Venta looked at London, not wanting to answer without permission, and London nodded.
“The person wouldn’t say,” Venta said.
“You have no name?”
“No.”
“Did this person say they were from Vesper & Bennett?”
London nodded permission to answer.
“No,” Venta said. “He said the matter was confidential. So confidential that he didn’t even want the name of the law firm in my files.”
Fog cocked his head.
“So what makes you think this man was with V&B?”
“I was able to get my phone records,” she said. “The calls came from a phone registered in the lobby of this building. For some reason he always gave me the impression he was with a big firm. Plus this firm is in the process of opening a Bangkok office. It’s the only firm in the building that has a tie to Bangkok.”
Fog looked at her hard, then at London.
“Ms. Vaughn,” he said, “your letter states that $10,000 has already been paid.”
“That’s correct,” London said.
“Do you have a copy of a check or wire transfer or anything else to show that the payment came from V&B?”
Venta jumped in.
“The payment was made in cash,” she said. “It was made in that manner as part of the firm’s plan to keep its involvement confidential.”
Fog stood up.
Hooked out the window and then back at them with a puzzled look on his face.
“You’re not giving me much to go on,” he said. “If the firm owes you money, Ms. Devenelle, we’ll definitely pay you every penny. I trust that you can see my dilemma though.” He smiled. “I’ll tell you what, let me get the word out to the other attorneys regarding this matter and see if anyone knows anything about it. How’s that? Fair enough? If someone steps up and says they hired you, case closed. We’ll get a check to you in full right away, with our apologies.” He looked at London. “Plus any associated attorney fees.”
London stood up.
Venta joined her.
“How much time are you looking at?” London asked.
He shrugged.
“I think a week should be adequate,” he said.
London put her hands on the table and leaned across.
“We’ll be back at ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” she said. “You can either give us a check at that time, or I’ll be marching straight down to Denver District Court to file a complaint.”
Fog looked as if he was about to say something harsh.
Instead he said, “I’ll see what I can find out by then.”
London turned and walked out of the room, trying to catch her breath and not pass out.
DOWN AT STREET LEVEL Venta asked, “Why the rush?”
“The more time we give them,” London said, “the more time they have to come up with some brilliant plan. Our best chance is to get them running and hope they stumble over their own feet.”
“You think they will?”
“Run, yes, stumble, no,” London said. “How’d I do? Did I look like a real attorney? I was so nervous that I felt like passing out. I had a picture of you having to drag me out by my arms, caveman style.”
Venta hugged her around the shoulders.
“You are a real attorney, honey,” she said. “I knew it the first time I saw you. Vesper & Bennett is about to learn it, too. And then, sooner or later, at some point down the road, you’ll know it yourself.” She paused for a beat and added, “I couldn’t believe it when you leaned across the table and stared him down. Where did that come from?”
London laughed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just happened.”
Venta pointed her face to the sun and spun around.
“I’m starved,” she said. “Let’s go to the Hard Rock Café, my treat. I want to tell you about this man I met.”
15
Day Three—June 13
Wednesday Afternoon
THE SEARCH OF THE ARVADA APARTMENT shared by the victim, Samantha Rickenbacker, and the missing woman, Tessa Blake, turned up nothing to suggest that either woman had any enemies of significance or that either had done anything to warrant being a murder target. No drugs were found. According to their bank statements and bills, they weren’t rich but lived within their means.
Teffinger found a store-bought pregnancy kit in the bathroom cabinet, waved it at Sydney, then opened the box and found it only half full.
He looked down at the trashcan and frowned.
It was full.
He dumped the contents in the bathtub but found no used samplers.
“I love going through trash for nothing,” he said. “Be sure we get a pregnancy test on the victim.”
“Why?” Sydney asked.
“Because if she’s pregnant then I’m really going to be bent out of shape,” he said. “And if she’s not, that means Tessa Blake may be.”
“In which case you’re going to be bent,” Sydney said.
Teffinger nodded.
“Right.”
“So either way, you’re going to be bent.”
He raked his hair back with his fingers and said, “Right, but I want to know why.”
FROM THE APARTMENT they took Wadsworth south to the 6th Avenue freeway, headed west and turned left at the Colfax interchange just as Jimmy Buffet’s “Why Don’t We Get Drunk?” came on the radio.
Teffinger turned it up.
Home Depot appeared almost immediately on their left. When he drove past it, Sydney looked at him weird and said, “You just passed it, cowboy.”
“Two things,” he said. “First, you can never stop the car when a Jimmy Buffet song is playing. Second, I smell coffee up the road.”
Sydney rolled her eyes.
“Jimmy Buffet? You need to get some rap music in this truck, Teffinger. Something that makes you want to stand up and shake your ass.”
“I don’t have an ass, remember?”
Five minutes later, with a thermos full of gas station coffee in hand, Teffinger doubled back to the Home Depot parking lot and killed the engine.
They cut through the garden department.
Teffinger picked a lily on the way and handed it to Sydney.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
He didn’t know.
Inside, they got directed to Samantha Rickenbacker’s immediate supervisor, a man named Ben Adams who owned a head full of really bad hair-plugs and a mouth full of yellow teeth. He wore a stained asparagus-green T-shirt that looked like it hadn’t been off in twenty years.
Adams and his co-workers portrayed Samantha as a friendly, conscientious worker who always reported on time and wore a smile. She never showed up drunk or high or unreasonably stressed or distracted. From what they knew, she didn’t party all that much and definitely wasn’t into the club scene. She didn’t have a boyfriend at the moment, or in recent months, that anyone was aware of. They knew of no reason why anyone would harm her.
Walking back to the truck Teffinger said, “She’s just your basic, really nice young lady.”
“I didn’t know they made those anymore.”
When Teffinger fired up the truck, Sydney flicked the radio to a hip-hop station, got Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love” and cranked it up.
“Finally,” she said. “Real music.”
Teffinger grunted.
“There’s a Beach Boys song playing in there somewhere and you’re wasting it.”
BACK AT THE CRIME SCENE Teffinger wrote down what he had forgotten before, namely the name and number of the realtor on the sign in the front yard. As they walked towards the back of the house, he called the man; a guy named Jim Hansen, a guy who wasn’t in, so Teffinger left him a message.
Suddenly a woman emerged from around the corner of the house and joined them in the backyard. She appeared to be about fifty, an ex-cheerleader type, with bottle-blond hair and a few more pounds than she had in high school. She carried a book.
<
br /> “Are you the police?” she asked.
Teffinger nodded.
“We are.”
“I’m Becky Moon,” she said. “I live across the street. When I got home I found a note on my door to call some officer named Adam Woods. When I saw you over here, I thought I’d just come over and talk in person.”
Sydney said, “That’ll work,” and pulled out a pen and spiral notebook.
Then she interviewed the woman, who had an interesting observation.
“Yesterday, there was a car parked in front of this house,” she said. “About two o’clock. I just took it to be someone who was looking at the house.”
“What kind of car?”
“Foreign,” she said. “My brother works for Ford so we always buy American. I have this habit, whenever I see a car, of seeing if it’s American. The car I saw here yesterday wasn’t.”
“Do you know what kind it was?” Sydney asked.
The woman shook her head.
“I don’t know anything about foreign cars and don’t want to,” she said. Then she turned to Teffinger. “I see you drive a Toyota.”
“It’s made in the U.S.,” he said.
“It is?”
He nodded.
“Indiana or Illinois, I can’t remember which,” he said.
“I didn’t know that.”
Teffinger raked his hair back with his fingers. It immediately flopped back down over his forehead.
“Would you recognize the car if we showed you pictures?” he asked.
“No.”
“What color was it?”
“Something medium.”
“Medium?”
“Right,” she said. “It wasn’t anything real light colored, like white or silver. And it wasn’t anything too dark either.”
“Red?”
“It could have been.”
“Blue?”
“It could have been.”
“Brown?”
“Same thing,” she said. “It wasn’t white and it wasn’t black. Sorry, that’s about the best I can do.”
“Did you see the person driving it?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t see any people, only the car.”
TEFFINGER’S PHONE RANG. It turned out to be the realtor, Jim Hansen, returning his call. The man hadn’t heard about the murder and when Teffinger told him he said, “Perfect. Now no one will buy that stupid place.”
“Why not?”
“Ghosts,” Hansen said. “People won’t buy a house if there’s been a suicide or a murder.”
“That’s not rational,” Teffinger said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
In addition to the ghost information, Hansen had a few other interesting tidbits. The owners had moved to California more than two months ago. Hansen hadn’t shown the house in more than two weeks. He did not, repeat not, call Molly Maids and request a cleaning. Why would he? Nor would the owners have had a reason to do so.
“You sound familiar,” Teffinger said. “Do I know you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s weird,” Teffinger said. “For some reason I have the feeling I know you.”
ON THE DRIVE BACK TO HEADQUARTERS, Sydney reset all the radio buttons in the Tundra to hip-hop stations.
“At first I thought that this whole thing may have just been a spur-of-the-moment sexual attack,” Teffinger said. “Now I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with a premeditated plan. And I think the intended victim was Tessa Blake and not Samantha Rickenbacker.”
Sydney looked at him.
“Why do you say that?”
“Here’s my theory,” he said. “The guy already knew that Tessa Blake worked for Molly Maids. Her apartment complex is too congested for a killing or abduction. So he wanted to lure her somewhere quiet and dark. He scoped out this house during the day, looked in the windows and saw the rooms empty, and knew that no one would be around at night. Then he called Tessa Blake and arranged for her to show up here after hours to make a little extra spending money. He didn’t want to break into the house, because that would be one more layer of complication, which meant that he couldn’t open the front door for her. So he told her to come around to the back. When she did, he was waiting for her and attacked. What he didn’t foresee is that her roommate would be with her.”
Sydney nodded.
“That all fits,” she said. “If you’re right, then the car in front of the house yesterday definitely belongs to our guy.”
“Yes it does.”
“It also means that someone went to an awful lot of trouble.”
“Yes it does again.”
“Why?”
“That’s what we need to concentrate on,” Teffinger said. “Motive.”
Sydney smiled.
“That and the other thing,” she said.
Teffinger cocked his head.
“What other thing?”
“Her phone records,” Sydney said. “The man was here scouting out the house at two in the afternoon. Samantha Rickenbacker got killed between nine and ten. That means that somewhere between two and nine, someone called Tessa Blake and talked her into coming here.”
Teffinger beamed and then felt his face sag.
“What?” Sydney asked.
“This guy’s smart,” Teffinger said. “He would have called from a public phone, and one where there’s no surveillance cameras. We need to run it down, obviously, but that’s what we’re going to find out.”
“Which brings us back to motive,” Sydney said.
Teffinger nodded.
“Something was definitely going on in Tessa Blake’s plain-vanilla life that wasn’t so plain-vanilla,” he said. “We need to figure out what it was.”
16
Day Three—June 13
Wednesday Afternoon
JEKKER PARKED THE AUDI AT THE TURNOFF near the base of the cliff, the same one he fell off Monday evening, and laced his climbing shoes while his heart raced. A cloudless blue Colorado sky floated above. The June temperature was absolutely perfect, 82 and counting. This time, unlike the prior two times, he pulled out a pair of Bushnell auto-focus binoculars and studied the formation.
He found a path, a dangerous path but a path that might be feasible with a bit of luck.
He stretched, took a deep breath and said, “Okay, let’s see what you got.” Then he started up, staying to the left, concentrating on nothing other than being a perfect climbing machine.
He made it to the twenty-five foot mark, then the thirty, and kept going.
At thirty-five feet he had passed too many spots that wouldn’t be kind to anyone stupid enough to downclimb. The only way off the face was up.
At fifty feet he was getting close to the top and found a nice place to wedge himself and get his breath. Suddenly his cell phone rang. The sound shocked him because he didn’t know he’d left it in his pocket.
He pulled it out and answered.
“We have a situation,” the voice said. “Something we need you to get on right away.”
“I thought I was too sloppy for your taste,” Jekker said.
A pause on the other end.
“Are you in or not?”
“We never talked about my retirement,” Jekker said.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that when I’m done, for whatever reason, I become a liability instead of an asset. You’d be better off if I didn’t exist at that point,” he said.
A black-and-white magpie flew by.
“Do you speak French?” the voice asked.
He didn’t.
“Why?”
“You have a counterpart in France who retired five years ago,” the voice said. “I’m going to have him contact you so you can see he’s still alive.”
Jekker considered it.
He’d need to be sure it wasn’t a charade, but felt confident that he’d be able to tell.
“You do that,” he said.
“Expect the call,” t
he voice said. “In the meantime, like I said, we have a situation.”
17
Day Three—June 13
Wednesday Night
IT WAS ALMOST DARK when London’s shift at Cactus Dan’s ended, not a minute too soon. The manager’s philosophy today seemed to be that the beatings would continue until morale improved. London peddled the Trek over to the Colfax bus stop and sat on the bench next to a young Hispanic woman who didn’t answer her cell phone even though it rang every thirty seconds. London sensed a boyfriend on the other end, one who just got dumped, probably a cheater.
London looked at the woman and said, “Screw him.”
“Exactly.”
When the RTD bus finally showed up, London put the Trek in the bike rack, flashed her pass to the driver and took a seat near the front. The vehicle shuddered and shook with protest as it pulled into traffic and the pungent smell of diesel intensified. She was anxious to get home to work the net and find out what she could on Vesper & Bennett, plus Bob Copeland.
She got off at the Union/Simms stop, which still left her a two-mile peddle to her Lakewood apartment. Twilight had given way to darkness, causing the streetlights to kick on ten minutes ago.
She flicked the switch for the Trek’s rear light.
Nothing happened.
She jiggled it.
Still nothing.
The batteries must be dead.
SIMMS WAS A FAIRLY MAJOR LAKEWOOD ROAD, two lanes in each direction, and well lit. She hugged the edge, like always, and kept a good lookout for idiots armed with cars as she got the bike going as fast as she could. Unfortunately, she seemed outnumbered tonight.
Then, damn!
Headlights were right behind her, coming fast, not giving her space.
She sensed an impact. Some primitive survival gene from a deep part of her brain made her twist the handlebars to the right. The front tire hit the curb and sent her flying over the side of the bike. A white-hot pain immediately exploded from her kneecap and her forearm scraped against something jagged.
Attorney's Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) Page 5