supposed to be getting into Denver soon to finish off the tattoo woman.”
“He better be,” Draven said. “I’m sick of having her around. She’s a serous liability at this point.”
“Agreed. I told him twenty-four hours, max. We can’t wait any longer than that.”
“Good,” Draven said. A robin perched on a limb, about fifty feet away, chirping. Draven threw a rock at it, missing by more than five feet but scaring it enough to send it scrambling into the sky. “Also, we got a slight complication at the cabin. Apparently some water guys are going to be coming around to check out the well for some stupid reason. They’re only going to be there a couple of minutes and won’t need to go into the house or anything, but I’m not sure when they’re coming, so I moved the woman over to the place I’m staying at in the meantime.”
“Smart move. God, nothing’s easy.”
“You got that right,” Draven said. “Anyway, I positioned some wood by the well, which they’ll have to move, so I’ll know when they’ve been there.”
“Well, tomorrow’s Saturday,” Swofford said. “We won’t have to worry about them over the weekend.”
Draven agreed.
“Changing subjects, how are you coming along with Davica Holland?”
“Circling and closing,” Draven said.
“Good.”
“She’s a looker,” he added.
“So I hear. Just remember to not mark her up. That’s for the client to do. He’s very insistent on that.”
84
Day Twelve—September 16
Friday Evening
Jacqueline Moore lived in an expensive penthouse loft on Larimer Street, not far from Coors Field in the heart of LoDo—a place befitting the stature of a senior partner in one of Denver’s most established law firms. After work, about six o’clock, Teffinger pointed the Tundra toward that loft to have a chat with her.
Mean charcoal clouds blew in and filled the sky.
Rain dropped on the city.
He set the windshield wipers to intermittent, but they made a god-awful noise every time they raked back, so he turned them off and made a mental note to replace the blades.
He wanted to know exactly why Moore had quit the firm. And why she’d warned Aspen that her life was in danger. More importantly, he wanted to confirm that the source of that danger was Derek Bennett, and find out if she had any information as to how or when he might strike.
Jacqueline Moore was definitely in the mix of things, dirty up to her elbows.
That was obvious from the conversation in the hallway that she had with Derek Bennett, referencing a murder, overheard by Aspen and Christina Tam—that and her strange behavior today. If it turned out that she was only nominally involved, however, maybe he could scare her into turning state’s evidence.
Either way, he needed to squeeze her.
He circled around the area, caught up in a claustrophobic press of traffic, finally finding an empty spot on Walnut. He used to carry an umbrella in the Tundra, but it mysteriously disappeared more than a year ago.
He stepped into the rain, making a mental note for the fifth or sixth time to get another umbrella, and then hoofed it over to the building.
By the time he got there, he was soaked.
A security guard sat behind a desk in the lobby, strategically positioned to protect the elevators. She was a woman in her mid-twenties, dressed in a dark blue uniform with her hair pulled into a no-nonsense ponytail.
Teffinger flashed his badge. “I need to see Jacqueline Moore,” he said.
She studied his eyes and then said, “She’s not in.”
“You sure?”
She was.
She would have seen her. Also, there was no elevator activity going to the penthouse since early this morning.
“How late are you on duty today?” he asked.
“Two.”
“In the morning?”
“Right.”
He handed her his card. “Do me a favor,” he said. “As soon as she shows up, call me on my cell phone, no matter what time it is. Also, I’d appreciate it if she didn’t know I’m looking for her. Do you think you could help me out with that?”
She
could, and would, and stuffed the card in her pocket.
“I like your eyes,” she said. “Especially the green one.”
From there he went straight to Davica’s place. They took a long run in the rain and then showered together. She kept trying to massage his cock and he let her, but only a little.
“As soon as I have this case buttoned up,” he said, “you’re going to get more of the little fellow than you ever wanted.”
She frowned and rubbed soap on his chest.
“You’re driving me nuts. I can’t wait that long.”
“Me either,” he said. “But it may be any day now. Let’s just give it a little more time.”
She rubbed her stomach on his.
“You’re the biggest tease I’ve ever met in my life.”
“Trust me, I’m not trying to be.”
While Davica went into the kitchen to see if she could find anything edible in the freezer to microwave, Teffinger went into the garage and sat behind the wheel of the ’67.
A plan came to him; a plan precipitated by the fear that Derek Bennett might actually strike Aspen tonight, or if not tonight, then this weekend.
He pulled out his cell phone and made a number of calls to set it in motion. Everyone cooperated and sprang into action, even though it was Friday night.
Then Davica opened the passenger door and stuck her head in. “There you are,” she said. “I found food.”
“Excellent.”
He was starved and would need the energy for tonight.
“You look weird,” she added.
“I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Whether I should bring you with me tonight or not.”
“You better,” she said. “You owe me something after the way you keep teasing me. So where are we going, exactly?”