“Right,” Venta said.
“That’s the key,” London said. “They need to get the woman to go to Bangkok of her own volition. But that’s only half the battle. Once she’s there, they need her to go to the abduction site—in your case, a bar. Being a P.I., you were the perfect type of target.”
Venta nodded.
“Notice I said type of target,” London said.
Venta wrinkled her forehead and said, “Meaning what?”
“Meaning that other female investigators would be equally susceptible to the same charade,” she said. “Have you done any research to determine if other female P.I.s went to Bangkok and ended up missing?”
Venta shook her head.
Then she clinked London’s glass.
“You’re brilliant,” she said.
THEY TALKED FOR ANOTHER HALF HOUR. “By the way,” Venta said at one point, “the man I’m seeing—Nick Teffinger—doesn’t know anything about any of this.”
“He doesn’t?”
“No. I’m too afraid to tell him.”
London tilted her head.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid he’ll see me as tarnished,” Venta said. “I’m going to tell him, eventually. But I need to get a more solid foundation with him first.”
“Does he know about me?” London asked.
“No. If I tell him I have a lawyer he’s going to want to know what for.”
“Understood.”
WHEN THEY FINALLY GOT UP TO LEAVE, the storm still hadn’t let up. “This is like San Francisco on steroids,” Venta said. Of course, neither of them had an umbrella. They took a deep breath, ducked out the door and ran for Venta’s car, splashing through puddles.
Something about the vehicle was wrong.
It looked too low to the ground.
Then they figured it out.
All four tires were slashed.
Venta slapped her hand on the hood.
London swallowed, pushed rain out of her eyes and said, “This is another warning. But how the hell did they know we were here? I’m positive we weren’t followed.”
Venta said, “They’re sneaky little bastards. That’s for sure.”
24
Day Four—June 14
Thursday Night
TEFFINGER SPENT THE DAY tracking down and interviewing anyone and everyone in the world who knew Tessa Blake—friends, relatives, co-workers, you name it. In the end, no one had the vaguest idea why anyone would want to abduct or harm her.
No one had heard from her.
No one knew where she could possibly be.
He drove to her apartment, searched through every square inch, again found nothing and then slumped down on the couch.
He cleared his mind and waited for something—anything—to fall out of the sky and land on him.
Nothing did.
“Damn it! Give me something!”
He got silence, only silence, inescapable silence where there should be the ordinary, everyday sounds of two young women going about their ordinary, everyday lives.
Anxiety washed over him, a dark anxiety.
He tried to shake it but couldn’t.
Time kept passing and each minute that disappeared into oblivion meant one less to find the woman before it was too late, assuming it wasn’t already too late.
Thunder crackled outside, pulling him to the window for a look. Charcoal clouds rolled in with a furious pace from the mountains; mean nasty clouds on a mission. In another ten minutes the sky would drop with a vengeance.
He called Venta.
She didn’t answer.
His stomach growled, suddenly starved.
He looked at his watch—8:12 p.m. No wonder he was so hungry. He rummaged through the refrigerator, found the makings for a sandwich, then decided that he better not. He slumped down on the couch and closed his eyes, just to rest them for a second.
He was sound asleep when his cell phone rang.
He fumbled for it.
Light no longer came through the windows.
The room was dark.
Night had come.
THE VOICE OF LEANNE SANDERS CAME THROUGH. “Do you have paper and pencil with you?” she asked. Teffinger heard rain in the background and could tell that she was in the meat of the storm, not inside a vehicle. He pictured her walking down a dark street.
He stood up, groggy, and headed to the kitchen.
“Yeah, where are you?” he asked.
“Following my target.”
“That French guy?”
“Right. He’s on foot and paying a lot of attention to a house over here in the east side of the city. My gut tells me he’s ten minutes away from making a hit. Write this address down,” she said, giving it to him.
Teffinger grabbed a pencil and scribbled the digits on the countertop.
“Can you find out who lives there and call me back?”
Teffinger paced.
“You need backup,” he said.
“No.”
“But—”
“Can you get me that name or not?”
He kicked the chair.
“Give me two minutes,” he said.
“Damn it!”
“What?”
Then the phone went dead.
“Leanne?”
No answer.
“Leanne!”
TEFFINGER RAN DOWN TO THE TUNDRA, squealed to the 6th Avenue freeway and headed east with the windshield wipers on full blast. Just as he brought the vehicle up to speed he realized that he remembered the street name but not the number.
Suddenly a vehicle in the adjacent lane shifted, a Hummer.
Teffinger felt the impact somewhere in the side bed of the truck and fought to keep from spinning out, then he put his foot to the floor.
25
Day Four—June 14
Thursday Night
JEKKER DROVE DOWN THE TWISTY MOUNTAIN road towards Denver through a dark night, smack dab in the middle of a terrible storm, with the windshield wipers swinging back and forth as fast as they could and still not able to keep the slop off. Duran Duran’s “Rio” came from the radio, loud, the way it was supposed to be. He sang when the chorus came up, barely able to hear his own voice. It reminded him of his days as a lead guitarist in a so-so rock band back in eleventh grade.
That was eternities ago, before his first kill even; the carefree days but the poor days too, the trailer-trash days.
Would he go back if he had a chance?
Good question.
Then he decided, no.
No way.
Screw poverty.
Poverty was overrated.
WHEN THE LIGHTS OF CIVILIZATION APPEARED Jekker headed straight to his favorite strip club off Santa Fe in southern Denver. The women there weren’t necessarily the hottest in the world but they were the loosest and the private-dance area was the darkest.
He had five hundred dollars in his pocket and didn’t care if he spent every penny.
Tonight he was going to chill out.
Tomorrow would be different.
Tomorrow he would kill Tessa Blake. He’d give her a choice—a bullet to the back of the head, a knife to the heart, or she could do it herself in private with a razorblade. He didn’t care and had no interest in having her suffer.
The cover charge was $5.00.
He paid with a hundred-dollar bill and put $10.00 in the tip jar, which got him a hug from a cute brunette and a hand down his pants for about five seconds.
The women inside must have smelled the money.
Two of them latched on and were already rubbing their tits on him before he even got to the bar. But then again, maybe it wasn’t the money. He was, after all, an attractive man.
Make that an attractive man with an incredible physique, a physique good enough to get up that stupid rock in Clear Creek Canyon, even if it did take him three tries.
He didn’t care how drunk he got tonight.
He’d take a cab
when the time came.
He owned the night.
He already knew where he’d bury Tessa Blake tomorrow.
All he had to do at this point was sit back and chill.
HE CLOSED THE CLUB FIVE HOURS LATER with seven beers in his gut and ended up going home with a stripper named Phoenix.
She a real name that started with a B.
Brenda.
Or Barbara
Or Bernadette.
Something like that.
She was a gorgeous long-legged thing who loved to clamp his head between her vice-like thighs and get tongued. Midway through that tonguing, when he had the woman worked up into a solid sweat, his cell phone rang.
“Don’t answer,” she said.
He ignored it at first, then pulled it out and looked at his watch.
2:38 a.m.
What the hell?
“Hello?”
A voice came though, a familiar one.
“We had a situation develop earlier this evening.”
“What kind of situation?” Jekker asked.
“Something serious,” the voice said.
26
Day Four—June 14
Thursday Night
LONDON DIDN’T HAVE A LOT OF STUFF but did have a not-too-ancient Gateway laptop that got her on the web whenever she wanted. Tonight, as the storm raged outside, she and Venta hit the search engines—looking for another female P.I. who had been lured to Bangkok and disappeared; someone they could cross-reference to and maybe find a common denominator.
So far, an hour into it, they had nothing.
Nada.
Zippo.
The bar-buzz wore off more than a half hour ago. Now, getting nowhere fast, the exuberance waned too. Venta was in the bathroom with the door closed when her cell phone rang.
“Will you get that?” she shouted.
London did.
“Venta’s receptionist,” she said.
“Venta’s receptionist?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Venta?”
“She’s in a meeting with John.”
“John?”
“Right,” London said. “But she’ll be out in a minute. Who should I say is calling?”
“Hannah.”
London held the phone away from her mouth and shouted, “It’s Hannah.”
“Hannah?”
“Right.”
“Tell her I’ll be right there.”
“Did you hear that?” London asked.
Hannah had.
London went back to working the web, but listened with a half-ear as Venta talked. It seemed to be about nothing. Afterwards, Venta said, “Hannah does work for me now and then. She wants to know if I’ve made up my mind yet whether to relocate to Denver.”
London cocked her head.
“Well, have you?”
Venta nodded.
“I don’t have a choice,” she said. “That man I told you about—Nick Teffinger—has one blue eye and one green one. Did I mention that before?”
No, she hadn’t.
“And they’re both for me.” A worried expression washed over her face and she added, “Of course, he doesn’t know yet that I had a hundred different cocks shoot cum on my face in Bangkok.”
London winced at the visual and said, “If he has any real substance, it shouldn’t matter.”
Venta grunted.
“Shouldn’t is a big word, sweetie; a universe-sized word.”
A HALF HOUR LATER they found an interesting article from the Miami Herald. A P.I. by the name of Rebecca Vampire disappeared in May of last year while “out of the country.”
“Vampire?” London asked.
“Right, Vampire.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, it says it right here, Rebecca Vampire.”
A photo accompanied the article.
“She sure doesn’t look like one, though,” Venta added.
The woman was hot, blond and hot.
“Do you recognize her?” London asked.
“No.”
27
Day Four—June 14
Thursday Night
WHEN 6TH AVENUE ENDED as a freeway and turned into a street as it entered metro Denver, a street with intersections, Teffinger did his best not to T-bone anyone as he busted through red lights. He made it all the way to Colorado Boulevard and by some miracle actually caught a green light and continued east. The windshield wipers swept back and forth and brought an upscale neighborhood of Tudor mansions on tree-lined boulevards, home of Denver’s rich and powerful, in and out of focus.
Teffinger didn’t know this side of town that well and studied the signs.
Then, there it was—the street.
He turned right and saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Five minutes later, on his third pass, he spotted a dark shape on the ground, barely visible at the base of a row of pitch-black hedges—a shape that could be a body.
He slammed on the brakes and ran over, not swinging the truck door shut, not caring if the interior got soaked.
There he found Dr. Leanne Sanders.
She was laying face down, motionless in two or three inches of water.
He rolled her over to get her mouth off the ground and felt wet goop at the back of her head, thicker than water. He couldn’t see it but knew it was blood, fresh blood, still flowing, meaning she was still alive.
TWO HOURS LATER he wound up Green Mountain to home and found Venta waiting up for him, watching Body Double. An empty wineglass sat on the coffee table. The stress on her face reminded him that a good amount of Leanne’s blood had transferred to his clothes.
He kissed her and said, “That isn’t mine.”
Then he recapped the evening for her.
Halfway through, she interrupted him. “I don’t ever want to lose you.”
He held her at arms length and looked into her eyes, the eyes of this mysterious woman he had only known for three days and couldn’t imagine life without her.
“Me too,” he said.
At first, he couldn’t believe his own voice.
As soon as he said it, though, he was glad.
“You too?”
He nodded.
“Right, me too.”
“You’re not just messing with me, are you?”
“To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way before in my whole life.”
“You don’t even know who I am,” she said.
“I know enough,” he said. “And I want you to appreciate something. I’ve never fooled around on a woman, behind her back. So if you want this to be an exclusive thing, starting right now—actually, starting since Monday when we met—just say the word.”
She played with his hair, as if deciding, and then said, “The word.” Two seconds later a mischievous expression washed over her face.
“What?” he asked.
“Do you remember what you promised me this morning?”
He tried to remember but couldn’t.
“Do you want a hint?”
“Yeah, give me a hint.”
“Rug burns,” she said.
28
Day Five—June 15
Friday Afternoon
JEKKER WOKE UP in a bed that was too soft to be his. He opened his eyes a crack, enough to let some light in but not enough to hurt. Dark drapes were framed by a strong sunlight trying to break in from the outside. Next to him lay a woman, the stripper from last night, now showing an extra five pounds that he hadn’t noticed before. She hadn’t removed her makeup before passing out. Mascara and lipstick had drifted on her face during the night and now gave her the appearance of a Picasso painting.
It didn’t diminish the underlying beauty.
He muscled out of bed, staggered into the bathroom and took a long piss.
The beer, so incredibly easy to swallow last night, had settled into the front of his head and now beat on his skull with little hammers. His mouth felt like a desert sa
ndstorm.
Aspirin.
He needed Aspirin.
A truckload of Aspirin.
Not in thirty seconds.
Right now.
He found some in the cabinet, tossed three to the back of his mouth and downed them with a full glass of water, followed by another, and a third.
There.
The healing was in progress.
In twenty minutes he’d feel semi-human.
He got the shower as hot as he could stand it and stepped in. When he came out ten minutes later, the woman was in the kitchen and the coffee pot was full.
He walked in with a towel around his waist.
“Morning,” he said.
“Afternoon, actually.”
What?
Really?
She handed him a cup of coffee.
“12:30,” she said. “You were good last night. I’m glad you came over.”
He was too and kissed her to prove it.
“If you want to see me again, you can,” she added.
“You mean like a date or something?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, if you want,” she said. “Or you can just come over and hang out and watch TV or something. Whatever you want.”
He pictured it and liked the picture, more than he thought.
She grabbed his hand, led him into the bedroom and shut the door, drawing the room into a deep darkness. Then she dropped to her knees, slid her fingers up his thighs, slipped the towel off and said, “I just want to say thanks for last night.” A few minutes later she paused for a heartbeat, looked up, and said, “My name’s Bethany.”
As soon as she said it he remembered.
“I know that,” he said.
She paused again.
“Sorry,” she said, “I think I forgot yours.”
“Dylan.”
“Glad to meet you, Dylan.”
A HALF HOUR LATER, after throwing Bethany on her back and giving her the most intense oral attack of her life, he took a cab to the strip club to pick up the Audi, only to discover something weird.
The Audi wasn’t there.
Maybe his memory was flawed, so he had the cabbie crisscross the area for a three-block radius. When it failed to appear he had the driver drop him off at the loft downtown.
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