Pretty Little Lawyer (Nick Teffinger Thriller)

by Jagger, R. J.

  Teffinger stared at him.

  “Have you ever had your head roll down the street and fall into a gutter?” the chief asked.

  “No.”

  “Trust me. It’s no fun.”

  Teffinger didn’t really care if it was any fun or not.

  Right now he could only think of Tashna Sharapova.

  She wasn’t having any fun.

  He was pretty sure of that.

  HE POURED ANOTHER CUP OF COFFEE and then flopped down into his chair.

  Then it came to him.

  Something he hadn’t thought of before.

  He grabbed Sydney’s arm.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Ten seconds later they were halfway down the hall.

  “Hold it” Teffinger said, turning around. In two heartbeats he returned with a donut and fresh cup of coffee. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Day Nine—May 13

  Tuesday Morning

  ______________

  WHEN DEL RAE FINALLY SHOWED UP, it was four in the morning and she looked like she’d been dragged around by the storm all night. Her hair was tangled and matted, her makeup was long gone, and her clothes were wrinkled. The cuffs of her jeans were caked with mud.

  Tarzan put her in a bear hug and pulled her tight.

  “What happened?”

  “In a minute,” she said. “Fix me a drink first.”

  By the time Aaron got the rum and coke out, Del Rae had already stripped and turned on the shower. He brought the drink over as she felt the temperature of the water and handed it to her as she stepped into the spray. She downed it in one long swallow, said “Another one, please.”

  Aaron cocked his head.

  “Well someone had quite the night,” he said.

  “You’re not even going to believe it.”

  Five minutes later she stepped out, toweled off and slipped into one of Aaron’s long-sleeve shirts. Her hair hung wet, soaking the cotton wherever it touched.

  They ended up sitting on the mattress in the dark, she with another rum and coke in hand, he with a beer.

  “Better?” Aaron asked.

  She nodded and took a sip.

  “So what happened?”

  “Coyotes,” she said.

  He wrinkled his forehead.

  “Coyotes?”

  “Yeah, they look like dogs except they live in the wild.”

  He knew it was a joke and he was supposed to laugh but he couldn’t. He needed to know what happened and how much trouble they were in.

  Then she told him the story.

  EVERYTHING WAS GOING GOOD RIGHT UNTIL THE END. She was driving and the lawyer was in the passenger seat. They were heading to the abandoned house with the radio off. The lawyer twisted the box cutter in his hands, anxious to get it over with. The wipers were on full speed, fighting a heavy storm that had pounded them for the last twenty minutes. They made it all the way to the dead-end road and were halfway down it, not more than a mile from the hideaway, when it happened.

  A small deer ran out in front of them, approaching from the left, a baby, probably not more than a week or two old.

  Del Rae knew better than to jerk the wheel or slam on the brakes. She slowed as much as she could without losing control and by the time they got to the animal it was almost across the road.

  She veered to the left just to be absolutely sure she didn’t clip it.

  Suddenly a pack of coyotes ran directly in front of her, chasing the deer.

  There must have been six or seven of them.

  She hit a bunch of them.

  Maybe all of them.

  “You wouldn’t think it, but it was like running into a brick wall,” she said. “One jumped right before we got to it and ended up coming straight into the windshield, shattering it. The others didn’t jump and got caught by the front end. The radiator ended up punctured and we were dead in the water.”

  “Ouch.”

  “With no ride out, the lawyer wasn’t about to slit anyone’s throat, and I don’t blame him,” she said. “The big problem we had at that point was getting the car out of there before daybreak. I didn’t want to call a tow truck company from the area because they might put two and two together after Tashna’s body eventually gets found. So I called one from Golden. Sharapova removed the plates before the guy showed up. Then I had it towed to my house. That took forever.”

  Trane shook his head.

  “Of course it rained like a bastard the whole time,” she added.

  “Of course.”

  “Then we had another problem, namely that we couldn’t let the tow truck driver see Sharapova, since his face would eventually be on the news mourning for his wife,” she said. “He can’t be connected with that area in any way, shape or form. So he hid while the car was getting hooked up and waited there for over two hours. Then I had to drive back out with my other car and pick him up.”

  Aaron was impressed.

  “You handled it good,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “Anyway, we’re back on schedule for tonight.”

  “So he’s still holding the course?”

  “More than ever,” she said. “On the way back I let him drive and gave him the blowjob of the century, just to be sure he didn’t start having second thoughts.”

  Aaron detected a hesitation in her voice.

  “What?” he asked.

  She held his hand.

  “I called the hospital again this afternoon,” she said. “Scotty Marks died. I didn’t want to tell you over the phone.”

  Aaron swallowed what was left in the can and crushed it in his hand.

  His thoughts turned to Nicole Ta’Veya White.

  Chapter Seventy

  Day Nine—May 13

  Tuesday Morning

  ______________

  PAIGE DIDN’T GET BACK TO THE HOTEL until two in the morning but was more than content just to get back at all. She felt and looked like a drowned rat—an exhausted drowned rat, so exhausted that she fell asleep as soon as her body dropped on the bed. She didn’t move a muscle until the first rays of light crept into the room. Then she sat bolt upright and looked at the clock. She hadn’t gotten more than a few hours sleep but that would have to do. She’d rest in her next life.

  Ta’Veya’s side of the bed was empty.

  Paige muscled to a standing position, rubbed her eyes as she walked to the window, pulled the curtain back and peeked out.

  Ta’Veya’s car wasn’t in the parking lot.

  She took a quick shower, threw on jeans and a T-shirt and headed out into the world on foot, walking north towards the rock quarry.

  IN HINDSIGHT, SHE HANDLED LAST NIGHT remarkably well. When her vehicle got stuck and she ran into the storm, she made the fatal mistake of forgetting to grab her purse. Luckily Mitch Mitchell had been too stupid or too adrenalin-filled to check her car before chasing her. Instead he got right on her tail so he wouldn’t lose her in the dark.

  He was a fast little freak.

  She had to give him that.

  It took a full half mile but she finally got far enough ahead to lose him in the dark. Then she doubled back and grabbed her purse and cell phone. A flash of brilliance told her to check his truck.

  The door was unlocked.

  The keys were in the ignition.

  She fired it up, slammed it into drive and got out of there. A half hour later she parked it at a bus stop on the edge of Denver where it would be sure to get towed. She threw the keys down a gutter, took a bus back to Golden and then hiked the remaining mile to the hotel, all in the rain.

  No, not rain—storm.

  Her biggest worry was that Mitchell had been smart enough to write down her license plate number and would trace it.

  Anyway, that was last night.

  Now it was morning.

  SHE HEARD THE RUMBLE OF THE MINING OPERATIONS a full half mile away. As the amount of gravel in the road diminished, her shoes got more
and more caked with mud. By the time the front-end loaders and fabricated buildings came into view, she was a mess.

  She got to where she thought her car should be but didn’t see it. Then she spotted it next to a metal building. Someone must have pulled it out this morning so it wouldn’t be in the way.

  Ouch.

  Even from here she could tell it was trashed.

  The freak must have taken a rock or stick or iron bar or something to it after Paige took off in his truck.

  Every window was shattered.

  A red pickup truck came out of nowhere and pulled alongside her, slowing down so it wouldn’t throw mud. A window opened and the tanned, leathery face of a man in his fifties appeared. “It looks like one of us is lost. And it’s probably not me since I’ve worked here for ten years,” he said.

  She felt the corner of her mouth turn up ever so slightly.

  “Then it must be me,” she said.

  “That’d be my guess.”

  “That’s my car over there,” she said, pointing.

  “Hop in.”

  On the way she told him the story. She and her boyfriend drank a little too much last night and went down the wrong road and somehow ended up here. They got stuck in the mud and had a fight. She took off on foot. It looks like he trashed the car after she left.

  “Dump him,” the man said.

  “That might be good advice,” she said.

  “Trust me, it is.”

  Luckily the vehicle was still drivable. She offered him twenty dollars for whoever it was that pulled it out of the mud this morning. He declined.

  HER CELL PHONE RANG as she parked the car and walked into the hotel room. She answered it as fast as she could, hoping against hope it was Ta’Veya.

  It wasn’t.

  It was the man with the scrambler.

  “You’ve been a bad girl,” he said.

  She hung up and threw the phone against the wall.

  FIVE MINUTES LATER IT RANG AGAIN—surprisingly unbroken. She almost ripped it in two but answered instead. A man’s voice came through, not scrambled this time.

  “Do you know who this is?”

  She recognized the voice but couldn’t place it.

  “Are you the one who just called?”

  “Just called? No—”

  Suddenly she recognized the voice.

  “Aaron Trane,” she said.

  “Very good,” Trane said. “Now listen carefully because what you say and do are going to tell whether things go very good, or very bad, for your pretty little friend.”

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Day Nine—May 13

  Tuesday Morning

  ______________

  TEFFINGER AND SYDNEY got the two live victims—Rain St. John and Tracy Patterson—in the same room and had them go over their captures, hoping they’d feed off each other and collectively remember something they hadn’t told him before. Teffinger didn’t want much; just a scraggly little piece of information, one more seemingly irrelevant piece of the puzzle, no matter how small.

  But he didn’t even get that and found himself back at square one.

  Mid-morning Sydney strolled over, eased into a chair and propped her feet on his desk. “Ta’Veya White’s phone company just got back to me,” she said. “They were able to identify the location where she made the call to you last night and gave me some GPS coordinates. They said the call probably originated from within a hundred yards of there. Apparently it’s not too far from here, on the west edge of Denver near the Lakewood border.”

  Teffinger nodded and processed the information.

  Tashna Sharapova was the top priority today.

  He didn’t need a distraction.

  But Ta’Veya still didn’t answer her phone.

  And he had no idea what to do next on the Sharapova matter.

  The need for motion and activity washed over him. He stood up and said, “Let’s go find that phone.”

  Sydney got up and fell into step.

  THEY WALKED PAST THE ELEVATORS and hiked down the stairwell three floors to the parking garage, then wove through the streets with the slow version of “Hotel California” on the radio. They ended up on the west edge of the city where they entered a frayed industrial zone.

  Fifteen miles to the west, clouds were already building over the mountains.

  “More rain coming,” Teffinger said.

  Sydney looked at him. “I’ll take your word for it, now that you’re a professional at being in the middle of the rain.”

  Teffinger chuckled.

  Pretty sure what she was referring to.

  “You’re not speaking of rain as in rain the weather, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re speaking of rain as in Rain the person.”

  She nodded.

  “Very good.”

  “And by the middle of the rain, you’re referring to—”

  “—right, you being in the center of the storm, so to speak.”

  He smiled and cocked his head.

  “What do you think of her? Do you like her, or what?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s too gorgeous,” Sydney said. “Women like me don’t like to be in the same room as women like her. We feel like Raggedy Ann dolls.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Are you fishing for a compliment?”

  She grinned. “Maybe—why?—you got one?”

  “I might have a spare one sitting around somewhere. But I’m not going to give it to you because it wouldn’t mean anything after you fished for it.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what would it be, if I hadn’t fished for it?”

  “It would be something like, You can hold your own in any room, no matter who else is in there—including Rain.”

  She smiled.

  “Sorry I missed that one.”

  “Next time don’t fish for it,” he said. “Just wait for it to jump out of the water and land in the boat.”

  WHEN THE GPS LED THEM TO A RAILROAD YARD, Teffinger felt a knot in his stomach. The razorblade killer—the one Dr. Leigh Sandt wanted so badly—put his latest victim in a boxcar. Then there was Marilyn Poppenberg, the law student, found dead next to railroad tracks down by Santa Fe Boulevard, bound in blue rope with a screwdriver in her ear.

  Now this.

  Trains.

  Trains.

  Trains.

  They parked as close to the yard as they could and then headed over on foot.

  “I got a bad feeling,” Teffinger said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I’m not going to be too surprised if we find more than her phone.”

  “Meaning what? Her body?”

  He nodded.

  It took over an hour, but they finally found Ta’Veya’s cell phone, buried in a puddle of water. Teffinger put on gloves, picked it up by the antenna and placed it in an evidence bag. Then he stuck a pen in the ground to mark the spot.

  Weird.

  They were surrounded by tracks and cars.

  “What would Ta’Veya be doing around here?” he asked.

  Sydney cocked her head.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Someone must have forced her here.”

  Teffinger couldn’t disagree and frowned.

  “Okay,” he said. “We need to get as many people as we can down here and start searching for her. Can you get that in motion?”

  “Are you serious?”

  He was.

  Dead serious.

  Then he turned and walked down the tracks.

  “Where are you going?” she shouted.

  “To find the yardmaster,” he hollered back. “I don’t want any cars leaving this place until we look inside.”

  “They’re not going to like that,” she said.

  “Too bad, because I don’t really care.”

  AS TEFFINGER HIKED UP THE TRACKS, his phone r
ang and the voice of Dr. Leigh Sandt came through. “Remember before, when I said there were a couple of those Mustang owners who I interviewed and wouldn’t mind knowing more about, if I had unlimited time and money?”

  He remembered.

  “Well, I found a little spare time and threw it their way,” she said. “One of those guys is starting to get very interesting. A guy named Todd Underdown. I’m heading to Denver to dig deeper and thought you deserved a warning.”

  “Good, because I have all kinds of stuff I need to bounce off you. Are you going to stay at my place?”

  “That depends,” she said. “Do you have a squeeze hanging around?”

  “Well, sort of, I suppose.”

  Leigh chuckled.

  “In that case I’ll pass,” she said. “I can’t sleep when you have someone screaming.”

  He laughed.

  “She’s not a screamer,” he said.

  “Give me a break, Teffinger,” she said. “With you they’re all screamers.”

  TEFFINGER TOLD HER ABOUT THE LATEST DEVELOPMENT involving Ta’Veya White and the search they were about to undertake.

  “Another tie to trains,” he noted.

  “So I see.”

  “Meaning an awful lot of coincidences or a connection,” he said.

  “I agree,” she said. “And here’s a juicy little fact you might be interested in. Todd Underdown was a switcher for Burlington Northern for ten years.”

  Teffinger raked his hair back with his fingers.

  “Is he still?”

  “No. That was up in Cheyenne. He flunked one too many drug tests, got fired, and moved to Denver about six months ago.”

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Day Nine—May 13

  Tuesday Morning

  ______________

  TARZAN WOKE AT 10:00 A.M. on Tuesday morning feeling like a new man. Good thing, too, because today would be critical on a number of fronts and he needed to be at his absolute best. He washed the sleep out of his eyes, brushed his teeth, slipped into his jogging shorts and stepped outside, shirtless.