License to Die (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)
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He stepped out of the mid-year beauty and carefully closed the door.
“You’ll see.”
85
Day Twelve—September 16
Friday Evening
When Aspen got a call from Teffinger early Friday evening, she was shocked to find that he was taking Jacqueline Moore’s warning so seriously.
She was even more shocked at what he proposed, but she agreed to go along with it, and so did Christina Tam.
They packed, threw two suitcases in the trunk of Christina’s car, and met Teffinger at the Table Mountain Inn in downtown Golden. He checked them in under an alias, paid cash, and helped carry their stuff up to the room.
It was a nice two-bed suite with a New Mexico décor.
“You guys don’t have to stay holed up here,” he said. “I can’t see how anyone could trace you here. But if you feel the need to go out, stay within walking distance.”
“I need to get drunk,” Aspen said. “I’m getting totally stressed out.”
“Go for it if you want,” Teffinger said. “Just be sure you keep your cell phone with you.” He cocked his head. “So you’re pretty sure that Bennett knows you’re staying with Christina?”
Aspen nodded.
“It’s common knowledge in the firm, after my apartment got busted into,” she said. “I can’t image Bennett not knowing.”
Teffinger looked at Christina.
“He’d know where you live, right?”
“Right. There’s a firm directory. Plus I’m in the phone book.”
“Okay. Looks like we’re set, then.”
He started for the door, but Aspen grabbed his arm. “Who are you using for the decoy?”
“I don’t know, vice is going to get someone for us about your age and size,” he said. “I told them to be sure she’s pretty so we keep it as real as possible.”
She smiled.
“You are such a flirt.”
He shrugged. “Actually, I really did say that.”
“See what I mean?”
After Teffinger left, Aspen and Christina walked down Washington Street until they found a dark place with upbeat music and ordered Margaritas at the bar.
“I just hope that the people inside the house don’t go snooping around to kill time,” Christina said.
“Why?”
“You know.”
“No, what?”
“My dresser drawer,” Christina said.
“Why, what’s in there?”
“You know, my vibrator.” Christina punched Aspen on the arm. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know.”
Aspen laughed.
“Okay, busted. I think that I might have taken one short peek in there once.”
“As long as you didn’t use it,” Christina said.
“No need. I have my own.”
They clinked glasses.
86
Day Twelve—September 16
Friday Night
On Friday night Gretchen wanted to go out and get drunk, so Draven decided to take her to an old biker bar that he used to frequent in downtown Golden, up the street a block from Foss Drug. It turned out to still be a bar, but the ragged edge was gone.
Someone had civilized the place.
Shit.
Nothing ever stayed the same anymore.
Still, it wasn’t bad, so they grabbed a booth, sat on the same side next to each other, and drank Jack while they talked about what life would be like in California.
A couple of women sat at the bar drinking Margaritas.
One of them looked familiar, the Asian one, the one with the designer glasses.
Outside lightning cracked and the sky dropped rain with a vengeance.
Gretchen reached under the table and rubbed Draven’s dick.
“I love the rain,” she said.
87
Day Twelve—September 16
Friday Night
Teffinger hadn’t been on more than two or three stakeouts in his entire career, largely because they almost always represented too much of an investment of time for the potential return. So it was weird, sitting out here in the dark a half block down from Derek Bennett’s house, waiting for something to happen.
Having Davica with him made all the difference.
Without her, he wouldn’t have had the patience.
The rain beat down and sounded incredibly nice, better than any song ever made, except maybe “Brown Eyed Girl.”
They sipped coffee. The first thermos was only half gone and they still had a second full one in the back.
“I need to tell you something weird,” Davica said.
He raised an eyebrow.
“You’re not going to say you used to be a guy, are you?”
She laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“Okay. Good.”
“It has to do with last night in the hot tub with Monica,” she said. “Before it all started, I was really excited about it.”
Teffinger smiled.
“You looked pretty excited during it, too,” he noted.
“Right,” she said. “I was. But not as much as I thought I would be. I kept thinking that she shouldn’t be there, that she was invading our space. I felt guilty, being the one who brought her in.”
“Our space, huh?”
She nodded. “The space of you and me; our private space. The bottom line is that I don’t think there are going to be any more Monicas.”
“Your choice,” he said. “Either way, I’m going to support you.”
He called Sydney and when she answered he said, “Talk to me.”
“We got Aspen’s car in the driveway to make it look like she’s home,” she said. “We have most of the curtains partially open and the decoy’s walking around, turning lights on and off, stuff like that, to make it obvious someone’s there. I’m sitting a half block down the street. It’s raining like hell.”
“Here too,” Teffinger said.
“So far, no activity.”
“Same here.”
“How will Bennett know the car in the driveway is Aspen’s?”
“The information is in her H.R. file. Plus I’m sure he’s already been stalking her.”
Forty-five minutes later a silver BMW pulled out of Derek Bennett’s driveway and started to wind its way out of the neighborhood.
Teffinger followed.
He called Sydney to tell her he was in motion.
Being this far off the main roads, the traffic was sparse. So Teffinger had to hang back. Unfortunately he had to hang back so far that Bennett slipped away.
He called Sydney.
“I lost him,” he said. “Watch for him at your end. I’m headed that way.”
“What do you mean you lost him?”
“I had to hang back.”
“Well, don’t hang back that far,” she said.
“Now you tell me.”
Twenty minutes later, when Teffinger was only a few minutes away from Christina’s house, he got a call from Sydney.
“We just had a drive-by,” she said. “A light-colored BMW. It could have been silver.”
“That little shit,” Teffinger said.
“The driver might have looked my way when he passed,” Sydney added.
“Then go ahead and get out of there,” he said. “I’ll take the watch.”
“Done.”
He heard an engine start before the phone died.
He drove by the house and saw no suspicious cars and definitely no BMWs. He circled the block twice, took a spot all the way at the end of the street under a burned-out streetlight, and killed the engine.
The sound of the storm immediately intensified.
The coffee was suddenly going right through him, so he stepped outside and pissed by the side of the truck. By the time he got back inside he was soaked.
“Goddamn hurricane out there,” he told Davica.
“So I see.”
He stared down the street.
“Come
on, asshole. Take the bait.”
Nothing happened for the next hour except that Teffinger had to step back out into the storm two more times. Davica did too, but only once.
Then a second hour went by.
Still nothing happened.
“Do you ever get the feeling like you’re being watched or followed?” Davica asked at one point.
“No, not really.”
“I’ve had that feeling for the last couple of days,” she said.
“That happens sometimes when you’re around all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. It plays with your mind.”
They were half asleep, listening to a country-western station, when Barb Winters called from dispatch. Teffinger pulled up an image of her new implants, double Ds. “We got a dead body,” she said.
Right now, he could care less.
“Call Richardson,” he said. “He’s got duty tonight.”
“Yeah, I already did,” she said. “He wanted me to let you know that they have a preliminary identification. It’s someone called Jacqueline Moore. He said she’s a lawyer.”
Teffinger slammed his hand on the dashboard so hard that Davica jumped.
88
Day Twelve—September 16
Friday Night
Teffinger cornered a cab downtown, stuck Davica in it, and then headed straight to the Jacqueline Moore crime scene. The woman’s body was still lying undisturbed in a dark Wynkoop alley not far from Union Station, about four blocks away from her LoDo loft.
The sky continued to spit rain.
Teffinger was drenched, again, and shivering to prove it.
The woman’s neck had a deep knife wound.
Her purse was on the ground, looking as if someone had ransacked it before throwing it down.
“Looks like a robbery,” Detective Richardson said as Teffinger ducked under his umbrella. “All the money’s gone from her purse and she doesn’t have a shred of jewelry left.”
“Actually it’s a murder made to look like a robbery,” Teffinger said. “Get the tapes of every surveillance camera up and down this street and for the surrounding two blocks. I know who did it and I want to tie him to the location.”
“You know who did it?”
“Yeah. A guy named Derek Bennett.”
“How do you know that?”
Teffinger was already walking away, but said over his shoulder, “It’s a long story. I’ll brief you tomorrow.”
Sydney showed up, under an umbrella, just before he got out of the alley.
“Where you going?”
He ducked under with her.
“Bennett’s,” he said.
“You want company?”
“Come on.”
On the way to the truck he called Aspen, just to be sure she was okay.
She was.
He warned her to be extra careful because Jacqueline Moore had just been murdered.
They determined that Bennett wasn’t home and then parked down the street from his house to wait. The plan was to cut him off before he could get in his driveway and then scare him into committing a traffic violation.
Then they’d pull him over, search his car, and hope he still had some of the things he took from Jacqueline Moore.
When Bennett showed up an hour later, Teffinger immediately fired up the Tundra and got on the man’s ass, tailgating not more than ten feet away, blowing the horn and flashing the lights.
Bennett sped up, panicked.
Teffinger hung with him, staying as close as he could without actually making contact.
Then Bennett did a beautiful thing.
He ran through the stop sign at the end of the street.
“Got you, asshole!” Teffinger said.
He swung into the oncoming lane and pulled alongside. Sydney powered down her window, flashed her badge and motioned for Bennett to pull over.
Instead of doing it, though, he slammed on the brakes, did a one-eighty and raced back the other way.
Teffinger put all the muscles in his leg down on the brake pedal. The truck’s ABS grinded and brought the vehicle to a straight-line stop.
He swung around as fast as he could but Bennett was way ahead.
“He’s going to lose us,” Sydney said.
Teffinger put the gas pedal to the floor.
“We’ll see about that.”
When Bennett got caught in traffic up ahead, Teffinger rammed him from behind. The Tundra’s hood crinkled up and shot towards the windshield. Then the airbags went off.
A pain exploded in the middle of his face, coming from his nose, probably broken.
He had no time for it and charged out the door.
Bennett was out of his car now, running, but not fast enough, and when Teffinger caught him, the little asshole made the mistake of throwing a punch that landed on Teffinger’s nose.
89
Day Twelve—September 16
Friday Night
When Aspen told Christina the news about Jacqueline Moore getting murdered, Christina hardly said anything and ordered another Margarita.
“I’m never going back to that firm,” Aspen said.
Christina studied her and said, “Me either.”
“It isn’t worth it,” Aspen added. “I’ll work at McDonald’s first.”
Christina drank half the glass in one long swallow.
Then she looked directly at Aspen.
“I got a few things I should tell you,” she said. “You asked me before if I was a spy. I said no. That was a lie.”
A knot twisted in Aspen’s stomach.
“What?”
“I’ve been feeding information to Blake Gray the whole time,” she said. “He wanted me to buddy-up to you, after you wouldn’t drop your investigation, so he’d know what you were up to.”
“Why?”
She shrugged.
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said. “At first I thought it was just because he likes to know what’s going on in the firm. But now, with Jacqueline Moore dead, maybe there’s more to it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean, other than Rachel Ringer’s dead and now so is Jacqueline Moore. What I can tell you, though, is that everything you and I did and everything we learned, I told him about it.”
“That’s disturbing. I thought we were friends.”
“We are, but I owed him,” she added. “He kept me in the firm after I screwed up that case I told you about. Plus, he was pretty clear that he’d grease the skids to be sure I made partner when the time came.”
Aspen pondered it and sipped the drink.
Then she asked, “Do you think Blake fed all that information to Derek Bennett?”
Christina shrugged.
“I’d have to believe so. They’re pretty close.”
Aspen twisted the glass in her hand.
“So who put the note on my chair warning me that you were a spy?”
Christina didn’t know but said, “It wasn’t Blake, that’s for sure. The more I think about it, it might have been Jacqueline Moore. She was close to both Blake and Bennett and would have known that I was working as a spy. If Bennett was getting the information from Blake, he might have been thinking that you were getting too close for comfort and needed to be taken out. So maybe Jacqueline warned you that I was a spy so you won’t give me any more information. That way I couldn’t feed it to Blake, who in turn couldn’t feed it to Bennett. That way it would be less likely that Bennett would perceive you as a threat and would be less inclined to do something drastic.” She frowned. “That’s just a wild theory, though. I don’t have any proof one way or the other.”
A man and a woman climbed out of a booth and headed for the door. The man—who looked like an Indian—grabbed Christina’s arm as he passed and asked, “Where do I know you from?”
She looked at him.
A scar ran down the side of his face.
His hair was long and thick and black, pulled into a ponytail.
&nb
sp; She’d never seen him before.
She would have remembered.
“I don’t know.”
“You look familiar,” he insisted.
“Sorry. I really don’t think I know you.”
He studied her, as if deciding whether she was lying, then he looked at Aspen, longer than he should have, before walking away.
90
Day Twelve—September 16
Friday Night
When Gretchen passed out back at the farmhouse, too drunk to even have sex, Draven’s thoughts turned to Davica Holland. He got dressed in all things black, parked on the other side of the open space, and then crept toward her house through a pitch-black night.
Before he knew it he was in her back yard, then in the window well, prying open the window, listening for an alarm, hearing none.
He waited there, nevertheless, for more than five minutes, just in case she had a silent alarm directly piped to a security company. When no cops came, he crept into the house.
He found her upstairs in the master bedroom lying naked on top of the sheets, sound asleep.
He injected drugs into her ass and then held his hand over her mouth until she lost consciousness. Then he carried her limp body through the open space to the car, put her in the trunk, and headed for the cabin.
When they arrived, she was still unconscious. He tied her hands to the headboard and put a breathable gag in her mouth.
Then he pulled her legs up and stuck his dick in.
He pounded her hard.
He pounded her like the stud that he was.
He pounded her until he came like a madman.
He then tied her feet to the bed and wandered into the other room where he fell asleep on the couch.
An hour later he woke up and did it again, exactly the same, except this time she was awake, which made it a lot more fun.
91
Day Thirteen—September 17
Saturday—2:00 a.m.
Teffinger didn’t find a single thing belonging to Jacqueline Moore in Derek Bennett’s BMW, even though he searched it meticulously three times.
No bloody knife.
No jewelry.