He stood up.
“Screw that.”
He walked back over to where Samantha Rickenbacker died. He looked down at the spot where her body had been and said, “I renew my promise to you. And to Tessa Blake.”
Then he got in the Tundra and pointed the front end towards headquarters. On the way he called the realtor who had the listing for the rental house, got the man’s voice recorder, and left a message for him to call back.
AT HEADQUARTERS, TEFFINGER WALKED straight to the sixth floor to see if Paul Kubiak was in yet by some miracle. He wasn’t, of course, because that’s how Teffinger’s life worked, so he left a note on Kubiak’s desk and then headed down to homicide. No one was there yet, meaning there was no coffee, so Teffinger got it going. While the pot filled, Teffinger called the FBI profiler and got her voice message service. He said, “Give me a call,” and hung up. As soon as he did he realized he hadn’t given his name or number. Hopefully she’d recognize his voice.
He pulled the Alan English file and went through it.
Thirty minutes later Sydney showed up in a nice gray pantsuit.
“I hope you got a good night’s sleep because we have a truckload of work to do today,” Teffinger said.
She headed for the coffee and gave him a sideways look.
“Do I know you?”
He ignored it and said, “The first thing I need you to do is get the flight logs of every trip that Alan English took to Bangkok. I don’t care about other places, only Bangkok. Get the names and phone numbers of the passengers on those flights. I want to talk to them.”
“Why?”
“To see if they know anything about him going to a bondage place,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because if he did, that could be related to why he’s dead,” Teffinger said. He raked his hair back with his fingers. “Oh, another thing, too. Check his bank records and see if he made any cash withdrawals before his Bangkok trips.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“I’m talking about sizeable withdrawals,” Teffinger added.
“Why?”
“Because if he went to the place that I think he might have gone to, it’s pretty pricey—and they don’t take American Express.”
SHE TOOK A SEAT IN FRONT OF HIS DESK, propped her legs up on the other chair, took a sip of coffee and looked directly into his eyes. “What place are you talking about? And what the hell is going on?”
He hesitated, unsure whether to talk or not.
Then he said, “This is confidential, meaning you don’t say a word to anyone. Agreed?”
She nodded.
“Okay, if that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want.”
“Okay then, so what’s going on?”
“I’ve stumbled across a few things that could possibly suggest that Venta killed Alan English,” Teffinger said.
Sydney wrinkled her forehead.
“Your Venta?”
“Right, mine.”
Then he told her the story of how Venta had been enslaved in Bangkok.
“If Alan English paid a visit to her there, and then she somehow tracked him after she got back to the U.S.—which isn’t totally unfathomable since she’s a private investigator—she’d have plenty of motive to kill him. She had opportunity too, since she was in Denver at the time.”
“Damn.”
“I need to confirm that Alan English never paid a visit to her,” Teffinger said.
“Why don’t you just ask her?”
“I did,” Teffinger said. “I showed her pictures of English and she said she’d never seen him. I didn’t detect any lies.”
“But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t,” Sydney said.
“Correct,” Teffinger said. “So I need to prove she’s telling the truth. I’m hoping to find that English never made any big cash withdrawals before his Bangkok trips. I’m hoping that English’s passengers have evidence that English spent all his time with them, or on tours, or whatever.”
“What if you find the opposite?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t gotten to that point in my mind yet.”
She reached across the desk and squeezed his hand.
“I’m sorry you’re going through this.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She looked as if she wanted to say something but was hesitant.
“What?” Teffinger asked.
“Did Venta describe what this place looks like?”
Teffinger held his hands up in uncertainty.
“Just in general terms,” he said. “She was embarrassed to get into specific details. She said she didn’t want me to have too vivid of an image of her. She was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get it out of my mind and that it would taint my feelings towards her.”
Sydney nodded.
“I can see her point,” she said.
“But?”
“But, like I told you before, Alan English has lots of bondage porn on his computer,” she said. “Maybe he took some of those pictures himself. Maybe some of them came from this place where Venta was. If you knew what the place looked like, you’d be better able to judge.”
Teffinger nodded.
“I remember you telling me about the porn,” he said. “In fact, I stopped up at Kubiak’s this morning to get into English’s computer and take a look at it firsthand. That’s the first thing I’m going to check out this morning.”
She looked hesitant again.
“What?”
“If he’s got all this porn on his computer, I can’t imagine him being in Bangkok and not spending time in bondage clubs,” she said.
Right.
Teffinger already knew that.
“That doesn’t mean he knew about the place where Venta was though,” he said.
HALF AN HOUR LATER Teffinger called Venta and said, “I’m going to need you to describe this place you were taken to. You know, what the rooms looked like, what was in them, that kind of thing.”
She hesitated.
“You know I don’t want to do that.”
“I know,” he said. “But this is important.”
A pause.
“I’ll think about it. But if I say okay, we need to do it face to face.”
“Tonight?”
“Sure, if I say okay.”
KATE BAXTER WALKED INTO THE ROOM, poured a cup of coffee and took a chair in front of Teffinger’s desk. He recognized the look of excitement on her face, so compelling that he hardly even glanced at her chest. It meant that she had a breakthrough in one of her cases.
“Got big news,” she said.
“Shoot.”
“This involves the Brandy Zucker case.” Teffinger recognized the name but couldn’t place it. Kate must have sensed his confusion because she said, “The hiker, the weatherman’s daughter.”
Suddenly it came back to him.
“Right.”
“Okay,” she said, “you remember that we found her car at the rest stop on top of Vail Pass.”
Teffinger nodded and pulled up an image of the place. It was one of the main rest stops on that stretch of I-70, with lots of parking and lots of use. He couldn’t remember a time he had ever passed it without stopping, thanks to the people who make coffee.
“Right.”
“There were no fingerprints on the steering wheel or door handle,” Kate said. “That tells me that the woman isn’t the one who drove the car there. Someone else drove it and then wiped their prints off.”
“That’s how I’d read it,” Teffinger said.
“There’s more. It turns out that this particular rest stop has a couple of videotape surveillance cameras,” she said. “Unfortunately, neither of them pointed at the area where we found the woman’s car.”
Ouch.
Too bad.
“BUT,” SHE ADDED, “WE DID GET SOME FOOTAGE of a truck driver, a female, actually. When she pulled into the rest st
op she was alone. She went in and used the facilities. When she came back out, a man approached her at her truck. They talked for a little and then he got in the truck with her and they left. My thought is—this is the person who drove Brandy Zucker’s car there. This was how he left.”
Teffinger nodded, impressed.
“How good is the tape?”
“I’m giving it to Paul Kubiak to do his magic,” she said. “My gut feeling is that it’s going to be good enough to put on the news.”
“Nice going.”
“Actually you deserve most of the credit.”
Why?
He hadn’t even done anything except hand the whole mess to Kate.
“Because you jumped on this so fast,” she said. “If we had waited even one more day, the tape would have been written over.”
He grinned.
“So I did something right,” he said.
“Yeah and you cost me a lot of money.”
Huh?
How so?
“I had all my cash riding on September of next year.”
67
Day Nine—June 19
Tuesday Noon
JEKKER WOKE UP HUNG OVER IN BETHANY’S BED. He took a long piss and drank three large glasses of water to get the sandpaper off his tongue. The woman moaned, rolled to her other side, and then passed back out. When Jekker got out of the shower, she still hadn’t moved.
Last night had been a surreal mix of valleys and peaks.
The deepest valley was running over the biker woman. He could still feel her thumping and scraping underneath the car as she got mangled into human hamburger.
One of the three motorcycles stopped at the scene.
The other two chased Jekker, driving like maniacs, somehow managing to stay on his tail for more than five miles through the storm before one of them went down and the other one stopped.
They couldn’t have gotten his license plate number, not through all that rain.
Maybe, if they were lucky they’d be able to identify the vehicle as an Audi but he doubted it and, needless to say, they never saw his face.
After he lost them, he circled over to I-70, then C-470 and then Highway 74, back to the boxcars. Even though he had no reason to be nervous at that point, he had second thoughts about killing Tessa Blake so quickly. Just in case someone did find a way to track him, he didn’t want to be found with a dead body. So he locked her in the boxcar.
Those were the valleys.
THEN THE PEAKS CAME. He took a shower, dressed, and made it to the strip club just before midnight. Bethany—stage name Phoenix—immediately took him to the private-dance area and positioned herself so that he could feel her up without being spotted by the bouncers.
Then he drank beer, lots and lots of beer, enough beer to drown out the vision of the biker woman being torn to shreds under his car.
Bethany’s stalker wandered into the club an hour later.
He was a gorilla.
Six-four, able to swing from tree limbs.
Bulletproof.
Jekker waited until the dickhead went to the restroom and then stuffed his head in the toilet and broke his ribs.
Then he drank beer until closing.
He and Bethany were both too drunk to drive, but he was drunker than her, so he let her take the wheel. Somehow they managed to get to her place without killing anyone.
Then they screwed like rock stars before passing out.
That was last night.
Now it was almost noon.
HE KISSED BETHANY AS SHE SLEPT and left a note on the kitchen table saying that he’d call her later. Then he popped three Tylenol and pointed the Audi towards the boxcars.
The grim reaper was calling Tessa Blake’s name.
It was time.
Past time.
68
Day Nine—June 19
Tuesday Afternoon
LONDON WALKED ACROSS THE LOBBY of the Republic Plaza Building and spotted her client, Venta, strategically positioned where she could watch the comings and goings of the elevator bank that fed the law office of Thung, Manap & Deringer. The black-haired assistant who gave such good backrubs, Hannah Trent, was with Venta—obviously back from her trek to Cleveland.
Both women wore baggy clothes, hats and dark sunglasses.
London wouldn’t have recognized either one if she hadn’t been expressly looking for them.
Staking out the Thung firm had been Venta’s idea, following the news from Sarah Woodward this morning that pointed to a connection between the Thung firm and the place where Venta had been held captive.
The plan was simple.
See if Venta recognized anyone.
No one had seemed familiar based on the firm’s website.
But not all bios had photographs.
And even of those that were there, Venta had trouble knowing if she’d seen the person before. What she really needed to do was view the men in person where she’d have the benefit of seeing their skin color, size, posture and mannerisms.
“HOW’S IT GOING?” London asked as she walked up.
“Not much action yet,” Venta said. “Things will pick up at 5:00.”
London smiled and said, “I have big news.”
They looked at her.
Eager.
“Yeah? What?”
“I told Sarah Woodward about that tattoo that you described on Mark Remington’s thigh. She said she’d check into it. About a half hour ago she called and confirmed that Remington’s body did in fact have such a tattoo.”
Venta gave her a high-five.
Hannah did too.
“Now she knows we’re not lying about Remington having a session with me,” Venta said.
“Exactly.”
“Major cool.”
“She’s a believer,” London added.
“She better be.”
“She is.”
“That gives us an ironclad suit against V&B,” Venta added.
London frowned.
“Not exactly,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“It means we have a pretty good case against Mark Remington,” she said. “What we still don’t know is if he was a rogue attorney acting on his own.”
Venta looked confused.
“Tell me how that works.”
“Okay,” London said, “it works like this. If Remington was acting on his own, without the knowledge or participation of the law firm, then the law firm isn’t liable for anything he does. He’s liable, of course, but not the law firm.”
“But Remington said he was representing a law firm,” Venta said. “He said the firm wanted dirt on Bob Copeland.”
“It doesn’t matter what Remington said,” London said. “Nothing he says is binding on the law firm. The only way the law firm itself can be held liable is if it did something wrong. That can come in a number of ways. If, for example, the law firm provided the money that was given to you, or knew what Remington was doing and allowed it to continue, or knowingly profited from Remington’s actions, or something like that, then the firm itself can be held liable. But if Remington was acting solely on his own, outside the scope of his employment, then the firm isn’t liable.”
“This is complicated,” Venta said.
“Just think of it in terms of basic fairness,” London said. “If Remington was acting on his own, it wouldn’t be fair to hold the firm responsible. If the firm was in on it somehow, then it would.”
“Okay.”
“Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
London looked at Hannah.
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“What if Remington was working with someone else in the law firm and that person helped him by giving him law firm money or something like that?” Venta asked.
“That would probably be enough to make the firm itself liable,” London said.
“Then I have only two things t
o say.”
“What’s that?”
“Thomas,” Venta said. “And Fog. That guy’s dirty. I can feel it in my gut. We need to focus on him.”
London chewed on it.
Then a wild thought came to her.
“We’ve been assuming that Remington was working with Vesper & Bennett since that’s who he’s employed with,” she said. “Maybe, in point of fact, he was working with Thung, Manap & Deringer the whole time.”
69
Day Nine—June 19
Tuesday Morning
ALONE IN A CONFERENCE ROOM, Teffinger sipped coffee as he pulled up the bondage photographs from Alan English’s computer. There were fewer than he thought, only a couple hundred. His primary goal was to figure out if any of them had been taken by English in Bangkok, and in particular, at the place where Venta had been kept, and whether Venta was in any of them.
That answer came easy.
No.
All of the pictures had been downloaded from websites. In fact, most of them had the web name imprinted on them. They had been pulled from cyberspace more than three years ago over a period of six months, meaning they were stale.
So where was the fresh stuff?
HE FLIPPED BACK TO ONE OF THE PICTURES—an unusually beautiful woman wearing only a thong, stretched tight in a spread-eagle position on a bed. It reminded him of that night with Darien Jade, when she tied scarves on her wrists and ankles and told him to tie her down.
He said no.
It was too weird.
But she insisted so he did.
Then he explored her body with a light touch, slowly and teasingly, for a long time, working her into an orgasmic frenzy but backing off before she came.
Then he started all over again, controlling her every sensation until there was nothing left in her universe except the need to come, then denying her that, making her want it even more, reducing her to pure animal lust.
SUDDENLY THE DOOR to the conference room opened, Sydney stuck her head in and then entered. “There you are,” she said.
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