Sudden Guilt (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  Aaron chuckled.

  “If only it were that simple. Ta’Veya told me everything, including the fact that you two planned to blackmail me into killing some skinhead named Mitch Mitchell,” he said. “The truth is that I might actually oblige you if he turns out to be who you say he is.”

  TA’VEYA WHITE, IT TURNED OUT, HAD TOLD Tarzan just about everything. He knew the story almost as well as Paige did. Some guy was running around the country abducting women, sticking them in desolate places with only a bottle of water and a razorblade, then bringing yet another woman into the game as a rescuer. Ta’Veya got stuffed in a boxcar to die but Paige rescued her. In the process Ta’Veya got raped by a drifter and shot him in the face with Paige’s gun.

  Then a fellow classmate of Paige’s by the name of Marilyn Poppenberg turned up dead—naked, bound with blue rope and stabbed through the ear with a screwdriver.

  Found at a railroad yard.

  Another tie to trains.

  Another tie to Paige’s law school.

  It was too much of a coincidence to not be connected.

  Paige knew that Poppenberg had been investigating cases where defendants escaped justice because the cops got their evidence through an illegal search. She and Ta’Veya found that two of the potential targets of Poppenberg’s investigation lived in Denver—namely Mitch Mitchell and Aaron Trane.

  They started investigating both men.

  That’s why they were in Trane’s loft.

  They didn’t find any evidence that Trane was the razorblade killer—in fact, just the opposite. But in the process they found out about his trailer and discovered pictures of two women who had recently been abducted and were in the news. They were going to use this as leverage to force Trane to kill Mitch Mitchell once they confirmed that Mitchell was in fact the razorblade killer.

  Aaron kicked a stone.

  “You two have been busy little beavers,” he said.

  Paige stared at him.

  “How’d you get Ta’Veya to tell you?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s not important.”

  SUDDENLY HER CELL PHONE RANG.

  The sound came from the front pocket of her jeans.

  “Take it out,” Trane said.

  She did and looked at the number.

  Unknown.

  “I think it’s him,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “The guy.”

  Trane pulled his hair back, put his ear next to hers and said, “Answer it.”

  She flicked open the phone and brought it up where they could both listen. A voice came through, a scrambled voice, the same scrambled voice as all the previous times. “You’ve been a bad girl, Paige Deverex, a very bad girl. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “Leave me alone,’” she said. “I’m out of your games.”

  “There is no out, Paige. You know that.”

  She hung up.

  “Is that him?” Trane asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He paced for several moments and then said, “I don’t like this guy. Hit redial and see who answers.”

  She did.

  The phone rang.

  “No one’s answering,” she said.

  “Let it ring.”

  Then suddenly someone answered.

  A woman.

  “Who is this?” Paige asked.

  The phone turned out to be a payphone on the 16th Street Mall in downtown Denver. The woman who answered just happened to be walking past as it rang. She didn’t see who used the phone last. There were lots of people in the area, probably more than a hundred within sight. Some of them had shaved heads.

  “Thanks,” Paige said. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “You sound stressed. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. Thanks again.”

  When she hung up, Trane said, “If you really want all this to end, I have a plan—a win-win for all of us. It’s going to take some guts though, on your end of the equation.” He looked her straight in the eyes. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  She held his eyes.

  “No.”

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Day Nine—May 13

  Tuesday Afternoon

  ______________

  IF THE CLIMB TO ROBERT SHARAPOVA’S LAW OFFICE was painful, the meeting at the end of the climb was even more so. The lawyer saw no harm in threatening the man who took his wife. Moreover, he wasn’t overly pleased with the fact that Teffinger still didn’t have a clue where she was or who had her.

  He’d be talking to the chief, that was for sure.

  Teffinger put his tail between his legs and felt so tired, frustrated and pressed for time that he slowed down at the elevators and seriously thought about pushing the button. Then he hurried into the stairwell and bounded down the steps two at a time. Somewhere around the 15th Floor, Jena Vellone called and said she wasn’t able to derail the interview.

  It would air on the evening news.

  “I really tried,” she said. “You need to know that.”

  “I know,” he assured her.

  “I’m sorry,” she added. “I really am.”

  “I know. Don’t worry about it.”

  He exited the building on the Broadway side.

  An RTD bus rolled past and threw a cloud of diesel fumes at him. His first thought was to hold his breath and step back but instead he walked through it, thinking about what the lawyer said and admitting that the man was right.

  Teffinger should know more than he did.

  Then Sydney called and said that they still hadn’t found Ta’Veya. “We checked every car in the yard,” she said. “Also, I drove over to that building to the east, where that Tarzan guy lives, to see if he happened to have any security cameras that might have picked up something. He wasn’t home, but I walked around the building and didn’t spot any. Right now I can’t think of anything else to do. So unless you tell me otherwise, I’m going to wrap it up here.”

  Teffinger frowned.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Be sure to tell everyone thanks for me. Oh, and hey, find out if any cars got pulled out of there before we started searching.”

  “Will do,” she said. “By the way, all the TV stations got wind of things and showed up.”

  “That figures.”

  HE GOT BACK TO THE OFFICE and then went nowhere, literally and figuratively, except for the usual ping-pong trips to the coffee pot and the restroom.

  Precious time slipped away.

  More followed.

  No brilliant ideas dropped out of the sky and fell on him.

  Then Leigh called and said she’d be landing at DIA in about forty-five minutes. Should she drop by the office or stay out of his way?

  “I’ll pick you up,” he said.

  On the drive to the airport his phone rang. It turned out to be the last person on the face of the earth he expected to hear from.

  NAMELY TA’VEYA WHITE.

  “Paige Deverex says you’re looking for me,” Ta’Veya said. “What’s going on?”

  She sounded tired.

  But otherwise fine.

  “You’re okay?”

  “Of course I am,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Teffinger told her about the call he received last night and the fact that they traced her phone to the railroad yard this morning. She explained that she left her cell phone sitting on the sink of a ladies room last night.

  “Why would someone call me with it?” Teffinger questioned.

  “They probably didn’t mean to,” she said. “I had your number programmed on speed dial—number eight, if you care. They must have hit the button.”

  “So you’re fine?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” she said. “You did blow me off, in case you forgot.”

  Teffinger almost responded but hit the brakes instead.

  Slowing t
he Tundra down barely in time to avoid riding up the taillights of a Porsche.

  “I didn’t blow you off,” he said.

  “Prove it,” she said. “Take me to dinner tonight.”

  He almost said no but then saw it as an opportunity, an opportunity to find out what Paige Deverex—Little Miss Common Denominator—was up to.

  “Deal,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “It’s supposed to rain tonight.”

  Teffinger didn’t know that but it didn’t surprise him.

  “Do you remember what happened the last time it rained?” she asked.

  His thoughts flashed with such speed and vivid imagery that he could almost hear the storm and feel her body pressed against him and taste her lips.

  “I remember,” he said.

  He felt her hesitate.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  Then she said, “That meant something to me. In case that means anything to you.”

  As soon as he hung up he remembered something.

  He had already promised to take Rain to dinner tonight.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER he stood under the white peaked roof of DIA and waited for Dr. Leigh Sandt to emerge from the masses. When she did, Teffinger was never so glad to see anyone in his life. He put her in a bear hug and spun her around to prove it.

  “Thanks for picking me up,” she said. “I’ll buy you dinner to make up for it.”

  Teffinger chuckled.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing, I’ll tell you later. Right now I’m dead in the water on the Tashna Sharapova case and I need your insight.”

  “My insight?”

  He nodded.

  “How about my hindsight? That seems to work a whole lot better than my insight.”

  He knew he should grin but didn’t.

  “She’s going to die tonight if I can’t think of a way to get my engine in gear,” he said.

  She looked at him hard.

  “I’ve never seen you like this before.”

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Day Nine—May 13

  Tuesday Afternoon

  ______________

  TARZAN BOOSTED Ta’Veya and Paige into the boxcar, then climbed up and closed the door, leaving it cracked just enough to allow a sliver of light. This is where Ta’Veya got chained and where the drifter took a bullet to the face. Aaron wanted to see the place for himself, just to be sure they weren’t lying to him. Plus they needed a private place to talk.

  The sky crackled with distant thunder.

  Ta’Veya seemed apprehensive as if the place freaked her out.

  Paige too, even though she had her gun in hand—a showing of good faith on Trane’s part.

  “Do you believe me now?” Ta’Veya questioned.

  He did.

  “So what’s this master plan you keep talking about?” Paige asked.

  Aaron dropped to the floor and leaned against the steel siding of the car. “First things first,” he said. “For this to work it’s important that we trust each other, so I want to clear up a few misconceptions you may have about me. My name used to be Gordon Andrews. One night, four years ago, I’m heading to a party in the hills outside L.A., minding my own business and perfectly sober, when the cops pull me over. They said I had a busted taillight and wrote me a ticket, which was fine, I didn’t care. Then without any justification whatsoever they made me take a roadside sobriety test. You ever had one of those?”

  Ta’Veya nodded.

  “Once,” she said. “They’re hard to pass, even sober.”

  He nodded.

  That was true.

  “I passed, of course, but wasn’t too subtle about what I thought of the whole thing. In hindsight, I think they were trying to piss me off on purpose so they’d have a reason to escalate things.”

  “To escalate things? Why?”

  “Because it was all part of their plan to get a reason to search the car,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, the next thing they did is ask if they could search the car. I told them no. They said, Why, are you hiding something? I said no. They said, In that case, you won’t mind if we have a quick look around. They made me lay on the ground while they searched the car. Guess what they found?”

  Paige looked at him and said, “They found a dead woman in the trunk—naked and bound in blue rope.”

  Aaron nodded and exhaled.

  “Just like Marilyn Poppenberg,” Paige added.

  “DON’T RUSH TO JUDGMENT,” Aaron warned. “I was a lot more shocked than they were. I recognized the woman vaguely but couldn’t place her. She turned out to be someone named Carolyn Malone. I was charged with first degree murder and got assigned to a public defender who kept telling me to take a plea—namely life in prison but no death penalty. In an act of desperation I cashed in every penny I had and retained a private defense attorney, a woman named Alex Ringer. That turned out to be the best decision of my life.”

  “Obviously,” Ta’Veya said. “You’re here.”

  He nodded.

  “She filed a motion to exclude the evidence based on the argument that the police conducted an unreasonable search of the car, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The D.A. opposed the motion and we all sat back and waited for it to come to a hearing. Meanwhile, my attorney dug around and uncovered some very interesting facts. It turned out that the dead woman—Carolyn Malone—had an ugly breakup a month earlier with her boyfriend, a man named Johnnie Poindexter. Even more interestingly, Johnnie Poindexter turned out to be the son of a detective in the L.A. vice department.”

  “So you were set up?” Ta’Veya asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I think they targeted me at a nightclub named Midnight because it turned out that the dead woman used to go there too. That’s probably where I’d seen her. As far as I can figure, they planted the body in my car and expected me to go down at the hands of an incompetent public defender.”

  “Wow.”

  Aaron nodded.

  “Anyway,” he said, “my attorney had a private talk with the prosecuting D.A. and they cut a deal. She wouldn’t go public with the theory that I was set up if they cut me loose. They agreed but asked that we all go forward with the exclusionary hearing. That way, if they lost there, they could save face and in effect tell everyone they had the killer but he got off on a technicality.”

  “Wow.”

  “Right, wow,” Aaron said. “I shouldn’t have agreed to go along with that part of the deal, in hindsight. But I was too scared not to. Anyway, we won the hearing and the D.A. dropped the case, but I was still branded as a killer. I got out of Dodge, changed my name and started a new life in Denver.”

  He studied the women to be sure they understood what he was saying.

  Ta’Veya did but he couldn’t read Paige.

  Then Paige said, “So how is it that Marilyn Poppenberg ends up dead in Denver, after you move here, bound with blue rope? Are you telling us that’s just another great big coincidence in your life?”

  HE STOOD UP AND LOOKED OUTSIDE.

  No one was around.

  Low charcoal-gray storm cells rolled overhead and brought the thunder closer.

  “You already figured out what happened to Marilyn Poppenberg,” he said. “You have it all connected except the last two dots.” He looked at her and smiled. “Why don’t you try to connect them while I step outside to use the facilities. Let’s see if you’re smart enough to be a lawyer.”

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Day Nine—May 13

  Tuesday Afternoon

  ______________

  AFTER THE MEETING AT THE BOXCAR, Paige headed to law school, partly to catch her four o’clock Environmental Law class, but mostly to be in a normal environment where she could think. Up front, behind a podium, Professor Buckley droned on about the Endangered Species Act in tha
t nasal monotone of his, proving once again that he was the most boring person on the face of the earth—as if anyone within ten miles had any doubts.

  A thrill a minute, he wasn’t.

  But the class was packed because he was the easiest grader on the face of the earth; show up with a warm body and walk away with at least a B-plus. Paige paid enough attention to take notes but focused on a deeper question.

  Namely whether she would help Tarzan and Ta’Veya kill Mitch Mitchell.

  Tonight.

  Or tomorrow.

  Soon, in any event.

  SHE HAD TO PAT HERSELF ON THE BACK for at least being smart enough to connect the dots regarding Marilyn Poppenberg. As far as she could figure, Poppenberg had been investigating both Mitch Mitchell and Aaron Trane. Chances are that one of them found out about it, perceived her as a threat and took her out.

  At first Paige thought it had been Trane because Poppenberg had been bound in blue rope, the same as the woman in Trane’s trunk.

  But now, in hindsight, Trane didn’t even use blue rope once, much less twice. Plus, even if he had used it the first time, why would he be so obvious as to use it again?

  He wouldn’t.

  But someone trying to frame him would.

  So what happened is this. Mitch Mitchell spotted Poppenberg following him. He laid a trap and caught her—just like he tried to catch Paige, twice in fact. He squeezed her until he found out what she was up to. She confessed that she was investigating both him and Aaron Trane. He pressed her for information about Trane and learned about the blue rope.

  Then he killed her using Aaron Trane’s signature to frame him.

  MARILYN POPPENBERG DISAPPEARED ON TUESDAY, May 6th, sometime after eight o’clock in the evening when her last class ended. According to the newspaper article the following day, her body was discovered later that evening.

  The big question Paige now had is whether Aaron Trane had an alibi for that time period. So when her Environmental Law class ended, she called Trane from the payphone next to the restrooms at the end of the first floor.