Sudden Guilt (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)
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The women started following Mitch Mitchell and Aaron Trane, figuring that one of them was the razorblade killer, but not knowing which.
“I couldn’t do that investigation without you,” Ta’Veya said. “We were getting so close, but you were always on the verge of dropping out. So I had my friend continue to call you with the scrambler, to keep you scared enough to stay focused.”
“I can’t believe you did that!” Paige said.
Then she sprang.
And got a fistful of Ta’Veya’s hair.
And pulled as hard as she could.
Ta’Veya screamed, struck at Paige’s face with a fist, and both women fell to the floor in a tangled web.
Trane scrambled out of the way and let them go at it, two loose cannons, two loose cannons that he couldn’t afford to have in his life to be precise.
Chapter Eighty-Six
Day Nine—May 13
Tuesday Night
______________
ROBERT SHARAPOVA PULLED HIS BMW into the parking lot of the 24-Hour Fitness in Lakewood and killed the engine. Teffinger pulled to a stop a good hundred yards away but left the engine running, now knowing that he’d been wasting his time. The lawyer wasn’t up to anything, he was just working out.
But Sharapova didn’t get out.
Two minutes later another car pulled next to him. Sharapova got into the passenger seat and the vehicle pulled away.
Teffinger hung back as far as he could and followed them east on the 6th Avenue freeway, north on I-25, and then northeast on I-76. Just as they took the Highway 85 exit and headed north, Sydney called.
Bar sounds filled the background.
“Chalk one up for your gut,” she said. “You were right. A bartender down here by the name of Ryan Smith remembers seeing Sharapova at some point in the last week or two. He was with some incredibly beautiful woman, which is the reason he remembers him. They were dressed down and getting rip-roaring drunk.”
“I knew it,” Teffinger said.
“It could have been the night that Tracy Patterson got abducted,” she added. “He doesn’t specifically remember, but did confirm he was working that night.”
“I’m sure it was.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that the woman he was with wasn’t just an escort or anything, she was a woman on the side, which is a good motive to get rid of the wife. His being there where Tracy Patterson got abducted is more than just a coincidence. He’s in this thing up to his eyeballs.”
“How?”
Before he could answer, the Tundra’s right front tire exploded.
The vehicle jerked violently and left the road and smashed into something, hard, with a deafening sound.
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Day Nine—May 13
Tuesday Night
______________
TEFFINGER WASN’T SURE HOW BAD HE WAS HURT. Blood rolled down his forehead and into his eyes. He squeezed it out and fumbled for the door handle, desperate to get out, just in case the gas tank had been punctured. The driver’s door wouldn’t open but the passenger one did.
He ran.
The storm pummeled down and soaked him immediately, cold and invasive.
A pain shot up his spine every time he twisted to the right, but wasn’t anything that would kill him. He didn’t see any fire coming from the vehicle, and when it didn’t blow after a few moments, he ducked back inside and fumbled around until he found the cell phone.
Sydney was still on the line.
He told her to pick him up.
Immediately!
SHE SQUEALED TO A STOP NINETEEN MINUTES LATER in her personal vehicle, a dark blue 4-cylinder Honda. Teffinger opened the passenger door, stuck his head inside but stayed where he was. “I’m not going to call for backup because the only way we’ll ever find this guy is to sneak up on him,” he said. “So if you don’t want to go I have no problems with that.”
“Just get in the car,” she said.
As soon as he did, Sydney floored it, heading north on Highway 85 into coyote country.
“So how do we find him?” Sydney asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t gotten that far yet. The only thing I’m sure of is that he’s on his way to kill Tashna Sharapova.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know. I just do.”
The storm got even worse and the Honda’s wipers couldn’t keep up. The city was long gone and so were the city lights. Streetlights had long since disappeared.
“I can hardly see,” Sydney said.
“Don’t slow down.”
LIGHTS APPEARED AHEAD ON THE RIGHT.
It was a gas station.
Teffinger instinctively looked at the Honda’s gauge and found the needle pointing to half. Just as they were about to pass the station he shouted, “Stop!”
Sydney slammed on the brakes and the vehicle fishtailed to a stop.
“Back up to the station,” Teffinger said.
She did.
He jumped out and ran inside. A kid about nineteen with greasy yellow hair stood behind the cash register. Three people stood in line. Everyone gasped when Teffinger bounded in. He immediately remembered that his face was covered in blood.
“I’m a police officer,” he said. “I’m looking for an abandoned house. Small—just a couple of rooms. It’s probably been vacant for some time but the windows aren’t broke. You can hear coyotes at night.”
No one said a word.
“Coyotes are everywhere around here,” the kid behind the counter said.
The others nodded.
Other than that, no one knew anything.
TEFFINGER AND SYDNEY HEADED FARTHER NORTH. There weren’t that many gas stations so they stopped at every one. No one knew anything about an abandoned building.
They came to a Sinclair station.
Just as the lights inside went out. The door was locked. Teffinger banged on it until an old man wandered out of the back room and shouted that the place was closed.
Teffinger flashed his badge and said, “I’m a police officer. Open up.”
Three minutes later he hopped back into the Honda and said, “In two miles we’re going to come to a gravel road and take it to the right.”
Sydney put the pedal to the floor.
Chapter Eighty-Eight
Day Nine—May 13
Tuesday Night
______________
PAIGE REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS when her chest got so tight that she could hardly breathe. She was dangling at the end of a rope tied around her chest, under her arms, being lowered into darkness. She reached up, grabbed the rope above her head and pulled up as best she could to get the pressure off her chest. She kicked with her legs but that only made things worse.
The only light came from above, through a round manhole of some sort.
“Help me!”
The lowering continued until she hit the bottom.
Then the other end of the rope dropped down on her head. She smelled coal and felt dust work its way into her lungs. Then someone shined a flashlight from above. She saw that she was in an underground chamber of some sort, a large deep chamber, about the size of four or five boxcars.
Ta’Veya lay on the ground next to her, unconscious or dead.
Next to her was a blue bag.
“Glad you’re awake. I wanted to at least say goodbye,” a voice said from above.
She recognized it immediately even through the echoing.
It was Tarzan.
“What are you doing?”
He laughed.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” he said. “You’ll find flashlights, razorblades and two bottles of water in that blue bag. Enjoy.”
“Please don’t do this,” she said.
“By the way,” he said. “There won’t be a rescue. This is it. This is all you get. You two represent the end of an era. If you need something to think about, think about
me sitting on a beach in the French Rivera drinking those little drinks with umbrellas in them.”
“But why?” she asked. “I don’t understand. I thought we had a deal.”
“I did too,” Trane said. “I was actually going to let you two live. But you didn’t help kill Mitch Mitchell like you were supposed to.”
“Yes I did.”
“No you didn’t!” he said. “You held back. That made you a loose cannon, someone who might eventually get a guilty conscious and go to the police. And then, when Ta’Veya told us how she’d been playing you for a sucker all along, you became even more of a loose cannon. She wasn’t anyone you’d go out of your way to protect any more. In fact, if I’m reading that little catfight right, you hate her stinking guts and I don’t blame you.”
“Aaron, you got this all wrong,” she said. “I’d never go to the cops about anything, not in a million years. The only thing I want to do is go back to law school and forget that any of this ever happened. I’m going to take all this to my grave, just like we talked about.”
He laughed.
“You got that right. Except sooner than you thought.”
“Please, Aaron, don’t do this.”
“THERE’S ONE MORE REASON why I can’t have you running around alive,” he said. “You’re too smart.”
Paige didn’t understand.
“What do you mean?”
“It means that sooner or later you’d figure out that Mitch Mitchell wasn’t the razorblade killer,” he said. “You’d figure out that I am. When that happens it’s inevitable that you and Ta’Veya will either go to the cops or try to kill me.”
The words stunned her.
“What do you mean—you are?”
“Simple,” he said. “Too simple, which is why you’d eventually connect the dots. I needed you and Ta’Veya out of my life. Once you two got the razorblade killer out of your lives then you’d get out of mine. You figured it was either me or Mitch Mitchell. So I took all my stuff—my collars and chains and padlocks and all my newspaper clippings—and put them in Mitchell’s garage while you were down at law school and your little friend Ta’Veya was out having dinner somewhere.”
“That was your stuff?”
“It was,” he said. “In fact, Ta’Veya recognized the authentic collar, the same exact kind that I used on her sister. The one Ta’Veya bought to pull her little prank had been close to authentic but wasn’t exactly the same. As soon as she saw the real one in Mitchell’s trunk she knew immediately that he was the one.”
“But you can’t be the razorblade killer,” Paige said. “You never recognized me or Ta’Veya.”
“Of course I didn’t,” he said. “That’s because that whole boxcar thing involving Ta’Veya and you was nothing more than a charade that Ta’Veya set up. I had nothing to do with it.”
Paige bowed her head.
He was right.
“I would have never figured that out,” she said. “You should have just let it be.”
“Sure you would have,” he said. “And if not you, then the FBI. They’d do an investigation to be sure that Mitchell was the one who killed all the victims. Chances are they were going to find that Mitchell was here in Denver, at work or something, during one of the times that someone got killed in another state. That profiler would tell all this to Ta’Veya, who would tell you. I’d be the only suspect left in your mind. Then you’d figure out that I must have used my own stuff to frame Mitchell.”
Paige said nothing.
He was right again.
“Do me a favor,” he said. “When Ta’Veya wakes up, tell her it was fun to kill her but it was even more fun to kill her stupid little sister.”
He took several pictures.
Each one exploded with an insanely bright flash.
“For the scrapbook,” he said.
The lid closed on the manhole and the world plunged into darkness, so black and absolute that Paige might as well have been blind.
“Aaron come back!”
He didn’t.
And the sound of Paige’s own breathing suddenly terrified her.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
Day Nine—May 13
Tuesday Night
______________
WHEN THEY CAME TO A DARK VEHICLE parked on the side of the road out there in the middle of nowhere, Teffinger slapped his hand on the dashboard. “Oh yeah, baby!” Sydney pulled up behind it and immediately killed the headlights.
Then they stepped outside, into the storm.
Weapons in hand.
They saw no farmhouse or lights.
They heard no sounds.
Teffinger let the air out of both rear tires of the other vehicle. Then they walked up the road for a couple of hundred yards and came to an old abandoned bridge. The one the gas station guy told Teffinger about.
“This is definitely the right place,” he said. “The farmhouse should be over there somewhere.”
They headed that way.
“A half mile or more,” Teffinger added. “That’s what the guy said.”
“I can’t see a thing,” Sydney said.
Neither could Teffinger.
Stupid rain.
Neither of them had a dry spot left.
Their clothes were cold and heavy.
Suddenly a bolt of lightning ripped across the sky, lighting up the world for only a fraction of a second, but long enough for them to spot the structure two hundred yards away, totally creepy.
They picked up the pace, stumbling and repeatedly catching themselves. As they got closer a flicker of light bounced inside the structure.
“A flashlight,” Sydney said.
Teffinger’s heart raced.
“We need to proceed as if Tashna Sharapova is still alive,” he said. “That means we need to be careful where we shoot. When we get there, you take the back and I’ll take the front. Be careful.”
“Wish I had a flashlight,” Sydney said.
“Be careful not to shoot me.”
“That goes both ways.”
TEFFINGER POSITIONED HIMSELF AT THE FRONT DOOR as Sydney disappeared around the side of the building. The doorknob wasn’t locked. He turned it as quietly as he could and then slowly pushed the door open.
No reaction came.
No charging footsteps.
No gunfire.
He stepped inside.
A flashlight bounced off the walls of a rear room.
A woman sobbed, hardly audible over the pounding of the storm.
“Please, Robert, don’t do this. I’ll give you the money, every single penny—it’s all yours, honest to God. If you kill me you’re just going to end up in jail.”
Smack!
“Shut up!”
Teffinger took a step towards the room.
Then another.
And another.
Suddenly a bright light flashed.
And glass exploded.
Gunfire.
Sydney shouted, “I’m hit!”
Chapter Ninety
Day Nine—May 13
Tuesday Night
______________
WHEN TEFFINGER BOUNDED INTO THE ROOM, he wasn’t prepared for what he saw. A woman—no doubt Tashna Sharapova—was lying on a ratty mattress, naked and tied with rope. Robert Sharapova was on his knees behind her with a fistful of hair in one hand and a box cutter in the other, pressed against the woman’s throat. Sydney’s body hung jackknifed through a window, her torso inside and her legs out. She didn’t move. Her arms hung limp and blood dropped to the floor.
A woman holding a gun stood next to Sydney
“Drop it!” Teffinger said.
She almost did but Sharapova shouted, “No!”
Then he locked eyes with Teffinger and said, “Drop the gun or I slit her throat.” Sharapova looked at the woman with the weapon. “If he doesn’t drop the gun by the time I count to three, shoot her again.”
The woman swung around and trained her weapon at Sydney�
�s back. Teffinger held his hands up in surrender, quietly flipped the safety back on, then slowly stooped down and set his weapon on the floor.
“Now back up,” Sharapova said.
Teffinger obeyed.
“Get me his gun,” Sharapova told the woman.
She did.
With Teffinger’s gun in hand, Sharapova stood up.
“Get in here,” he ordered.
TEFFINGER WALKED SLOWLY. If he charged, there was no way he could get to Sharapova before the man shot. The best he could hope for was the guy didn’t have enough knowledge about guns or enough presence of mind to take the safety off.
Sharapova said, “Stop there!”
Teffinger did.
“Very good,” Sharapova said. “I’m sorry about this, but you understand that I can’t leave any witnesses.”
Teffinger lunged.
The gun didn’t fire.
Both men landed on the floor and the nerves in Teffinger’s back exploded. Then something burned his cheek. He immediately put his hand to it and felt blood, lots of blood, gushing, and realized that Sharapova had slashed him with the box cutter.
Then Sharapova was up and running out of the room.
Teffinger forced himself to his feet.
The woman with the gun stood there, frozen, not knowing what to do. Teffinger turned his head, as if he just saw someone come into the room, and when the woman did the same he pounced. But she dodged him and disappeared out the door as he struggled with the pain in his back.
Then Sydney’s body fell into the room.
“Get ’em,” she said.
“No. I’m not leaving you.”
“Don’t argue with me.”
Teffinger rolled her onto her back and ripped her blouse open. She wasn’t wearing a vest. The bullet had gone all the way through the edge of her body, missing her heart and lungs. He untied Tashna Sharapova and put his cell phone in her hands.
“Call 911,” he said. “Then keep pressure on her wounds. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
He looked at Sydney again.
“Go,” she said.