Blank (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  She lifted the wood off and set it on the ground.

  What she saw she could hardly believe.

  Between the studs were a number of horizontal, two-by-four shelves.

  On those shelves were ten or more mismatched jars filled with some kind of yellowish liquid.

  Inside each jar, sunk down at the bottom, was a human ear.

  Cave’s face jumped into Pantage’s brain.

  It was his face that she saw at Jackie Lake’s.

  It was his face that she saw when he chased her out the door that fateful night. It was his face that she saw right before he grabbed her foot and sent her flying into the fire hydrant.

  It was his face.

  There was no question.

  This wasn’t a dream.

  It wasn’t a trick of the night.

  It was a memory.

  105

  Day Six

  July 23

  Saturday Night

  Kelly was nowhere. She never showed up for the 4:30 meeting, never went back to the firm, never answered her phone and never called Teffinger. He swung past her house three times and her car wasn’t in the driveway.

  She was gone.

  A dark thought emerged.

  Maybe the gladiator took her to mess with Teffinger.

  Maybe that’s why the man didn’t kill Teffinger last night. Maybe he was going to entice Teffinger to rescue his little squeeze and then murder her in front of his eyes.

  It was night.

  A nasty thunderstorm beat down on Denver.

  Teffinger swung over to Kelly’s house for the fourth time. Everything was the same as before. There was no car in the driveway. No interior or exterior lights shined. No one was home.

  Still, Teffinger pulled into the driveway and killed the engine.

  When he stepped out the weather assaulted him.

  The rain was almost horizontal.

  The front door was locked. He pounded on it, hard, and mashed the doorbell in again and again and again. No one came.

  He went around to the back.

  To his surprise, the back door was wide open and the kitchen floor was drenched with rain. Kelly’s purse was sitting on the granite countertop. Inside were her wallet, keys and cell phone.

  Then he spotted blood on the floor.

  “Kelly!”

  No one answered.

  He searched the house.

  She wasn’t there.

  Her car was in the garage.

  Teffinger raced out to the Tundra, fired the engine and spun the back tires, heading for the gladiator’s.

  His stomach quivered.

  His breath was short and rapid.

  The beating of last night played with his brain.

  Another trauma like it would be his death.

  Halfway to the gladiator’s his cell rang. He answered hoping beyond hope that it was Kelly with some stupid explanation.

  Instead Pantage’s voice came through.

  “Nick it’s me,” she said. “Listen carefully. Cave is the one who killed Jackie Lake. I’m at Cave’s house right now. I broke in. I found the ears. They’re in jars down in his basement. I remember him being at Jackie’s. It’s not a dream. It’s a memory. I’m positive of it.”

  “You’re at Cave’s right now?”

  Yes.

  She was.

  “Where’s Cave at?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s not here.”

  “Get the hell out of there right now!”

  “It’s okay. He’s not here.”

  “Do it!”

  “Teffinger, you don’t have to yell—”

  “Just do it! Go, go, go! Get out of there right now, this second.”

  “I’ll bring a jar with me.”

  “Forget the jars. Just get out of there! Do you hear me? Do it now.”

  The line got silent.

  “Are you there?”

  No answer.

  “Pantage, I said are you there?”

  “Yes, I’m here. I think I heard something. I got to go.”

  The connection died.

  Teffinger almost hit re-dial but had the presence of mind to consider that if the noise was Cave, the last thing Pantage needed was for her phone to ring.

  Where to go?

  The gladiator’s?

  Cave’s?

  He smacked his palm down on the dash.

  Choose!

  Choose!

  Choose!

  A bolt of lightning struck a telephone pole to his left and lit the night with a force that made his eyes shut. The thunder was so explosive and immediate that he instinctively jerked the wheel to the right.

  106

  Day Six

  July 23

  Saturday Night

  Pantage flicked the flashlight off and stood perfectly still, frantic to not hear another strange sound, desperate to learn that what she heard before was simply a trick of the night. The storm pounded against the upper level, rattling the windows, loud but constant, with no jagged interruptions except for thunder.

  Then something bad happened.

  Glass shattered.

  A door opened and then slammed shut.

  Heavy footsteps walked almost directly above her.

  She flicked the flashlight on just long enough to wedge into the junk under the stairs. No more than a second after she turned it off, the door above her opened and someone walked down, using a flashlight for a guide.

  It was a man.

  She could tell by his breathing.

  Cave no doubt.

  He didn’t come at her when he got to the cement. Instead he shined the light at the corner where the jars were. Then he walked in that direction. Enough light splashed off the walls for Pantage to see that he was carrying a jar.

  He set it on the shelf next to another one.

  There was liquid inside the jar.

  A human ear was in that liquid, sunk to the bottom.

  Pantage gasped.

  The flashlight jerked in her direction.

  Then the man charged.

  She scrambled back and raised her arms to protect her face.

  The flashlight came down on the top of her skull.

  Colors flashed in her brain.

  She tried to stand but her legs wouldn’t respond.

  The flashlight stuck again.

  Then everything went black.

  107

  Day Six

  July 23

  Saturday Night

  From Honest Ed’s Junkyard Yardley saw something she didn’t expect, namely a woman broke into the side window of Cave’s house and disappeared inside. She didn’t turn on any inside lights. A flicker of flashlight washed across the walls.

  What was she doing?

  Robbing the place?

  Not more than five minutes later Cave came home, parked in front of the structure and entered from behind.

  Strangely, he didn’t turn the lights on.

  Three or four minutes later he dragged a woman around the side of the house, put her in the trunk and took off. Yardley hopped on the Kawasaki and followed with the headlight off.

  Cave’s car was easy to keep in view; the right taillight was weaker than the left, as if there were two bulbs inside and one had burned out.

  Vision was dangerous.

  The storm built up too much on the helmet’s faceplate to see through. She had to keep it raised. The rain stung her face with cold needles. She squinted but the occasional needle still got through to her eyeball.

  East.

  East.

  East.

  Forever east, that’s where Cave was going. The traffic thinned then got almost non-existent. The sky was black and the road was equally so. She couldn’t see it, not an inch. With the headlight off, she could only gauge where to go by the movement of the taillights ahead.

  Half an hour passed.

  Then five more minutes.

  Then ten more.

  Her face was so raw that it
had to be bleeding.

  Then something bad happened.

  Her front tire hit something. The bike went down and slid out from under her. Her body skidded down the asphalt and then slammed into something hard and immobile.

  The breath flew out of her chest.

  She tried to stand.

  Her knees buckled and her body crumbled.

  108

  Day Six

  July 23

  Saturday Night

  Pantage regained consciousness to find she was tightly jammed into the trunk of a moving car. Her legs were tied at the ankles and knees, and her wrists were bound behind her back. The noise from a storm above and the road below was deafening.

  Another person was inside the trunk with her.

  It was Kelly Ravenfield, identically bound.

  “See if you can get your hands by mine,” Kelly said.

  Pantage tried to shift her body.

  There was no room.

  There was hardly enough room to expend her chest to breath.

  “I can’t.”

  “Let me try.”

  She wiggled.

  The wiggle did no good.

  “He’s going to kill us,” Kelly said. “He already told me he was.”

  “Cave?”

  “No, Michael Northway,” Kelly said.

  “That lawyer from New York?”

  Yes.

  Him.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “He killed Jackie Lake,” Kelly said.

  “No, Cave did.”

  “No, he did,” she said.

  Northway used to be a hotshot lawyer in Denver but he had a dark side and got himself mixed up with a serial killer. Bad things happened and he ended up on the run. He had a friend in Denver named Grayson Condor.

  “From my firm?”

  Right.

  Him.

  Condor got Northway a lawyer job in San Francisco under the name Rydell Rain. It was a complicated reciprocity scheme implemented by Condor’s right-hand man, Marabella Amberbrook, who delegated almost everything to Yardley White.

  “Jackie Lake was in San Francisco taking depositions,” Kelly said. “She saw Northway on the street and knew who he was and the fact that he was on the run. She also knew that Northway had been a client of Condor’s at one time. She called Condor to let him know she’d seen him. He talked her out of calling the police right away. He said he’d go with her to the station tomorrow morning. They’d play it up and make sure they got lots of kudos in exchange. She didn’t see the harm in it. She had a status conference set for the morning and sent you a text to see if you’d cover for her.”

  That was true.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Northway told me,” Kelly said.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s going to kill me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was all the investigation I did initially that ended up bringing him down and forcing him on the run,” she said. “Then I was the one who saw him in New York and called Teffinger about it.”

  After Jackie Lake called Condor, he called Northway to let him know he’d been spotted. Northway wanted Condor to kill the woman. Condor tried. He called Yardley to set it up. She called Cave; she couldn’t get a hold of him but left him a message. When she didn’t get a call back she let Condor know it didn’t look like the kill could be arranged before the morning. Condor called Northway back and gave him the bad news.

  So Northway flew out and did it himself.

  He made it look like Cave’s work.

  “You mean cutting off the ear?”

  Right.

  The ear.

  The rape.

  The strangulation.

  Cave did that sick shit on the side for his own personal enjoyment. No one knew about it for a long time, then Condor found out about it one day when he had lunch with an attorney named September Tadge, who got calls from a man telling her about these murders he committed. Condor had a suspicion it might be Cave. He dug into it and confirmed the suspicion. That’s when he met with Marabella and they decided that Cave was too sick to be part of the organization. They set him up to be hit down in Florida but it didn’t go as planned. They’ve been trying to kill him ever since.

  “Anyway, Northway flew to Denver and killed Jackie Lake,” Kelly said. “As he was heading down the street, he spotted Cave sneaking into the woman’s place. A few minutes later you showed up. You saw Cave at the body. You figured he was the killer and ran. He chased you and you ended up slamming into a fire hydrant.” A beat then, “Here’s the ironic part. Cave was going to kill you right then and there but Northway chased him off. Northway was the guy with the long hair that Teffinger could never find.”

  Suddenly what happened at Cave’s house made sense.

  Northway had Jackie Lake’s ear in a jar.

  He was planting it at Cave's.

  He was framing the man.

  The vehicle slowed and turned right onto a bumpy road.

  “I think we’re near to where Northway’s taking us,” Kelly said.

  Pantage pulled at the rope.

  It didn’t budge.

  “We have to do something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “We have to talk him out of it somehow.”

  “He’s too smart for that.”

  “Let’s do this,” she said. “Let’s tell him to let us have a fight to the death. The winner goes free.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “To watch,” she said.

  “But he won’t let one of us go free.”

  “Yeah but he’ll lie about it and let us fight, thinking that he’ll just kill the other one after he gets his jollies watching.” A beat then, “One of us needs to get our hands on something deadly. Keep a look out. When one of us makes a move the other one needs to jump in immediately.”

  “Okay.”

  “Kill him,” she said. “Don’t get second thoughts.”

  “Trust me, I won’t.”

  109

  Day Six

  July 23

  Saturday Night

  The car stopped, the trunk opened and Northway pulled Pantage out and laid her on the ground in the mud. He bent down with his knee on her chest, held a knife in front of her face and said, “Do something stupid and I’ll gouge your eyes out. Do you understand?”

  Yes.

  She did.

  “Say it!”

  “I understand.”

  “You better.”

  He checked the ropes on her wrists, found them secure then unfastened the rope on her ankles, rearranging it so there was a two or three foot gap, enough to walk in small steps but not enough to run. Then he removed the rope from her knees and wrapped it around her neck like a leash.

  Kelly Ravenfield got pulled out next and treated the same way.

  He held the leashes, got behind the women and said, “Walk.”

  They obeyed.

  He took them past a small dark house and dilapidated barn, out into the terrain. The storm raged down. Lightning arced and thunder clapped.

  “This is technically owned by the Apaches,” he said. “Condor funded the purchase. There are a lot of people buried out here. Did you know that?”

  “Look,” Kelly said. “Give at least one of us a chance. Let us fight each other to the death, like gladiators. The weaker one will die. Let the stronger one go.”

  Northway laughed.

  “That’s the best trick you can think of? I’m disappointed. Keep walking.”

  “But—”

  He punched her in the back.

  “Shut up. Keep walking.”

  Ten minutes into it he powered up a powerful flashlight and swept it across the field. A hundred yards away an orange reflector lit up.

  “Head for that,” he said.

  The light went out.

  They walked in darkness.

  The orange light turned out to be a bicycle
reflector taped to a stick.

  Next to it was a hole three feet or so in diameter, six or seven feet deep.

  Northway stood the women face-to-face and then wrapped them together with rope. He wrapped even more rope around their arms behind them and then gagged their mouths with rope.

  They were immobile.

  They couldn’t talk.

  They couldn’t scream.

  He walked them to the hole and forced them in, feet first, standing up. They fought but it did no good.

  “This was dug just for Kelly, so sorry if it’s a little bit of a tight fit,” he said.

  Their heads were a foot below surface level.

  They were looking directly into each other’s eyes.

  “There’s a man who uses this place by the name of Ghost Wolf,” he said. “This is how he buries all his people. It’s weird how people develop these little quirks, wouldn’t you say? You have to wonder sometimes how they get started on them.”

  With a shovel, Northway filled the hole past the women’s stomachs, to just below their breasts.

  “That’s it,” he said. “If I put any more in the compaction will keep your chests restricted and you won’t be able to breathe.” A beat then, “This way you’ll be able to last for as long as you last. What will happen after you die is that the walls will eventually cave in and cover you up, then the weeds will grow and the butterflies will fly. Pretty neat, huh?”

  He scattered the remaining dirt.

  Then he bent down.

  “I don’t know exactly how it is you’ll die,” he said. “I don’t know if the coyotes will find you and chew your heads, or whether the insects will eat you, or whether the sun will bake you to death or whether you’ll just last a really long time and eventually starve to death. It’s interesting to think about though, wouldn’t you say?”

  He was gone.

  Ten seconds later he returned.

  “Oh, and there’s one I didn’t think of,” he said. “Maybe the rain will just fill the hole and you’ll go gulp, gulp, gulp. It wouldn’t be pretty but it’s still probably better than the other ways.”