Attorney's Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by Jagger, R. J.

  Saturday Night

  TEFFINGER WAS SOUND ASLEEP when his cell phone rang. He twisted and checked the clock—10:02 p.m., meaning he had only been out for a half hour. Next to him, there was no Venta. Then he remembered that she was picking up a friend at the airport, someone named Hannah.

  “Got some job security for you,” Barb Winters said.

  Teffinger grunted.

  “Tell them to be dead in the morning. I’m too tired.”

  Thirty minutes later he squeezed the Tundra into a parking spot on Broadway and walked over to a small public parking lot in the middle of the downtown’s financial district.

  A sign with the rates caught his eye.

  Outrageous.

  What was this, New York?

  Someone had already taped off the entire lot and sidewalk, very impressive. It was better to have a crime scene too big than the opposite. One of the responding officers turned out to be John Root, a hang glider fanatic who got slammed into the side of Lookout Mountain last summer and broke a bunch of body parts.

  Teffinger shook his hand and said, “Still flying?”

  “Oh yeah,” Root said. “In fact, last week I caught this absolutely crazy wind, took it way the hell up there and stayed up for four hours.”

  “Four hours?”

  “Yep.”

  “How do you—?”

  “What?”

  “You know, go.”

  “You mean to the bathroom?”

  Teffinger nodded.

  “You just unzip and go for it,” Root said.

  Teffinger pictured it and said, “Man, I’d have to be really high to do that.”

  Root looked puzzled. “Why?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to be dragging that bad boy on the ground.”

  Root pushed him.

  “In your dreams, buddy.”

  “It reminds me of the Ohno bird,” Teffinger said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You never heard of the Ohno bird?”

  No.

  Root hadn’t.

  “Well,” Teffinger said, “the Ohno bird is about the size of a vulture, and it’s the only bird species in the world where the size of the male’s member is actually longer than its legs. Every time it comes in for a landing it makes the same sound—oh no, oh no, oh no!”

  Root laughed in spite of himself.

  “Bad, even for you.”

  “You love it,” Teffinger said. “You’ll tell it ten times.”

  THE VICTIM TURNED OUT TO BE A WHITE MALE, early 30s, slumped over in the passenger seat of a Jeep Commander, with no visible signs of physical trauma.

  “Overdose?” Teffinger asked.

  Root shrugged.

  “The paramedics said it seemed like he had a broken neck.”

  Teffinger must have had an expression on his face because Root asked, “What?”

  “Nothing, except that I just had a broken neck case,” Teffinger said. “A woman named Samantha Rickenbacker.”

  Root looked blank.

  He hadn’t heard about it.

  “You don’t get that many of them,” Teffinger added. “Guns and knives. That’s the bread and butter.”

  Root pointed to an Avis sticker on the rear passenger window of the vehicle.

  “A rental,” he said.

  “Can you do me a favor? Call Avis, find out who rented it and have them fax me over a copy of all the paperwork, including the guy’s driver’s license.” Teffinger handed him a business card. “Use that fax number.”

  “Done,” Root said.

  Five minutes later Root returned and said, “A guy by the name of Jean-Paul Boudiette rented the car from the DIA Avis.”

  Boudiette.

  Teffinger recognized the name but couldn’t place it.

  “Word is he’s a Frenchman,” Root added.

  Teffinger nodded.

  Remembering now.

  The INTERPOL guy.

  He was pretty sure that the victim was Boudiette rather than some third person, but put on gloves and pulled the man’s wallet out of his pants pocket.

  It turned out he was right.

  Then he called Leanne Sanders.

  “You’re still looking for the Frenchman, right?” he asked.

  She was, very much so.

  “I’ll bet you a steak dinner that I can find him before you do,” he said.

  A pause.

  “You know where he is,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Do we have a bet?”

  “Where is he?”

  “I can’t tell you unless we have an official bet.”

  “That’s low.”

  “True. But do we have a bet?”

  “Fine, we do.”

  “A steak dinner,” he said.

  “Agreed.”

  THE FBI PROFILER showed up twenty minutes later carrying a thermos and two disposable cups. She looked for a bullet in the back of Boudiette’s head, saw none and said, “I’ll be damned. It’s him. How’d he die?”

  “Broken neck, from what we can tell.”

  “Too bad, he was such a nice guy.” She looked at Teffinger and said, “I’ll make you another bet.”

  “What kind of bet?”

  “I’ll bet that you want what’s in this thermos more than you want that steak dinner,” she said.

  He tilted his head and said, “I’ll bet you’re right.”

  “So I’m officially off the hook?”

  “Yes, but only because you play dirty.”

  He poured while she held the cups.

  It was some kind of chocolate flavor, piping hot.

  “It’s decaf,” she said.

  “Too bad,” he said. “Decaf doesn’t count.” He nodded at the body and said, “Does our buddy here have any ties to Bangkok?”

  Leanne wrinkled her forehead.

  “Not that I know of, why?”

  “Something’s been nagging at me ever since you told me that the lawyer, Mark Remington, got on a plane to Bangkok. I have another case involving a pilot named Alan English who got stabbed in the back a bunch of times in his bedroom, right after he got back from a flight to Bangkok.”

  “When did that happen?”

  Teffinger searched his memory.

  “That would have been Monday.”

  “Boudiette wasn’t in Denver yet, if you’re implying that he did it,” Leanne said.

  “Right, I know that,” Teffinger said.

  “Remington was though, I assume,” she added.

  Teffinger nodded and took a drink of coffee.

  “So who killed your Frenchman?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” she said.

  “Then let me give you one,” he said. “Someone strong.”

  49

  Day Six—June 16

  Saturday Night

  JEKKER’S CONTACT LIVED in a stately Riva Chase mansion on a primo 5-acre cul-de-sac lot with a stream. Deer, elk, fox and coyotes abounded, yet downtown Denver was a mere twenty-minute jaunt down the freeway.

  Right now he wasn’t home.

  Jekker waited in the dark with the lights off down the road, behind the wheel of the Nissan rental, not knowing yet if he would kill the man or not.

  On the seat next to him sat a manila envelope, the envelope that Jekker found inside the center console of the Frenchman’s vehicle. Inside that envelope were several photographs of Mark Remington. Of greater interest, however, were the photographs of Jekker himself.

  The photographs meant one thing and one thing only, namely that Mark Remington and Jekker had both been set up as targets.

  Why?

  Headlights suddenly reflected from the rearview mirror into his eyes. A car approached. Jekker’s heart beat faster and he ducked down as the lights swept past. The driver was alone and headed for the driveway. Jekker cranked over the ignition and followed with the lights off. By the time the other vehicle pulled to a stop, Jekker was right behind it.

  “Good evening,” Jekker sai
d as he got out.

  A beat, then the man said, “This is squarely against protocol.”

  “So was the hit man who paid me a visit. The now-dead hit man, to be precise.”

  “I was afraid something like this might happen,” the man said. “Come inside.”

  THE MAN WALKED ACROSS A LARGE VAULTED ROOM to a wet bar, poured whiskey into two crystal glasses and handed one to Jekker, who took it but didn’t drink.

  The man swallowed half the glass and said, “Go ahead and drink. You’re not going to kill me.”

  Jekker swirled the liquor.

  “We haven’t established that,” he said.

  The man laughed. “Damn, you’re strung tight tonight.”

  Jekker handed him the envelope and watched as the man removed the photographs of Mark Remington and Jekker and looked at them.

  The man studied them and said nothing.

  Jekker pulled the .357 SIG out of his coat jacket and pointed it at the man.

  “Talk,” he said.

  He expected the man to tremble but he looked more like he was trying to solve a puzzle instead. “The Frenchman is your Western Europe counterpart. He’s either gone rouge or someone’s pulling his strings. We’re not sure which yet.”

  “Go on.”

  “We just recently found out that he was after Mark Remington,” the man said. “I had no idea he was after you until just now.”

  How?

  How did they know he was after Remington?

  “He was hanging around outside Remington’s house Thursday night,” the man said. “It turned out that a female FBI agent was tailing him. He doubled back and attacked her—a stupid thing, but a thing he did, nonetheless. The next morning, the agent and a homicide detective by the name of Nick Teffinger paid a visit to Remington to find out why he was a target. Remington told me about the visit.”

  “Then what?”

  “Remington got on a plane to Bangkok.”

  “So then the Frenchman turned his attention to his second target—me,” Jekker said.

  The man nodded.

  “It seems that way.”

  “He tried to snipe me but missed,” Jekker said. “When he came in to finish up, things didn’t go the way he planned.”

  “You killed him?”

  “Yes. I snapped his neck.”

  THE MAN REFILLED HIS GLASS. Jekker pondered the situation for a heartbeat more, then lowered the gun, drained half his glass, and let the man top it off.

  “So why was he after Remington? And me?”

  The man held his hands out in surrender.

  “We don’t know,” he said. “He went AWOL three months ago. A month after he dropped off the radar screen, his counterpart in Hong Kong—and your counterpart—showed up dead. We have every reason to believe he did it but don’t know why. That’s why there’s an opening in Hong Kong, like I was telling you about before. And the opening in Western Europe is to replace him, obviously. That’s the slot you’ll be filling.”

  Jekker took a solid drink of alcohol.

  It dropped hot and tingly into his stomach.

  “Has the Frenchman taken out anyone else, besides Hong Kong?”

  The man nodded.

  “A man named Gordon Smyth, in London. A damn fine guy.” He sipped the liquor. “What did you do with the body?”

  “I put it in the passenger seat of his car and parked it in a parking lot downtown.”

  The man looked dumbfounded.

  “Why?”

  “Well, I thought Remington might have been behind it some how. I parked the body by the law firm. It was a warning to him.”

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” the man said.

  50

  Day Six—June 16

  Saturday Night

  LONDON WORKED HER SHIFT at Cactus Dan’s from four to nine and miraculously encountered only one customer from idiot-land. She kept having a vision of the rock star, Michael Montana, walking in with a bunch of friends and accidentally bumping into her, but that didn’t happen. She got home at ten and logged on to the Colorado Bar Association website to see if any new jobs had been posted.

  None had.

  She twisted a pencil in her fingers, then snapped it in two.

  Venta knocked on the door ten minutes later. With her was a woman in her mid-20s, five-ten, incredibly attractive, athletic, with short black hair, wearing jeans, sandals and a green long-sleeve shirt.

  “This is my assistant, Hannah,” Venta said.

  London shook her hand and liked her immediately.

  Venta held up a bottle of white wine and said, “Brought another friend too.”

  They sat at the kitchen table—a cheap folding unit—and Hannah filled London in on what she knew so far about Susan Wagner, the private investigator from Cleveland who disappeared in Bangkok approximately eighteen months ago.

  She was a solo practitioner.

  Twenty-three.

  Attractive.

  Blond.

  And, most notably, she made a $7,500 cash deposit into her checking account.

  “I’m heading to Cleveland in the morning,” Hannah said. “I actually had a layover in Denver, so it isn’t costing any money to be here.”

  LONDON GOT UP, pulled fresh ice cubes from the freezer and plopped them in her wine. Both of the other women held their glasses up and she did the same for them.

  Then she sat down and twisted a pencil in her fingers.

  “What we need at this point more than anything is a direct evidentiary link to either Vesper & Bennett, or to Thung, Manap & Deringer,” she said. “We need to trace a phone call to their office, or get evidence that they hired a messenger service to have the cash delivered, or trace an email to or from one of their lawyers, or get a connection between them and Bob Copeland, anything like that.”

  “Exactly,” Venta said.

  “I don’t care how small it is,” London added. “It’s driving me nuts not knowing which one is the target.”

  “What does your new lawyer friend from V&B know about any of this?”

  “Michael Montana?”

  “Right.”

  London snapped the pencil in two.

  “I don’t know and I’m not going to ask him,” she said.

  Venta patted her hand and said, “You’re rough on stuff. Do you know that?”

  London grinned.

  “I’m going to do a background check on him,” Venta added.

  “Michael Montana?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if he’s married or has a girlfriend or something like that, then the whole meeting-you-thing was a setup, meaning that V&B is our target.”

  London didn’t like the idea but couldn’t disagree with the logic.

  “Just don’t do anything illegal,” London warned. “If we do end up suing V&B, we don’t want them to have a counterclaim against you. That would destroy your credibility, not to mention putting the entire case at risk.”

  Venta cocked her head.

  “Fine. If we need to bend the rules, we’ll have Hannah do it.”

  “No,” London said. “No one bends the rules.”

  Venta looked at Hannah and said, “Feisty, isn’t she?”

  “Apparently so.”

  HANNAH SPENT THE NIGHT AT LONDON’S APARTMENT. They talked for an hour in bed and then Hannah gave London a backrub before they went to sleep.

  51

  Day Seven—June 17

  Sunday Morning

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, TEFFINGER swung by the Marriott West in Golden, picked up Leanne Sanders, and drove back down to the parking lot crime scene while the profiler punched the preset radio buttons.

  “It’s all hip-hop,” she complained.

  Teffinger grunted.

  “Sydney,” he said.

  “You let her reset them?”

  “I don’t let her do anything,” he said. “She just does it.”

  “Well two can play at that game,” Leanne sa
id.

  She reset everything to easy listening. “This is what it sounds like inside an elevator,” she said.

  “No wonder I never go in them.”

  AS THEY PASSED BANNOCK STREET and entered downtown, Kate Baxter called and said, “Got a hit on our BOLO.”

  What BOLO?

  Brandy Zucker’s car.

  Right.

  He remembered now.

  “It showed up parked at the rest stop at Vail Pass,” she said.

  “Vail Pass?”

  Right.

  “That’s a long way from where she was supposed to be hiking,” he said.

  “That it is,” she said. “What do you want to do?”

  He considered it.

  “Has she shown up anywhere yet?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, let’s err on the side of caution and treat the car as a crime scene,” he said. “Call Paul Kubiak and have him send someone up there to process it.”

  “That’s eighty miles,” Kate said.

  “I know, but if she was abducted and there are prints in the car, I want them,” he said. “I also want to know if the car is running fine or broken down. Have you called the weatherman yet?”

  “No, I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Go ahead and call him and get him up to speed.”

  “He’s going to freak,” Kate said. “He’s already a rubber band stretched to the limit. Should we wait until after we process it?”

  Teffinger considered it.

  “If I was in his shoes, I’d want to know now.”

  IT BEING SUNDAY MORNING, the traffic was actually sane. That didn’t mean some idiot couldn’t take them out at any moment but at least the odds were less.

  “I had a strange thought last night,” he told Leanne.

  “Did it involve a naked woman, a donkey and a midget?”

  He laughed.

  “No.”

  “Then go ahead and tell me about it,” she said.

  “By no, I mean no midget. Still want to hear it?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Go on.”

  “Okay,” he said. “The Frenchman was after the lawyer.”

  “Remington.”

  “Right,” Teffinger said. “Remington knows this, because we paid him a visit. Now the Frenchman turns up dead. Did you note the location?”