Blank (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)
Page 23
When he woke up it was 10:16.
He got the coffee going and ate cereal from the left side of his mouth. Chewing was tough. There was a deep cut on the inside of his mouth where his cheek had been punched into his teeth.
Traffic on the drive in was thicker than usual.
Just as he passed Federal, his phone rang and Sydney came through.
“Bad news,” she said.
“Why? What happened?”
A beat then, “You sound weird.”
“My lip’s swollen.”
“From kissing?”
He grunted.
“Yeah, kissing fists. Give me the bad news first.”
“First? There’s only bad news, Teffinger. There’s no bad news followed by good news. There’s only bad news.”
“Okay, give me that first then.”
She smiled.
“I haven’t been able to get to the lawyer yet. She didn’t go home last night. I don’t know where she went. Worse though, I think we’ve been tricked,” she said, “and when I say we, I mean me.”
“How so?”
“That cell phone that she left on the table? I think it was a decoy,” she said. “I’ve run down every number in it. As far as I can tell, not one of them was to or from Northway. In hindsight, what I think happened is that the lawyer left it on the table pretending to help us but actually to obstruct us. My suspicion is that she called Northway as soon as she left the table. He’s probably in Bangkok by now.” A pause then, “The sad thing is there probably isn’t anything we can do about it. She never specifically said we’d find anything in there.”
“Maybe you missed something.”
She sighed.
“I’ve already double-checked,” she said. “Do you want me to triple-check?”
He considered it.
His brain hurt, right behind his eye.
It felt like someone was inside his skull trying to break out with a hammer.
“No,” he said. “Try to make contact with the lawyer again. Tell her we need his location and need it now. If we get it, it never came from her. Nothing about her ever goes into a file. If we don’t get it though and it turns out that she tipped him off, tell her we’re going to treat that as being an accessory after the fact.”
“Okay, but you still sound weird.”
When he got to the office things got worse. It turned out that the chief wanted to see him. Tanker closed the door, wrinkled every crease in his 50-year-old face and said, “This is a conversation I hoped to never have.”
With that, he showed Teffinger a DVD.
It was the one of Teffinger breaking into September Tadge’s law office, copying confidential and privileged files and sneaking out.
Teffinger went to speak but Tanker cut him off with a wave of the hand.
“Don’t say anything,” he said. “September Tadge’s lawyer, who turns out to be none other than Grayson Condor, dropped this off this morning on behalf of his client. He says you not only stole files from Ms. Tadge but you’re also bedding Pantage Phair, who’s a prime witness in the case, and maybe even a suspect.”
Teffinger's mouth opened.
Tanker frowned.
“Don’t say anything,” he said. “I already knew about Pantage. The important thing here is that Condor knows about it and doesn’t take too kindly to it.” He diverted his eyes for a second then looked back. “We both knew your dick was going to get you in trouble sooner or later. It was just a matter of time.”
Teffinger exhaled.
“Now what?”
“I don’t have a choice Nick,” he said. “I love you like a son. You know that, but this time my hands are tied. I have no option but to suspend you pending an investigation. That’s the protocol and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
101
Day Six
July 23
Saturday Morning
The tight little beauty from the club last night turned out to be a New York model named ReVelle Sunn. Yardley woke up to the woman in bed with her Saturday morning and studied her curves as she headed for the shower.
Things were unraveling.
Cave was still drawing air in and out of his lungs, un-killable.
Death was everywhere.
It still wasn’t clear if Marabella was friend or foe. The specter of being held captive by Ghost Wolf wouldn’t leave Yardley alone.
Plus the whole operation had grown too big. Too many links were in the chain. It was only a matter of time before the weakest one snapped.
It was time to cut and run.
She’d made herself a promise at the very beginning that she wouldn’t get sucked in past the safety point. Today she was keeping that promise.
Nobody would know.
She wouldn’t tell Marabella.
She’d disappear without a trace, never to be seen or heard from again.
The shower door opened and ReVelle slipped in, naked, still groggy but smiling. She got behind Yardley and rubbed her shoulders.
“Thanks for last night.”
Yardley turned and kissed her.
“Do you have a roommate?”
No.
She didn’t.
“Do you want one?” Yardley asked.
“You?”
She nodded.
“In New York?”
“Right. I’m going to move.”
“When?”
“Today.”
The woman ran her eyes down Yardley’s body as if seeing it for the first time, then did the same with her face. “We’ll make you a model,” she said. “I’ll hook it up.”
An hour later she drove nonchalantly past the bookstore, saw no signs of Cave and parked behind in the alley next to the dumpster. With the gun ever within reach, she began the sanitizing process. Every single shred of her existence for years needed to be erased.
There could be no loose ends.
All physical and electronic footprints needed to be destroyed.
Documents got shredded.
All the cash went into a suitcase.
Fake driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates and credit cards went into her purse.
The desktop computer had carefully been used only for legitimate bookstore business purposes. Still, out of an abundance of caution, Yardley reset it to initial factory settings, removed the hard drive and stuck it in the suitcase.
The laptop went in there too, after resetting it. Later it would be smashed and hidden from the world where no one would stumble on it in a million years, the bottom of the ocean or something equivalent.
Most of the critical information was stored on five flash drives.
Yardley cut each one into thirds.
On the drive home, she tossed them out the window one at a time, aiming for gutters and shrubs and whatnot.
Outside the clouds built up. The sunshine got spotty and then disappeared altogether. The temperature dropped into the low 80s and the humidity increased. A stronger wind blew.
A storm was coming.
With big kissing and a smiling face, ReVelle headed back to New York in a private jet late in the afternoon with Yardley’s suitcases in hand. There’d be no check-in or checkout of baggage. Since the flight started inside the United States, customs wouldn’t be involved.
The cash wasn’t an issue.
Even if ReVelle took it, which was unlikely, Yardley still had eight times that amount in offshore accounts.
She sanitized her apartment.
Tonight she’d make Cave pay for killing Deven.
She’d spend the night in a sleazy hotel, paying cash.
Tomorrow she’d fly to New York irrespective of what happened tonight. If she had to come back for Cave two or three months down the road, so be it.
Late in the afternoon she bought a Kawasaki dirt bike, street legal with turn signals, plus a helmet, all for cash, under a fake name, Samantha Seagull. She wasn’t new to bikes. Her license had a motorcycle endorsement.
&nbs
p; Cave would never expect her on a bike.
He’d be looking for a car.
102
Day Six
July 23
Saturday Morning
Things weren’t like the old days when a guy could get a little dirty and bounce back. Now everything was politically correct, by the book, with checks and balances and fifty thousand people involved. Teffinger knew that. He’d screwed up this time past the point of no return. Driving back home after the fateful meeting with the chief, he called Kelly and told her the bad news.
“I’m thinking about resigning before I get officially fired,” he said.
“No, don’t,” she said. “Let me give it some thought.”
“There’s no thought to give it,” he said. “I broke into an attorney’s office and stole confidential files. The whole damn thing is on videotape. What’s the defense to that? That I had a few beers? That I did it in the name of catching the bad guy? That I won’t do it again?”
“Nick—”
“God, I can’t believe I did this to myself.”
“Calm down.”
“How can I? That job was my life. I don’t have anything else.”
“You have me.”
He exhaled.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “The pisser is that Tanker’s going to catch a lot of flak for this too. He’s stood up for me every time I got close to the edge. All that will come out.”
Silence.
“Like I said, let me think about it,” Kelly said. “Let’s meet later this afternoon, say 4:30. Not my office though. The rumors from your last visit are still flapping out of everyone’s gossipy little gums.”
Fine.
Whatever.
“Where?”
“How about in front of the Daniels & Fisher Tower?”
The Daniels & Fisher Tower.
That’s where he screwed Pantage last night.
“I’ll make it easy for you,” he said. “How about right outside your building. We’ll go somewhere and I’ll buy you a glass of wine.”
She laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“You just used the word I and the word buy in the same sentence,” she said.
He smiled.
“See what stress will do to you?”
“I guess.”
It was a long time until 4:30. Teffinger was good at a lot of things but filling empty time wasn’t one of them. He didn’t even know what empty time looked like until this second.
Now he knew.
It wasn’t pretty.
He drove west through Golden and wound up Clear Creek Canyon with vertical rock on one side and the rapids on the other. Where the water was the wildest, he found a turnoff and climbed down to a boulder at the river’s edge.
The roar of the water filled his ears.
It was so weird being here.
It was a workday.
He got up to leave, once, then twice, then three times, each failing when he couldn’t think of where to go.
Pantage left a message.
She was okay, she was at work, she just wanted to thank him for last night, she still tingled between the legs, she wanted more.
He called Sydney.
She’d already heard the bad news and was en route back to Denver to take over the Jackie Lake case.
“I had a feeling this would happen some day,” she said. “I just pictured it at least a few years off.”
“I guess you were half wrong.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “Oh, by the way, the attorney refused to meet with me again. We have a total strikeout on Northway.”
“That’s because that’s the way my life works,” Teffinger said. “One good thing. The department’s going to save a lot of money on coffee with me gone.”
Sydney laughed.
“Millions,” she said. “You’re not gone yet though. Be on speed dial. As far as I’m concerned, you’re still running the Jackie Lake case.”
“If you want.”
“I want.”
He was downtown in front of Kelly’s building at 4:20, sitting on the sidewalk with his knees up and his back against the stone.
Someone walked by and tossed a dollar at him.
He looked up.
It was a man swinging a leather briefcase.
“Thanks,” he said.
The man didn’t respond.
He just kept walking.
Teffinger wasn’t worth a look back.
The appointed time came and went.
Kelly didn’t come out.
She must be stuck on the phone.
At 4:45 she still wasn’t out.
Then 5:00 came and still no Kelly.
He called her cell.
She didn’t answer.
He called the law firm receptionist and asked for her.
“She’s been out all afternoon, then she had a 4:30 appointment out of the office. I don’t expect her back today.”
Okay.
Thanks.
He stood up and paced.
Half an hour went by. Now it was 5:30. Kelly was officially a full hour late.
He called her cell.
She didn’t answer.
103
Day Six
July 23
Saturday Night
Saturday night after dark a mean thunderstorm fell out of an even meaner sky. Bolts of lightning ripped the blackness, one after another after another, igniting swirling clouds in their eerie wrath and slapping thunder across the front range. Dressed in all things black, Yardley took shelter from the weather in the rusty interior of a 1972 Camero, east of Cave’s house, in Honest Ed’s Junkyard.
She was locked in dark thoughts.
Tonight was made for killing.
It was built for it.
Cave would show up.
“This is for Deven.”
Those would be the last words his twisted little ears would hear on earth.
He lived in an uneventful two-story wooden structure at the end of a hundred-yard gravel drive that fed off South Golden Road in Golden. The area was a mismatch of development. Cave’s property was bounded on one side by the junkyard and on the other by the decaying infrastructure of what had once been a trailer park but was now a ghost town.
Yardley trained a pair of AutoFocus Bushnell binoculars on Cave’s windows. They were exactly the same as when she got here two hours ago, dark and lifeless.
He’d come.
She could feel it.
Tonight was the night.
She’d kill him.
She’d never regret it, not in fifty years. When she was old, she’d look back on this night and smile. She’d do it again, even then, if she had to.
Come on, Cave.
Come on home.
It’s safe.
Don’t be afraid.
104
Day Six
July 23
Saturday Night
In the midst of a violent storm, Pantage parked her car a hundred feet down from Honest Ed’s Junkyard and headed for Cave’s house on foot. Ever since Teffinger showed her the man’s driver’s license, his James Dean face became clearer and clearer as the person she saw murder Jackie Lake.
She needed to get into his house.
She needed to see if Jackie Lake’s ear was in there.
Teffinger didn’t know what she was doing.
He’d try to prevent it.
If she insisted, he might even break in himself just so she wouldn’t put herself at risk. She didn’t want to force him into that position, particularly given the trouble he was already in.
The night was dark except for when the lightning jerked it apart.
She made her way one silent step at a time to the house.
The windows were dark.
No light came from inside.
There was no garage.
There was no vehicle in the driveway.
She tried the front doorknob to find it locked.
Cave wasn’t home.
Either that or he was lying in wait.
She headed around to the back of the house, trying the windows as she did and finding them all locked. The rear door was also secured. She went to the other side of the house, busted a window and yelled in, “Anyone home?”
No one answered.
She climbed in.
Water dripped off her face and hair and clothes onto a carpet. She stood still and listened for the charging feet of someone who’d laid a trap.
No charge came.
She fired up a flashlight to find herself in a small bedroom. A quick scan showed nothing of interest, which is what she expected. If someone had souvenir ears of murder victims, they’d be well stashed. A main level bedroom wouldn’t be the first choice.
She headed downstairs into the basement.
The planks creaked.
The musty odor of stale humidity hung in the air. If the place ever had French drains they must have clogged up twenty years ago. The ceiling was low, six foot or thereabout, probably initially built for storage rather than living. She could stand upright without hitting her head on the joists but not by much.
In the corner was an old furnace.
Next to it was a shiny water heater, recently installed.
The flicker of a pilot light danced eerily behind a shield. Crude wooden shelves lined a wall, filled with junk and cobwebs.
The splash of the flashlight was creepy.
A bare light bulb screwed into a crude ceiling fixture had a pull chain hanging from it. She was half-tempted to see if it worked but there was a small garden-level window that could give her away.
She stayed with the flashlight.
There were no rooms, doors or enclosures.
The only hidden space to speak of was the one under the stairs, jammed with boxes and junk. Given the dust and spider webs, no one had disturbed it for some time.
Then she noticed something.
Over in the corner against the wall there were several vertical two-by-fours running from the floor to the ceiling and serving as supports for water pipes and ductwork. One section of those studs had a wooden cover. On inspection, it was a piece of plywood with circular holes in the top corners, approximately one inch in diameter. Those holes fit over nails, which supported the wood.