He wore a blue cotton shirt, clean pressed jeans, and New Balance running shoes—size 11 EEE—that he stumbled across on sale last month. The shoes, while sold for “running,” wouldn’t get a second glance from any serious runner. They had good padding and were fairly light, but they’d cost you at least an extra second or two in the quarter mile, if you were actually stupid enough to use them for such a purpose. Wickerfield just wore them for walking or light jogging.
The quarter mile had always been his best distance. He was just a tad too slow off the line for the hundred-yard dash and didn’t quite have enough strength to keep a knees-up sprint going for a full half mile. The quarter mile, however, was his. Even in high school he could whip it out in 52.8 seconds. Today, he could still close it in the 53s, with proper warm-up and a solid day of rest beforehand. Not world class by any means, but more respectable than 99.9 percent of the population.
It always surprised people that he could run that fast. That’s probably because most runners had no upper body to speak of. His chest and arms, on the other hand, were the kind you find on a rock climber, rippled and strong beyond their mass, without an ounce of fat. Back in his heyday, he could crank out fifty legitimate pull-ups any day of the week. Today, he could still get forty. They were painful, make no doubt about that, but he could get them.
He was one of the only people he knew who could do a one-armed pull-up. You grab the bar with one hand, hang so that your arm is completely straight, and then get your chin up above the bar without using the other arm or swinging your legs.
It sounds easy.
It’s not.
He can do it with either arm.
AS EXCEPTIONAL AS HIS BODY WAS, it wasn’t his crowning genetic achievement. That award would have to go to his intellect. He graduated from Harvard in just three years, fifth in his class, with a double major, Mathematics and Physics. From there he went straight to Yale, picking up master’s degrees in both subjects; then on to Berkeley for his Ph.D.s. All his education, of course, was under a full scholarship.
The Ph.D. in Mathematics was tricky, even for him. You have to think of something new, something no one has ever thought of before. That means you either have to take an existing mathematical universe—like Topography or Real Analysis—and extend it, or you have to take two different mathematical universes, and bridge them. He came up with a triple thesis, bridging two mathematical universes and then finding a way to extend both of them, leveraging from the bridge.
Every mathematician in the world learned his name.
The Ph.D. in physics, of course, was a lot easier. With a whole physical world out there to grab, he could come up with topics for physics dissertations ad nauseam if he had to.
Of course, all that was before his life went south.
HE FINISHED EATING and the waitress took his plate. Unfortunately, it looked like he’d been wasting his time. There simply wasn’t any action at Ashley Conner’s apartment building.
The waitress brought his check; with tax, it came to $5.35.
Then it happened.
A Channel 5 News van came down Broadway and started to slow down as it approached Ashley Conner’s street.
Bingo!
Wickerfield flagged down the waitress, handed her a ten, told her to keep the change and then walked out the door.
The heat hit him immediately.
It was supposed to get over a hundred degrees today and had to be every bit of that right now.
He headed straight for the Camry, walking as fast as he could without arousing suspicion. He had left the windows cracked, but the interior still had to be at least a hundred and twenty degrees when he opened the door. From the glove box, he grabbed a pair of black-rimmed glasses, a fake moustache and a baseball cap, and put them all on. From the backseat, he grabbed a notebook and a pen. Then he shut the door and headed straight to Ashley Conner’s apartment building, getting there just about the same time that the TV crew had organized themselves and were walking up to the building.
He nodded to them and fell into step.
“You guys here about the letters?” he asked.
The man carrying the camera, a big red-haired fellow with a history of beer in the gut, looked at him. “Yeah. You?”
“Yeah, same,” Wickerfield said.
They came to an elevator but a cardboard sign said it was broke, so they headed over to the stairway.
A well-dressed woman barked the orders. Wickerfield recognized her as Alicia Beach, a TV reporter with a greatly exaggerated opinion of her relevance to the universe.
The cameraman looked at him. “Who you with?”
“Freelance,” Wickerfield said. “Hope this is really something, I could use the money.”
“No telling,” the cameraman said.
They walked up the stairs in silence, concentrating on the climb, with Alicia Beach’s made-for-TV face leading the pack. It was cooler in the stairwell than outside, but not by much.
When they finally arrived on the fourth floor, everyone was sweating. The woman, Beach, took a few moments to powder her face and get her breath back while the cameraman set up, pointing the lens at the door with the 406 on it.
Wickerfield stood there looking as nonchalant as he could, fighting to keep the excitement from busting through.
When everything was finally set up, the reporter knocked on the door while the camera rolled.
No one answered.
She knocked again.
Nothing.
“Okay,” she finally said, stepping back, “cut. No one’s home.”
AT THAT MOMENT THE DOOR from the stairwell opened and two figures entered the hallway, a man who carried a sport coat draped over his forearm, and an African American woman.
Both wore weapons.
Wickerfield knew the man—Nick Teffinger—only too well from the TV, but had only been this close to him once before, and that was by accident. Teffinger was a fair height, about six-two, with a solid build that looked like it had been downright chiseled at one point. His face looked like something that belonged on a magazine cover. Thick brown hair flopped down over his forehead, which he combed back with his fingers, only to have it flop down again. He had a no-nonsense air to him. And his eyes—there was something wrong with his eyes, no, not wrong, but unusual.
Wickerfield wasn’t sure, one way or the other, if he could take Teffinger in a bare-knuckles, life-or-death fistfight. It would be close. Wickerfield would be faster and just as strong if not stronger. But Teffinger had a slight height advantage and a definite weight advantage. He wasn’t a runner, though, that much was obvious.
The African American woman, on the other hand, had all the earmarks of a sprinter. Even though she wore a loose suit, Wickerfield could sense the power in her thighs and ass and stomach by the way she walked. She wore no makeup and didn’t really need any. She looked to be about twenty-four or twenty-five and had a street-wise air to her.
Wickerfield shifted behind the cameraman as the two figures approached.
Before anyone could say anything more than the usual meet-and-greet, Teffinger had his arm around the shoulders of Alicia Beach, escorting her towards the end of the hall, saying, “Let me talk to you in private for a minute.”
Wickerfield hated the way the reporter went with him so willingly. Teffinger’s life always came to him way too easily. But that would change.
Wickerfield knew what they were talking about.
Teffinger was trying to keep a lid on the publicity.
It would never work; maybe short term, but not in the end.
Everyone else hung behind, complaining about the heat, while Teffinger and the reporter spoke in low voices at the end of the hall. When they finally walked back towards the group, the reporter told everyone, “We’re done here. Let’s go.”
Wickerfield went with them, to all intents and purposes just one more person from their group. Teffinger and the African American woman were already entering the apartment of Ashley Conner,
using a key, before Wickerfield made it to the stairwell.
He started down, smiling inside.
The game had begun.
As he walked down the stairs, someone climbed up—a woman carrying a bag of groceries. Wickerfield covered his face as she went by, but peeked enough to tell that she was absolutely stunning. She wore abbreviated, cutoff jean shorts that showcased the most incredible legs he had ever seen. He couldn’t help but look back up at her after she passed.
The cameraman did too; then he looked at Wickerfield with a Wow expression on his face, as if saying he’d have no trouble eating her for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Wickerfield nodded to him in one hundred percent agreement.
Wow indeed.
She would most definitely be fun to spend some quality time with.
Tingling inside, he walked back to the Camry, powered down the windows and turned the air conditioner on full blast. Then he headed into traffic, intent on getting back to see how his little catch, Ashley Conner, was doing.
Get yourself ready, he told her.
Chapter Six
Day One - July 11
Tuesday Night
_____________
EASING HIS WEARY BODY onto the hard plastic seat of the RTD bus, Teffinger realized as soon as he touched down that someone might sit behind him, not at this stop but at the next one, or the one after that.
Damn it.
If he wasn’t so tired, if the workday wasn’t already going on seventeen hours and counting, he probably would have been smart enough to take the rear seat right away. Now he had to pry himself up and move back, a pain but worth it.
There, that was better.
Just before the doors swished shut, a small African American man, about forty, ducked in, wandered to the back and took the seat across the aisle. Teffinger nodded at him, yawned, and studied the magic-marker graffiti on the seat in front of him.
“I lost my job today,” the man said.
Teffinger looked over. “Well that sucks.”
The man nodded. “Got three kids.”
Teffinger didn’t quite know what to say. Then he pulled out one of his business cards and wrote a name and number on the back. “Call this guy,” he said. “Tell him I sent you. That’s my name on the front.”
The man turned the card over. “Nick Teffinger,” he said.
“Right.”
“I’ve heard that name somewhere.”
Teffinger looked at him. “Not from the obituaries, I hope.”
The man smiled. “No, somewhere else.”
“As long as it’s not the obituaries,” Teffinger said.
AT THE NEXT STOP the man hugged Teffinger, said thanks, and got off. Teffinger exhaled and stared out the window, breathing diesel fumes and watching Broadway unfold as they headed farther out of downtown.
This is the same bus that Ashley Conner would have taken to go home when her waitress shift at the Mile High Eatery ended at 10 p.m. on Saturday. He wanted to follow her footsteps firsthand, see where she would have gotten off, and what the walk looked like at night from the stop to her apartment.
BEFORE THEY SEARCHED Ashley Conner’s apartment this afternoon, Teffinger had a pretty good idea what it would look like. It turned out that he wasn’t far off; a mattress on the floor, a sink harboring two-week-old dishes, paintbrushes face down in old pickle jars half filled with turpentine, canvases and drawings in progress, an alarm-clock radio, etcetera. A Monet calendar thumb-tacked to the wall told them little, other than when her finals were. Nor did they find a diary or address book. The important fact was that there were no signs of a struggle or any indicia of abduction. If someone took Ashley Conner by force, it didn’t happen inside her apartment.
The interviews at the Art Students League didn’t help as much as he hoped. The teachers and other students portrayed Ashley Conner as a shy, semi-talented student who kept to herself and never missed class. Her locker busted at the seams with supplies, clothes, books and other articles of equal non-interest. She attended all her classes on Friday but didn’t show up to any this week, unusual for her. She didn’t have a best friend that anyone knew of and no one really knew much about her past, other than she supposedly lost both parents when she was little.
THEN THERE WAS THE INTERVIEW OF BELLA Richardson, the owner of the Mile High Eatery on Champa Street. She turned out to be one of those persons who speaks too loud and stands too close.
Ashley Conner worked as a waitress on the evening shift, from five to ten, Tuesdays through Saturdays. She did in fact show up on Saturday and worked her full shift, leaving at her usual time—a few minutes after ten—for the bus stop, right across the street. She appeared to be in her normal mood and showed no evidence of being upset or stressed. No one weird came into the restaurant Saturday night that Bella could remember, adding, however, “Give me a break. I don’t exactly run up to everyone who comes in here and scan ’em with a weird-o-meter.”
The city rolled by.
In the downtown area, Broadway saw its fair share of upbeat city life, but then entered a more peripheral zone once it got south of 6th Avenue. There the buildings shrunk, the streets became more dangerous and the trash kicked up. That’s where Teffinger got off the bus, three blocks before Ashley Conner’s street.
That’s where she would have gotten off.
HE BACKED AWAY FROM A PLUME of diesel as the bus pulled away, then walked south with heavy legs and tired eyes, seriously needing the day to end. There were lights around, but not many. Up ahead, two women stepped out of a bar and walked in front of him, holding hands and bumping into one another like lovers.
The bar had the words Soft Sell stenciled on the door.
Curious, he opened it, and found himself immediately inundated with the heavy smell of smoke and alcohol, which triggered memories of the days when he lived to get laid. Several faces turned in his direction, all women. Music played, something energetic that he had never heard before. Lots of women mingled at a bar and tons more danced in the back. The only guy in sight was behind the bar, reminding Teffinger of one of the Village People, the one with the black leather.
“Come back when you get tits,” someone shouted.
Drunken laughter punched the aid.
Teffinger waved, as if in apology, then stepped back into the night.
The two women were thirty or forty steps in front of him now, coming up to a side street. Teffinger expected them to turn down it, to a car, but they crossed instead and continued walking straight, stopping briefly to kiss and grope. He followed, now two blocks from Ashley Conner’s street.
Fifty yards later something unexpected happened.
HE FOUND HIMSELF WALKING past a dark alley sandwiched between two buildings. He didn’t even see it until he was right there. Looking into it, he couldn’t see a thing. Someone could be in there not more than twenty feet away and he wouldn’t even know it.
He started in, slowing, feeling his way, with litter and refuse brushing against his feet. He couldn’t see much looking ahead, but when he turned around and looked back towards the street he could see that the space was wide enough for a car. It kept going for about a hundred and fifty feet and then dead-ended at another alley that came in from a side street.
He came back to Broadway just in time to see the two women entering another building about a block up the street. A small group of other women were strolling down the street towards him.
He kept walking and found the building the two women turned into. It turned out to be a place called Sophia, a bar, another bar filled with women to be exact. A half block farther up, just past Ashley Conner’s street, there was yet another one: Voulez Vous. By the light of day, he wouldn’t have noticed any of them.
HE WALKED BACK TO THE ALLEY, took twenty steps inside, then stopped and turned back towards the street. Tonight was Tuesday and there wasn’t much foot traffic, but last Saturday night there would have been lots of woman bar hopping up and down this three-block stretch of the universe.
If you wanted to abduct a pretty little lady, all you had to do was pull your car in here and point it towards the back. You wait for a single to come along—say Ashley Conner—get her into the alley, and bingo, you’re in business.
Back on Broadway, Teffinger looked around for any signs of surveillance cameras that could have recorded comings or goings from the alley. He saw none.
HE WASN’T SURE EXACTLY WHY, but he headed over to Ashley Conner’s apartment building and walked up to the fourth floor. He rapped on the woman’s door, hoping against hope that she would just open it up and be there, safe and sound, and he could go home and curse himself for wasting time.
Instead, no one answered.
He rapped again, just in case.
Silence.
He used her key—the one obtained from the building’s owner after they obtained the search warrant this afternoon—to open the door, and then stepped inside to see if there was any evidence that she had returned. The place was exactly as they had left it. The digital numbers on an alarm clock said 11:02.
He flopped down in her bed, just to rest his eyes for a few seconds.
It felt so damn good.
He was sound asleep when someone knocked on the door.
Chapter Seven
Day One - July 11
Tuesday Afternoon
_____________
JACKIE SPENT MOST OF THE AFTERNOON at a class-certification hearing in federal court. When it was over, she took the elevator down to the first floor of the fancy marble courthouse and stopped in the lady’s room. There she stripped off her pantyhose, skirt and black leather shoes and swapped them for cotton shorts, ankle socks and tennis shoes that she pulled out of her oversized briefcase. That was much better. Then she hoofed it back to her office.
Bad Client (Nick Teffinger Thriller) Page 3