Cross Lies (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)
Page 19
Lying or not, she was a dead end. She wasn’t going to give up Rekker, that was clear.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
That’s all Song ever got.
She headed back to the office under a nice San Francisco sun, wondering whether to report yesterday’s death threat to the police. Passing her bike in the alley, she reached under the seat to see if another transmitter had been planted.
It was clean.
In her office, she kicked her shoes off, walked across the carpet in her bare feet and made a fresh pot of coffee. When she turned, a man was standing behind her, not more than three steps away. He wasn’t the blue-bandana man but was just as rough looking if not more so. He had long black hair and reminded her a little of Nicholas Cage from the movie Bangkok Dangerous. She must have looked like she was about to scream because the man held up his hands in surrender, took a step back and said, “Whoa, lady, calm down.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Condor,” he said. “Jackson Condor. Are you Song Lee, the lawyer?”
Yes.
She was.
“Do you have time to meet with me about a legal matter?”
She sensed trouble.
She didn’t like him.
There was something about him that was off.
“What kind of legal matter?”
“If we talk, whatever I tell you is privileged, right?”
She nodded.
“Correct.”
“Does it stay privileged even if you decide not to represent me?”
“It does.”
He tilted his head.
“Are you the kind of lawyer who actually keeps your client’s secrets a secret?”
She studied him.
“What’s your issue, Mr. Condor?”
93
Day 5—September 25
Friday Morning
THE DEAD MAN, Troy Trent, had a nice house on Irving, one block south of Golden Gate Park. He was a man of taste. A half-dozen original Edgar Payne landscapes hung on the walls. Teffinger found the mysterious briefcase in the den—empty.
He looked around the interior.
Condor was guilty and the evidence was here somewhere.
Where to start?
He called Neva and said, “Did Condor’s car leave his place last night?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m glad you asked,” she said. “Because you owe me big time. I actually slept in my car last night, two blocks down from his place, on the chance he’d take off in the middle of the night and head for London Fogg. It wasn’t pretty. Cars aren’t designed for sleep.”
“Bertha is,” Teffinger said.
“I’m talking about cars that aren’t antiques,” she said. “Condor never left. The GPS stayed locked on his garage all night.”
“Maybe he found the transmitter and left it sitting in there,” Teffinger said. “Then he took off.”
“Could be,” she said. “If that happened, I wouldn’t know. I was just going by the signal.”
Right.
Understood.
“Are you still down the street from him?”
She was.
Four blocks down.
In a coffee shop.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Teffinger to discover something interesting about the victim, namely that he was into porn.
S&M.
He particularly favored the movies of an outfit called Concrete Cactus. Two whole drawers in his bedroom dresser were filled with their movies.
Baby’s First Bondage.
Dungeon Girls.
Sluts in Ropes.
Tied and Tamed.
Teffinger checked a few covers and had to admit the women were hot.
IT WAS A FULL HOUR LATER before Teffinger found out the next thing of interest, which happened while he was going through the man’s financial records. Trent, it turned out, got a string of big checks from Concrete Cactus.
No wonder he had a lot of their movies.
He was financially connected to them.
In fact, maybe he was them.
An investor or part owner or something.
THE NEXT THING of interest came from his cell phone records, which showed a lot of calls both to and from Jackson Condor.
Teffinger called Neva.
“As long as you’re sort of hanging around with time on your hands, you can do me a favor,” he said. “Get into the Secretary of State records and find out what you can about a company named Concrete Cactus. I have information to suggest that our newest job security, Troy Trent, might be a shareholder or partner in that group. They make S&M films by the way. What I’m interested in finding out is whether Jackson Condor is also involved in that group. Somehow Trent and Condor are connected. Concrete Cactus might be the link.”
She grunted.
“What are you going to do while I’m doing all the work? Emphasis on the all.”
“I’ll be thinking of more things for you to do.”
TWO MINUTES AFTER he hung up his phone rang. It was Detective Richardson, from the office. “We got a name for last night’s tattoo victim.”
“What is it?”
“Amanda Wayfield.”
“Dig up everything you can on her.”
A pause.
Teffinger sensed a problem.
“Will do it but it’ll have to wait until after this SJK thing unless you want to override Northstone and the chief.”
94
Day 5—September 25
Friday Morning
THE INDUSTRIAL WAREHOUSE where Tag had been held captive and interrogated by the Egyptian man and his girlfriend was vacant, abandoned and cold.
“Now what?” Tag asked.
Good question.
“All we can hope is that Rock didn’t give up the location,” Jonk said. “My feeling though is that he did. Someone’s gathering it up right now and planning their escape from the city.”
They passed a small diner, swung in and ordered pancakes and coffee.
Girlfriend.
Girlfriend.
Girlfriend.
The word kept bouncing around in Jonk’s brain, but he didn’t know why. The woman with the Egyptian man was his girlfriend. That became abundantly clear to Tag during her captivity.
Then it came to him.
He nudged Tag’s leg lightly under the table.
She looked at him.
“I just figured something out,” he said. “I always thought the Egyptian guy was someone hired by the Egyptian government, a mercenary. But I was wrong.”
“How so?”
“When I met with Poon, he told me how he bought the treasure from a man named Amaury, who had been part of the official search team. During the search Amaury figured out where the treasure was but didn’t tell anyone. Later, he and his girlfriend went back and uncovered part of it. He’s got to be the one running around San Francisco.”
Tag wasn’t impressed.
“YOU SAID BEFORE that Poon wanted to hire him instead of you but he couldn’t do it because he was already in the middle of heading back to dig up more of the treasure.”
Jonk took a sip of coffee.
Undaunted.
“He was lying to Poon. The best part of the treasure is the mask. He’s after it, while it’s loose. The rest of the treasure can sit under the dirt and wait. It isn’t going anywhere. That’s what I’d do if I was him. Go after the mask now while the going was good.”
Tag squeezed his hand.
“If he was part of the official search team, there must be pictures.”
“You’d think.”
Tag took out her handheld and logged on to the net. Within five minutes, she had a picture of the search team. She turned the display to Jonk and tapped her finger on a face. “Second from the left.”
Jonk nodded.
Now they had a name.
Amaury Bustani.
And a photo.
Whether it would help them was another matter.
95
Day 5—September 25
Friday Morning
SONG HEARD SHOCKING NEWS mid-morning. Nathan Rock—an international lawyer with the firm of Rapport, Wolfe & Lake—was murdered last night in a Sausalito marina where he lived. Song pulled up the image of Rock getting out of a silver BMW Wednesday night and walking into Danny Dan’s for a clandestine meeting with Rayla White, a law clerk from the firm’s criminal division.
Somehow that meeting was related to his murder.
It had to be.
She paced.
Should she tell the cops about what she saw?
Technically, she got the information while working on a case for a client, Shaden. That happened before she was fired. She wasn’t positive about how the rules of professional conduct worked, but was fairly certain that information obtained by an attorney while working on behalf of a client couldn’t be disclosed to a third party without the client’s permission. That made sense, too. The cops would want to know why she was following Rayla White. That question would lead directly into all the confidential information that Shaden had given her, including the fact that Shaden may or may not have killed a woman Sunday night.
Should she ask Shaden whether she could speak to the cops?
The more she thought about it, the more wrong it seemed.
There was no upside to Shaden.
It was Shaden, not Rock or the cops, who Song was hired to help.
It was bad enough that she really hadn’t helped Shaden in the end. What kind of lawyer would she be if she set out on a course of conduct that actually ended up hurting her client?
No.
Leave it alone.
The cops would get to Rayla White sooner or later on their own accord in any event.
ON HER DESK was an envelope with $20,000 cash inside—a retainer given to her by Jackson Condor. Song twisted it in her fingers for a few moments and almost picked up the phone to tell him that she had second thoughts.
She wasn’t the right lawyer for him.
He should get someone else.
Instead, she put the envelope in a backpack, peddled her Fugi down to the bank and deposited the money in a trust account, getting yet another raised eyebrow from the teller.
Then she headed back to her office to work the case.
And work it fast.
96
Day 5—September 25
Friday Morning
TEFFINGER SAT DOWN on Troy Trent’s couch and put his feet up on the coffee table. The crime unit was gone, the body was gone, the black-and-whites were gone, the news cameras were gone and the lookey-loos were gone. The motion and noise and buzz and activity and shouting and jockeying for position had all been replaced by a vacuum. Teffinger sat in the middle of that vacuum, waiting for something brilliant to fall out of the sky and land in his brain.
So far, it wasn’t happening.
He got up and wandered around, taking his time, casting his eyes here and there, searching for whatever it was he missed the first time.
He felt empty.
Condor was the one who killed Trent.
But there was no proof.
Not an iota.
Teffinger’s hope of averting the next SJK murder by getting Condor off the streets was gone.
Maybe he should go over to Condor’s place and question him about Trent.
Shake the tree.
See if anything fell out.
Maybe he could make Condor believe he had evidence he didn’t.
Maybe he could scare him enough to drive him out of town.
HIS PHONE RANG and the voice of Neva came through. “Remember how you already owe me big time,” she said. “Well now it’s even bigger time.”
“Good, put it on the list.”
“I already have.”
“Just out of curiosity, how big is that list?”
“Huge.”
“How huge?”
“Huge enough that I had to build a separate room to keep it in,” she said. “Anyway, according to the Secretary of State’s records, Concrete Cactus is a California corporation wholly owned by two other companies called D-Drop Ltd. and DAG, Inc. Those companies, in turn, are owned by others. It goes on and on like that. It’s a huge spider’s web. In the end, there are two shareholders at the top, namely Jackson Connor and Troy Trent.”
Teffinger looked out the window.
A couple of teens were going down the hill on skateboards.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll get back to you.”
TEFFINGER HAD HEARD the name D-Drop, Ltd. before but couldn’t place it. He opened the dresser drawer and flipped through the DVDs again, then stuck one called Dirty Blond Bimbo in the player to see what they were like.
The women were drop-dead gorgeous.
Forced sensual pleasures were interposed with rough S&M, rocking the victim between the two extremes.
Teffinger fast-forwarded through it.
To his surprise, it ended with one of the women being murdered while bound.
It was an actual murder.
No question about it.
What the hell?
He played it back at normal speed, three times, then at slow speed. It wasn’t until the last playback that he was able to tell that the murder wasn’t real after all.
It was a fake.
The best fake in the world, but a fake.
CURIOUS, HE POPPED IN ANOTHER ONE.
Lust Slaves.
Something about it seemed familiar. He was a full five minutes into it before he focused on the background and the apparatus rather than the women. Then he realized it was shot in the same room where he had seen Chase strangle Amanda Wayfield through the telescope in Condor’s bedroom.
Then he remembered where he heard the name D-Drop before.
That’s who owned the building where the dungeon was located.
He fast-forwarded through.
It also ended in a murder, although not as realistic as the other one.
He popped in a third.
It ended in a murder.
Incredibly convincing.
But not real.
97
Day 5—September 25
Friday Morning
ROCK WAS BEHIND the initial theft of the treasure from Poon. But how? He had to have had help. It was too big a job for one person to figure out how to get the treasure out of Poon’s possession to begin with, much less sneak it out of Hong Kong undetected and into San Francisco. It would be nice to know when Rock last went to Hong Kong and who accompanied him, the theory being that the other person was a co-conspirator.
That person would be as valuable as Rock.
In fact, maybe Amaury wasn’t the one who killed Rock.
Maybe it was Rock’s co-conspirator.
Greed.
Greed.
Greed.
Never underestimate it.
Tag tapped her PI resources and found out something interesting—Rock hadn’t been to Hong Kong, or anywhere else in Asia for that matter, in over a year—long before the treasure was even purchased by Poon, much less stolen.
Jonk scratched his head.
“How could he be behind the theft if he never even went there?”
“He must have just set it all in motion after Poon confided to him about it,” Tag said. “Someone from Hong Kong had to be the front man. We need Rock’s phone records—the incoming and outgoing numbers—to see who he was talking to.”
“Can you get them?”
She frowned.
Then said, “Probably not but let me make a phone call.”
AN HOUR LATER they entered the opulent lobby of the Mark Hopkins InterContinental Hotel on California street and took the elevator to the Top of the Mark, a vista bar on the nineteenth floor. Through the glass, San Francisco stretched in all directions with particularly stunning views of
Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge.
An older gentleman with a white beard waved at them from a table.
Three martinis sat before him.
He slid one across to each of them and said, “They have a hundred martinis on the menu here. They only need one, this one. It’s called the French 75. I took the liberty of ordering it for you.”
Jonk said “Thanks,” and took a sip.
Martini’s weren’t his thing, but it actually wasn’t bad.
“Why are we meeting here?” Tag asked.
“Because life is short,” he said. “At my age it’s even shorter.”
They chatted until their drinks were done.
Then they slipped the man an envelope under the table.
He showed his appreciation by slipping them a flash drive.
As they parted the man said, “The owner of these records got himself murdered last night. But I suppose you already know that.”
Right.
They did.
“We didn’t do it,” Jonk said. “Just for your information.”
“I wouldn’t care even if you did,” the man said. “Just for your information.”
BACK AT THE CAR, Tag fired up the flash drive in her computer and wasn’t disappointed. The phone records were clearly Rock’s and were clearly authentic. They showed myriad calls to and from a Hong Kong number starting approximately a month before Poon’s treasure got stolen.
It took hardly any effort to find who owned that number.
A man named Park Ching.
98
Day 5—September 25
Friday Morning
SONG WONDERED if Rayla White was the one who called yesterday to warn her that she was on someone’s murder list. It made sense in a way. Rekker was after her and Rayla worked in his department. She might have overheard him making plans. On the other hand, maybe she was working in cahoots with him to throw a scare Song’s way.
Friend or foe.
Which was she?
Either way she was definitely in the middle of things.
She was with Shaden the night they broke into Rekker’s house. She met with Rock at a dive bar on Wednesday. Last night, Rock was murdered.