by R. J. Jagger
Midnight City
R.J. Jagger
1
Day One
July 26
Wednesday Night
Wednesday night after dark Nick Teffinger sat in the garage behind the wheel of his ’67 Corvette and watched a mean thunderstorm pound Denver. The top was down and the seat was pushed back to give his 34-year-old, six-two frame room to breathe. He had two Bud Lights in his gut and a third in his hand. Lightning shredded the sky again and again and filled the universe with a rolling sea of drums.
The wind shook the trees with a demonic possession.
His house was near the top of Green Mountain, fifteen miles west of downtown, on a dead-end street. Traffic was minimal even in good weather so it was unusual when headlights punched up the asphalt. To Teffinger’s surprise they stopped in front of his house and went out. A solitary figure emerged and splashed through puddles up the driveway, hunched against the storm.
It was a female figure with a posture he didn’t recognize.
The woman walked into the garage, briefly stared at the windshield as if to verify someone was behind it, then opened the passenger door and slipped in.
“You don’t know me,” she said. “My name’s Tangiers Vendora.”
Her voice was a song.
The light wasn’t much but was enough for Teffinger to see a riveting beauty with blond hair and a fit body in a short white sundress. The woman grabbed his hand and placed it on her chest.
“Do you feel my heart beating?” she said.
He did.
“It’s a madman and I’ll tell you why. At midnight, someone’s going to die. It’s either going to be me, or you, or a man named John.”
Teffinger pulled his hand away and took a long swallow from the blue can.
“This is a joke, right? Sydney? Is that who put you up to this?”
“This isn’t a joke,” she said. “This is the furthest thing from a joke you’ll ever find.”
The words were laced with stress.
They made no sense but Teffinger found no lies.
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “It relates to Brittany Asher.”
The name sent bark and bite into Teffinger’s brain.
Brittany Asher, a pretty little waitress at the time, was one of the sickest murders Teffinger had ever come across. It happened eleven months ago on a warm August night on the east side of Denver in a frugal but relatively stable neighborhood. The killer had a neat way of doing it. He broke in sometime around midnight while the woman was deep in sleep in her own bed. He held a chemical-soaked cloth over her mouth until she passed out. While she was unconscious, he tied her spread-eagle to the bed with 3/8” blue rope. When she started to regain consciousness, the fun part started. He inserted a metal device into her mouth that kept it locked in an open position. He didn’t rape her or lick her tits or stomach. The best guess, though, was that he taunted her with what he was about to do.
Then he did it.
“It” was to drop a baby rattlesnake, not more than three inches long, into her mouth then close it off with duct tape. Baby rattlers, Teffinger later learned, have the same venom as the adults and are just as deadly, in fact even more so because they can’t control the amount of venom they inject and have a tendency to overkill.
The bite of the fangs eventually occurred, possibly after a period of time, possibly in response to a moving tongue that could no longer be kept still, and possibly immediately. There was no concrete evidence one way or the other as to the quickness with which the bite occurred.
What was certain was that it always occurred, and in Brittany Asher’s case, several times over.
The tongue and the inside of her mouth swelled.
That restricted the air and resulted in suffocation.
When the killer left, he made no effort to hide the method of murder. The mouth device was abandoned in place. The snake was also left in place. By the time the crime was discovered, the snake was dead. An autopsy was never performed on it but the best guess was that it either suffocated to death or got constricted and squashed by the very swelling it created.
That’s how Brittany Asher died in August of last year.
She wasn’t the first to meet that fate, however.
It turned out she was the third.
Six months before her, in February of last year, there was Jacqueline Squares, a New Jersey schoolteacher, killed in the exact same manner, right down to the blue rope, the identical-matching mouth device and the rattlesnake. She was number two of three.
Five months before her, in September of the year before last, a Miami model by the name of Lori Rain died the exact same way. She was number one of three.
The victims had three things in common.
They were all in their mid to late twenties, they all lived alone, and they were all attractive.
Those were old memories.
Now, tonight, a woman named Tangiers Vendora was sitting in Teffinger’s car to talk to him about something that related to Brittany Asher.
Her face was intense.
Her skirt had ridden up almost to her panties.
Strong shapely legs, slightly spread, stuck out.
Teffinger took a swallow of beer and said, “What’s your interest in Brittany Asher?”
The woman put her hand on his knee.
“Before we go any further, I have to have your 100 percent promise that everything I tell you will remain absolutely confidential. You need to promise that you’ll never tell anybody what I’m about to tell you.”
“Why?”
“Just promise.”
Teffinger frowned.
“I can’t promise that if I don’t know what you’re going to say.”
“Just do it,” she said. “We don’t have time to play games.”
He exhaled.
There was something in her voice that wouldn’t be denied.
“Okay,” he said. “You have my word.”
“Good,” she said. “Before I tell you what I’m going to tell you, though, I need to know one thing, and I want you to be absolutely honest with me. How did it feel when you murdered Peyton Rekker?”
2
Day One
July 26
Wednesday Night
“How did it feel when you murdered Peyton Rekker?” That was the question that came from the lips of this mysterious woman sitting next to Teffinger.
“I didn’t murder Peyton Rekker,” he said.
The woman ran her fingers through Teffinger’s hair.
“Okay, let me rephrase it,” she said. “How did it feel when you killed him?”
Lightning arced across the sky followed by a slap of thunder.
“It felt like he was resisting arrest.”
“Peyton Rekker didn’t murder Brittany Asher,” the woman said.
Teffinger swallowed what was left of the beer, crushed the can in his fist and threw it into the storm.
“That’s bullshit,” he said.
“Unfortunately it’s not. Tell me something, how did you find out about him to begin with? I’ll bet everything I own that someone made an anonymous call to you. Am I right?”
She was right.
Teffinger’s mouth didn’t admit it though.
“Why should I talk to you about any of this?”
“Because I have answers you’re going to want to hear,” she said. “Like I said, Peyton Rekker didn’t murder Brittany Asher. You killed the wrong man.”
Teffinger slammed his hand on the dash.
“Rekker
killed Brittany and I killed him. Since that day not one other person has been killed the way she was. That in and of itself proves that Rekker was the killer.”
He opened the car door.
“Where you going?”
“To get another beer. Do you want one?”
She grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
“No and neither do you,” she said. “I need you sober. In roughly two hours someone is going to die. I don’t want it to be you or me.”
Teffinger broke loose, stood up and shut the door.
Then he leaned in and said, “Look, lady, you’re pretty, I’ll give you that. But as far as making sense goes, you’re not doing it. I don’t know what your interest is in all this but you’re prying into things that are dead and finished.”
He left.
Inside, he grabbed two beers, popped one and drank a third of it in one long swallow. For a heartbeat he contemplated going to bed. Instead he headed back to the car, handed a beer to Tangiers and said, “If you think you can make sense, do it. I have to warn you though I’m losing patience.”
She eyed the beer in her hand as if it was the enemy, then opened it up and took a swallow.
“Peyton Rekker was framed,” she said. “The person who killed Brittany Asher is still out there and I know who he is.”
Teffinger cocked his head.
“Okay, who is he?”
“His name’s John.”
“John?”
“Right, John. He’s going to strike again tonight at midnight.”
Teffinger shook his head in disbelief.
“And how would you know this?”
She took a sip of beer.
“Because I’m his lawyer,” she said. “I’m going to fill you in but first get back to my question. Did you get onto Rekker from an anonymous call?”
Teffinger reflected back.
“That’s right.”
“That’s what I thought,” Tangiers said. “Tell me as clearly as you can remember exactly what the caller said.”
“Why?”
“Just indulge me, please.”
Teffinger considered it.
He saw no downside.
“He said he was a lawyer. He didn’t give me his name but he made it clear that the conversation needed to be off the record. He said he could get disbarred if it ever got out what he was doing. He was going to violate the attorney-client privilege and tell me things about one of his clients, things that had been communicated to him in trust. I agreed that I’d keep it all on the hush-hush.”
Tangiers made a noise.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” she said. “Keep talking.”
Teffinger took a swallow of beer.
“Well, he told me that his client was a man named Peyton Rekker. He said that Rekker had confessed to him that he killed three women, one named Lori Rain in Miami, one named Jacqueline Squares in New Jersey and a third named Brittany Asher in Denver.”
“When did the call come?”
“What do you mean?”
“In relation to Brittany Asher’s murder,” she said. “Was it the next day? A week later, or what?”
“I’d say that’s about right,” Teffinger said. “A week later, give or take. Anyway, I now had the killer’s name but I had no source that I could cite. There was no way to get a search warrant. I don’t ordinarily do this, but I was so upset about the way Brittany was killed that I decided to pay a little visit to Rekker’s house, off the record.”
“You mean illegally.”
“Right, I broke in,” Teffinger said. “Then I found stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Good stuff. The guy had a garage and one of the walls had a number of cabinets, almost like the kind you’d find in a kitchen, with doors on them. They were cheap pine, painted white. In one of those cabinets on a top shelf was a box. Inside that box I found a couple hundred feet of 3/8” blue rope, plus three metal devices that exactly matched what we found in Brittany’s mouth. Next to that box was another box. Inside that box was a small glass aquarium, maybe two or three gallons in size, with a tightly weaved mesh wire top covering it. Inside that aquarium were four baby rattlesnakes, the exact size and coloring of the one that was put into Brittany Asher’s mouth.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I put everything back exactly as I found it and got out of there without anyone seeing me,” Teffinger said. “I was illegal at that point, illegal as hell. I couldn’t tell anyone in the department what I was up to without dragging them into it. So I kept my mouth shut and started following Rekker around on my own, waiting for him to do something that would justify my making contact with him. During that contact I was going to plant a small amount of drugs on him. That would allow me to make an arrest and subsequently get a warrant for his house, ostensibly to look for more drugs. During that drug hunt, the plan was to accidentally find all the murder paraphernalia.”
“You were over the line.”
He nodded.
“Way over. The case upset me to that extreme. Anyway, I was staked out down the street from his house one night. He appeared from out of the blue, dragged me out of the car and punched me in the face. I had an assault at that point in time, which is exactly what I needed. I identified myself as a detective and told him he was under arrest. He resisted and forced me into a position to defend myself. He ended up dead in the process.”
Silence.
“You choked him to death,” Tangiers said.
“It was self defense.”
“Was it?”
“Yes,” Teffinger said. “There was a full internal investigation. I was cleared.”
She nodded.
“I know that,” she said. “But just between you and me and the storm, we both know you could have backed off and taken him alive.”
Teffinger said nothing.
He took a sip of beer.
Tangiers patted his knee and said, “Your secret’s safe with me. In fact, that’s the answer I wanted to hear. I wanted to know that you killed him.”
“Why?”
“Because I need you to kill him again.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“There’s anger in your voice,” she said. “Keep it there. You’re going to need it.”
3
Day One
July 26
Wednesday Night
“This is going to be awkward because when you got that anonymous call before, the guy said he was an attorney,” Tangiers said. “He wasn’t an attorney. Do you know who he was?”
“I told you, he didn’t give me his name.”
“He was the man who killed Brittany Asher. He was pretending to be an attorney and the call was made to frame Rekker and get himself off your radar.”
Teffinger heard the words.
His brain processed them.
His heart processed them even harder.
“Why would he frame Rekker?”
“I don’t know why it was Rekker instead of someone else but I do know it was a frame-up,” Tangiers said. “Think about it. What exactly did you find at his house? Two boxes of conveniently placed incriminating stuff, two boxes that were planted there and that he never even knew about.”
The words beat inside Teffinger’s head with the force of a hammer.
If they were true, he’d killed an innocent man.
“There’s no reason to say it was a frame-up instead of exactly what it was,” he said.
“Yes there is.”
“And what’s that?”
“He told me so.”
“You’re in touch with him?”
She nodded.
“I’m his lawyer.”
Teffinger shook his head in disbelief. “Just like the other guy said he was his lawyer.”
She exhaled.
“That’s the awkward part,” she said. “I didn’t know he used that line on you.” A beat then, “Here’s the situatio
n. I’m a lawyer here in Denver in the Grashnee firm over on Welton.”
Teffinger nodded.
He knew the outfit.
They did criminal defense work.
“A man named John called the office one day about wanting to possibly retain one of the lawyers in the office and I was the one who ended up doing the intake,” she said. “He said he wanted to talk to me about the possible defense of a criminal act but first wanted to be absolutely positive that what he told me would remain in absolute confidence.”
“Okay.”
“We talked about the attorney-client privilege and how the privilege belonged to the client and not the lawyer. We talked about how attorneys were bound by both the law and the rules of professional conduct to not betray the confidences of their clients and how, if a lawyer did, what they said could never be used as evidence in court, not to mention that they would be disbarred.
The storm howled.
Lightning exploded so close that Teffinger jumped.
“Go on,” he said.
“Well, after he got comfortable with the fact that I was duty bound to keep his secrets secret, he told me he was the one who killed Brittany Asher. He said he was telling me now because if he ever got caught, he wanted me to be his lawyer. He wanted me to monitor what the police were doing and to line up every defense possible in advance.”
“Did you do that? Monitor what we were doing?”
She nodded.
“He sent us a cash retainer of $10,000 and we opened a file.”
“Did you have his name at that point?”
“No, the only name we had was John,” she said. “We had an informal meeting with a few of the lawyers in the office and decided that it wouldn’t be improper to open a file even if we didn’t know the client’s full name. Anyway, during a subsequent conversation, one of the things I talked to him about was a defense commonly used by attorneys that the client couldn’t be the guilty one if someone else committed the crime,” she said. “In hindsight, now that I think about it, that conversation took place three days or four days after Brittany Asher was murdered, which would have been before he called you. In fact, that’s probably how he came up with the idea to pretend he was a lawyer.”