by R. J. Jagger
“Nothing personal,” she said, “but I was just curious what you were doing on the evening of May 6th.”
Aaron laughed.
“Does this relate to Marilyn Poppenberg?”
“Guilty,” Paige said.
“You’re trying to find out if I have an alibi?”
“Maybe just a little.”
“Woman, you need to relax and trust me,” he said.
“I do,” she said. “I just need to convince myself all I can. Lawyers call it due diligence.”
“Whatever,” Aaron said. “Let’s see—May 6th.”
“That’s a Tuesday.”
“Let me think,” Aaron said. “I don’t keep a calendar or anything like that.”
“I understand.”
“Bingo,” he said. “Now I remember. We were getting ready to do a photo shoot. I had a bunch of models from MOD-ELLE scheduled to show up at noon the next day. That evening, Scotty Marks was down on the second floor constructing a set. I took a lady friend to a long dinner that evening at Marlowe’s, down on the 16th Street Mall. We got there about 7:30 and left about 9:00. Hold on a minute.”
She heard walking, then papers shuffling.
“Okay,” he said. “I found the credit-card receipt. It’s dated May 6th at 8:52 p.m. I’m showing it to Ta’Veya.”
Suddenly Ta’Veya’s voice came through.
“Are you having second thoughts?” Ta’Veya asked.
“No.”
“Good. The credit-card receipt is just like he says,” Ta’Veya said. “It’s dated May 6th at 8:52 p.m.”
When Aaron came back on the line, Paige asked, “Then what did you do, after that?”
He laughed.
“You really aren’t a very trusting, soul, are you?” he asked. “Then, after that, we came back to my place. My lady friend read a book and I did an inventory of my darkroom supplies, in preparation of the shoot. I ordered a bunch of stuff that night, both online and by phone. I should be able to get you email printouts or receipts or something to prove it if you really want to take it that far. In fact, hold on a minute.”
Ta’Veya’s voice came through again.
“Okay,” Ta’Veya said. “We’re pulling up his emails from May 6th. Here’s one at 9:45 p.m.—from Aaron to a place called Photo Discounts, ordering some stuff.” A pause. “All right, here’s another one—10:23 p.m., to a place called Quality Photo Products, ordering color paper.” Another pause. “We got five more, running through midnight.”
Aaron came back on the phone.
“You feel better now?” he asked.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m a jerk.”
Aaron chuckled.
“No you’re not,” he said. “You can look at all this stuff yourself.”
“No, that’s okay.”
“I want you to,” he said. “I want you to be comfortable with the fact that I had nothing to do with Marilyn Poppenberg, because that is the honest-to-God truth. So are you still in, or what?”
She didn’t hesitate.
“I was never out.”
“Good,” he said. “Nine o’clock tonight. My place.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be there.”
Chapter Eighty
Day Nine—May 13
Tuesday Afternoon
______________
ON THE DRIVE TO HEADQUARTERS FROM DIA, Teffinger told Dr. Leigh Sandt everything he knew about the Tashna Sharapova case, hoping she would be able to point him to that one critical rock he hadn’t had the foresight to look under yet—the one that had the map to where Tashna was being held. When Teffinger finally stopped flapping his lips, the profiler frowned and admitted that no neon lights were flashing inside her head.
“Maybe something will come to me later,” she said.
Teffinger looked at his watch.
4:32 p.m.
“It’s already later,” he said. “If she isn’t dead by now she will be by midnight. I can feel it in my bones.”
He got quiet—partly to pay more attention to staying out of the way of the maniac I-70 drivers, but mostly to give Leigh some quiet time to digest the information.
Then Forrest Tanker—the chief—called and spoke in a serious, concerned voice. He wanted to know the story behind the manhunt that Teffinger commissioned this morning at the railroad yard. After Teffinger explained, the chief made a few points. First, Teffinger was the head of the homicide unit, emphasis on homicide. Second, not only did the situation this morning not involve a homicide, in hindsight it didn’t even involve a missing person. Third, did Teffinger have some kind of personal relationship going with this non-missing woman?
Teffinger couldn’t lie.
“We’ve had a few private moments,” he said.
He didn’t see the need to volunteer anything about dinner tonight.
“Nick,” the chief said. “We both know you’re the best hunter this place has, or may ever have for that matter. If my daughter turned up missing and I could only have one person look for her, it would be you. But this deal this morning concerns me in a big way. You need to know that.”
When Teffinger hung up he must have had a look on his face because Leigh said, “Problems?”
An 18-wheeler rode Teffinger’s bumper.
He wasn’t in the mood to care.
“That was the chief,” he said. “His basic theory is that my dick got in the way of my brain this morning and caused a bunch of lost man hours.”
“People hours,” she said.
“The truth is, that’s not what happened,” Teffinger said. “But I can see why he’d think it. Now I have to buy him lunch and straighten things out.”
She laughed.
“What?” he asked.
“You referred to yourself and used the word buy—as in the act of buying or purchasing—both in the same sentence,” she said.
He grinned.
“I did?”
She nodded.
“See what stress will do to you?” he said.
“I always knew it could have an effect,” she said, “but never anything like this.”
FROM I-70 THEY TOOK I-25 SOUTH into downtown, getting sucked into increasingly thicker stop-and-go traffic. “Rush hour,” Teffinger said. “One of the world’s great misnomers. So tell me about this guy on your radar screen. What’s his name again?”
“Todd Underdown.”
“Right, him.”
“He might be something, he might not,” she said. “Right now he has three strikes against him. One, he owns an old Ford Mustang, like the one in the vicinity of the boxcar that night. Two, he worked for BN for several years, another tie to trains. And three, he was in Oregon at the same time as one of the killings. Some poor girl got chained and left to rot on the rocks down by the ocean and ended up using the razorblade.”
“Poor thing,” Teffinger said.
“If I can just catch this one guy, my whole time with the bureau will have been worth it,” she said.
Teffinger understood.
“So what’s your plan?”
“Get some decent photos of him for starters,” she said. “Then grab his garbage and process it for prints and DNA and see where that goes. If things start adding up I’ll go for a phone tap and all the rest.”
“If there’s anything I can do—”
She nodded, appreciative.
“There is one small thing,” she said.
“No problem. Name it.”
“You can be the one to go through the garbage.”
Teffinger chuckled.
“You have an evil streak in you. Do you know that?”
TEFFINGER DROPPED THE PROFILER OFF at the downtown Marriott and then pointed the Tundra towards the Rock Rest on South Golden Road to meet Ta’Veya for dinner, not wanting to be late.
He got there before her, took a booth at the edge of an empty dance floor and ordered a Bud Light. The dim lighting washed the wooden beams and walls with a warm intimate glow. The sky had been rumbling for the last half hour and
finally started to drop water.
The beer felt good in his gut.
Too good.
A couple of young women walked over to a jukebox, put in a bill and got a country song out. Teffinger never heard it before but liked it within the first few bars. The women whispered something to each other, laughed, and then walked over to his booth and slid in.
“She’s Mandy,” one of them said, pointing to the other one.
“And she’s not,” the other one said.
Teffinger grinned.
“This is really weird because we have the same name,” he said. “I’m not-Mandy too.”
Mandy looked at Teffinger, then to her girlfriend, and said, “So how am I going to tell you two apart, having the same name and everything?”
Teffinger smiled.
“She’s the cute one,” he said.
Teffinger bought them beers and learned they were seniors at the Colorado School of Mines, celebrating the fact that they made it through an engineering exam alive this afternoon. The third song on the jukebox turned out to be a slow one.
Mandy grabbed Teffinger’s hand, pulled him onto the dance floor, put her arms around his neck and pushed her stomach to his.
“I love this song,” she said.
“So I see.”
WHEN THEY GOT BACK TO THE TABLE, Teffinger’s phone rang. He expected it to be Ta’Veya telling him she was running a little late. Instead it turned out to be Tracy Patterson, victim number two, the one who got dumped in Tashna Sharapova’s BMW at the museum parking lot.
“Nick,” she said. “You told me to call you if I thought of anything no matter how small it was.”
Right.
He did.
“This is probably nothing,” she said. “But I was watching the evening news and saw Tashna Sharapova’s husband on it.”
Teffinger winced.
He’d forgotten about that.
“Right,” he said.
“Well, he seemed familiar to me, as if I’d seen him someplace before,” she said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was he following you or something?”
She laughed.
“No, nothing like that,” she said. “I just remember seeing him somewhere, but not in a weird or threatening way.”
Teffinger processed the information and didn’t find it particularly helpful.
“Okay,” he said. “You did the right thing, calling me. I’m glad you did. If you remember where you saw him, let me know.”
He hung up just in time to see Ta’Veya walk in.
She stopped to get her bearings and spotted him, with Mandy and not-Mandy, and Bud.
She immediately turned and huffed out.
Chapter Eighty-One
Day Nine—May 13
Tuesday Night
______________
AFTER NIGHTFALL, DRESSED IN BLACK, Tarzan and the two women—Ta’Veya and Paige—crept through the dark fields behind Mitch Mitchell’s street. They carried flashlights but kept them off.
They didn’t speak.
A dog barked but it was a ways off, a block at least, probably more. The ground squished under their feet, still soaked from the rain. Cold water worked its way into their tennis shoes. The wind blew and thunder rolled through the clouds, warning of even more weather. Paige carried the only gun. Aaron and Ta’Veya each had knives, but Aaron didn’t care that much if he had one or not.
He had his hands.
Mitch Mitchell’s truck wasn’t parked in the driveway.
All his windows were dark.
Perfect.
They crept around to his back door, stopped and put on latex gloves. Aaron put his face to the window and saw no signs of life.
He knocked.
No sound of movement came from inside.
Aaron pulled off his sweatshirt, wrapped it in his fist and punched the window. The busting of the glass sounded deafening.
No alarms went off.
Aaron reached through the opening, unlocked the door and stepped inside. The women followed. They closed all the window coverings before turning on their flashlights. Then Paige kept a lookout through the front window while Ta’Veya and Aaron started to take the place apart.
They pulled drawers out, dumped them on the floor and shuffled the mess with their feet.
They didn’t care if Mitchell knew they had been there.
“It’s starting to rain again,” Paige said.
Trane didn’t care.
“Just keep watching,” he said.
“It’s dead quiet out there.”
“Good.”
They rifled through one thing after another and found nothing.
THEN TA’VEYA SHOUTED SOMETHING from the bedroom. Trane ran in and saw a pile of papers on the bed, looking as if they’d been dumped out of a file folder. Ta’Veya was on her knees, shuffling through them.
“Found this in the closet,” she said.
“What is it?”
Then he saw.
It was two sections of newspaper, folded open to articles about Marilyn Poppenberg’s murder.
Mementos.
His jaw dropped.
He knew in his heart that the little freak had set him up, but didn’t expect to actually find evidence.
“This guy’s dead,” he said.
Ta’Veya handed him a set of printed pages, stapled together. “Does this look familiar?” she asked.
Aaron recognized it immediately.
It was a printout of the court’s decision in his California case, ruling that the search of his car had been unconstitutional. Part of the text was highlighted in yellow marker. When Trane read that section the veins in his neck bulged. It was the part of the decision stating that the woman had been found naked and bound in blue rope.
“You were definitely framed,” Ta’Veya said.
Trane shook his head in disbelief.
“This guy is so dead,” he said.
“Look at the bottom,” Ta’Veya said. “This was printed off the Internet on May 6th, which is the day Poppenberg got killed. I can just picture the poor woman tied up and getting closer and closer to death while the little scumbag squeezed her for information on how to locate the case.”
“To be absolutely sure about the blue rope,” Trane said.
“Exactly.”
Ta’Veya took the papers out to Paige and said, “Look at this.”
Then things got even more interesting.
They found blue rope in a bag in the closet, about forty feet in length, cut at one end, the leftover part that Mitchell hadn’t needed for Poppenberg.
BEHIND THE HOUSE SAT A WOODEN STRUCTURE, probably a one-car garage at one point but now looking more like a storage shed. There they found a small trunk stuffed in the corner, hidden behind a cache of rakes and shovels.
Inside that trunk they found three steel neck collars, several sections of chain, a dozen or so Master padlocks, three boxes of razorblades, a voice scramble and a two-foot high stack of newspaper articles and Internet printouts regarding various women.
“Oh my God,” Ta’Veya said. “He’s definitely the one.”
“Unbelievable,” Aaron said.
Ta’Veya grabbed one of the collars and took it into the house to show Paige.
“This isn’t exactly like the one used on you,” Paige noted.
“Right,” Ta’Veya said. “I know that. But here’s something I didn’t tell you before, because there was no need to, really. But the collar used on me was slightly different than the ones used on the other woman—the one’s I was sent to rescue. This collar, on the other hand, is exactly like those other ones.”
“So he’s unquestionably the one,” Paige said.
Ta’Veya nodded.
Aaron couldn’t get the rage down.
“I say we just stay here and kill him as soon as he gets home.”
“Agreed,” Ta’Veya said.
“Me too,” Paige said.
Chapter Eighty-Two
Day Nine—May 13
Tuesday Night
______________
PAIGE SAT ON MITCH MITCHELL’S COUCH with a flashlight in hand and forced herself to go through the stack of gruesome papers retrieved from the trunk. Ta’Veya stood at the window, keeping a lookout. Tarzan paced back and forth with an animal intensity, tossing an eight-inch serrated knife from one hand to the other.
The papers painted a ghastly picture of at least eight dead women and several others who disappeared.
Most of the articles had photographs of the women.
They were all attractive.
One was almost in Ta’Veya’s league—model quality.
“He likes them pretty,” Paige said. “That’s for sure.”
Ta’Veya grunted.
Then she asked the question that was on all their minds. “So how are we going to do it?”
Paige set the papers down and turned off the flashlight.
They decided that all three of them would play a material role in the murder. That was the only way they could all trust one another.
“After we do this we take it to our graves,” Paige said. “None of us ever tells anyone about it. Not even in twenty years. Not ever. I need that assurance to go on.”
Aaron nodded.
“That’s the deal,” he said.
“Same here,” Ta’Veya added.
“That’s the only way we’ll all be able to sleep at night,” Paige added.
True.
“So how are we going to do it?” Ta’Veya asked again.
NO ONE SPOKE.
Then Tarzan stopped pacing and said, “I have two ideas.”
“Shoot.”
“One is this,” he said. “We kill him with his own blue rope. We wrap it twice around his neck. I get on one end and you two get on the other end. Then we pull until he stops breathing.”
Ta’Veya considered it and then said, “He deserves worse.”
Aaron chuckled.
“What’s your second idea?” Ta’Veya questioned.
“The second idea is this,” he said. “He’s got a set of steak knives in the kitchen. We get him immobile—tie him down or I’ll sit on him or something. Then we all stab him in the chest at the same time, at the count of three.”