Hit List (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order)

by R. J. Jagger

  Someone rapped on the door.

  Jeannie was off the bed in a heartbeat and opened it up without even looking through the eyehole.

  “Pizza guy,” she announced, pulling him in.

  The damage was $11.95. Jeannie pulled twelve ones out of her pursue and handed them to him. Then pulled out two more and held them in her left hand. The pizza guy, to all appearances a nice unassuming fellow, probably working his way through college or some such thing, looked confused. “You can have this tip or you can squeeze these,” Jeannie said, referring to her breasts.

  “Really?”

  “Sure, go on.”

  When he left and closed the door behind him, Jeannie smiled and said, “He’ll be talking about that for twenty years.”

  Kelly shook her head in wonder.

  “You know what, I’ll be talking about that for twenty years.”

  Teffinger showed up ten minutes later, tried not to stare too hard at the Jeannie show, got situated in his room and made Kelly a proposition. The two of them ended up in his Tundra driving down offbeat roads and winding up at a small parking area by the river.

  The night was blacker than black, shrouded in a low-lying blanket of clouds that totally masked any light from above.

  Thunder rumbled close by, giving fair warning.

  No other cars were parked there.

  No one was around.

  They ended up walking down a path, right next to the Colorado River, able to hear the force of its power but not able to see it.

  Teffinger had a number of things he wanted to talk about and didn’t waste much time getting to them.

  “Last week, you wanted to know if someone cut off a lock of D’endra Vaughn’s hair,” he said. “That’s been bugging me ever since you said it.”

  He stopped at that, waiting for her to comment.

  It turned out that Kelly hadn’t told Teffinger about the files that Northway’s secretary had found on his desk with the pictures of a dead woman, newspaper articles and an envelope containing hair.

  So Kelly told him the story.

  Ever the detective, he wasn’t satisfied with hearing it just once. He kept probing her about it as they walked until he knew every bit as much as she did about it. In the end, he didn’t know what to make of the fact that Northway’s former secretary, Fallon Somerville, hadn’t been able to say one way or the other whether the dead woman she saw in Northway’s file was Alicia Elmblade; nor could she remember if she saw the file before or after May of last year, when the incident at Rick’s Gas Station took place.

  “You only had that one photo of Alicia Elmblade to show her,” Teffinger noted. “I’m going to get some others and have her take another look. I’m finding it more and more interesting that no one’s seen this Elmblade woman alive since the night in question.”

  Kelly nodded, even though he couldn’t possibly see her in the dark. “Northway told me that the client hired a private investigator out in California to try to locate her,” she said.

  “Oh, really? Who?“

  That was a good question.

  “He said he’d be more comfortable keeping that information to himself,” she said. “He has an obligation to protect the identity of the client.”

  Teffinger grunted.

  “He’s got an answer for everything, doesn’t he? You know what I’m starting to think? There is no client, there is no P.I. out in California, Alicia Elmblade is dead, and Northway either killed her himself or is up to his eyeballs in it. That’s why he’s been trying to keep you quiet all this time and why he’s trying to keep me at bay.”

  Kelly understood the reasoning but still didn’t want to believe it. She’d been through too much with Northway over too many years. When you have that kind of history with someone you get a sense of their fiber. From that angle, Northway wasn’t the person Teffinger portrayed him to be.

  Neither version quite fit.

  She was about to tell him that when it started to rain—only a few drops at first, but they were those big heavy ones, the kind that give you a three-second warning before they pound the crap out of you.

  They turned and ran for the Tundra.

  “Here it comes!” Teffinger warned.

  He was right.

  They made it to the truck and couldn’t have been inside for more than a heartbeat before the whole sky fell down.

  She pulled off her sweatshirt and saw Teffinger fumbling around, trying to find the right key on his key chain for the ignition. “Wait a minute,” she said.

  She climbed in the back seat, a total spur-of-the-moment thing, excited by the way the rain thundered down on the roof with a thousand pings. It was solid and thick and she could tell that it wouldn’t let up for some time. Being there, in the back seat of a car in the rain, reminded her of the old high school days, which got her even more excited.

  She fumbled with her belt and had her pants off by the time Teffinger managed to get his overgrown frame back there with her.

  “Take your time,” she said. “Make me beg for it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Day Ten - April 25

  Wednesday Morning

  ______________

  The morning drive from Grand Junction back to Denver was taking Teffinger forever. As beautiful as the Rocky Mountain scenery was, each mile that passed represented another intrusion into a day that was already too short. The old Blondie song “Call Me” bounced around in his brain, stuck there since he heard it on the radio more than two hours ago.

  The attorney, Michael Northway, Esq., called him on his cell phone just as he was climbing the west side of the divide towards the Eisenhower Tunnel. Northway reported that the private investigator in California had made significant strides in the effort to locate Alicia Elmblade and was hopeful that he would actually find her within in the next two or three working days.

  Details?

  No.

  The lawyer wasn’t at liberty to provide those.

  Once Alicia Elmblade was located, Northway would have her contact Teffinger directly and he could interview her to his heart’s content.

  “Then you can apologize,” Northway added.

  Most of the rest of the drive was spent on the phone with Clay Pitcher, Esq., the Assistant District Attorney for Denver, trying to talk him into getting a search warrant for Northway’s house. Nick had known Clay forever. He was a slow-moving man with a barrel chest and yellow cigar teeth, who looked like he ought to be selling used cars somewhere. He usually wore a beige suit, not buttoned and couldn’t be, not for two years now. He punched out at 4:43 p.m. every day and was only eight years short of retirement. In spite of all that, however, he was a damn fine lawyer when he wanted to be, and had a sense of justice that could still get him riled up at times.

  Getting him to cross swords with Holland, Roberts & Northway, LLC, wouldn’t be easy, though.

  Teffinger had Katie Baxter fax over a half dozen photos of D’endra Vaughn’s dead body, so Clay could see the trauma and pain for himself. Teffinger told him everything he knew about Rick’s Gas Station and Northway’s involvement that night. He got Clay to admit that the attorney’s conduct amounted to a conspiracy to commit an obstruction of justice, even if it turned out that Alicia Elmblade hadn’t been killed. That meant that they had an actual crime to base a search warrant on.

  Then he called in every marker he had, pleaded, begged, and had a box of bagels delivered.

  Finally, Clay called him just as he was merging from I-70 onto the 6th Avenue freeway in Golden, only fifteen minutes away from the office.

  “Okay,” Clay said. “Come on over and we’ll work up an affidavit.”

  Teffinger slapped the dashboard with excitement.

  “It was the bagels, wasn’t it?”

  The D.A. smiled.

  “Well it was either that or your abilities of persuasion. You figure it out.” Then the D.A.’s voice got more serious. “We’re going to keep this low-key, though, to keep this guy’s rep
utation intact in case we’re barking up the wrong dick. That means we’re going to arrive for the search in unmarked cars and do whatever it takes along the way to keep this under the media’s radar screen.”

  That was fine with Teffinger.

  The paperwork and getting a judge to sign off on the whole thing, took more than two hours. By mid-afternoon, however, they were knocking on Northway’s front door and handing the warrant to a cleaning lady when she answered.

  “He’s a good man,” she told them. “This is wrong.”

  Teffinger nodded.

  “He’s a great guy. We just need to look around a little.”

  Teffinger couldn’t help but try to put a price tag on the place. Three million? Four? Five? He really didn’t have a clue. The entry vestibule alone probably cost more than his house.

  They hadn’t been inside more than ten minutes when Clay Pitcher, who insisted on coming, received a call. It was Richard Ferguson, Esq., one of the senior partners at Holland, Roberts & Northway, LLC. Within the next half hour, the law firm would be filing a motion to quash the search warrant and a motion to seal anything taken. Mr. Ferguson wanted to confirm where Mr. Pitcher could be reached this afternoon for an emergency telephone conference with the judge.

  Teffinger watched him take the call and could tell that the pushback had already started. Eventually, the D.A. put the phone back into the pocket of his coat, shrugged and said, “Wrong number.”

  Teffinger smiled.

  “Well that’s good. From the look on your face, I thought it was the IRS.”

  Teffinger was in the attorney’s den when Baxter shouted at him to come upstairs.

  He found her in the master bedroom. She was as usual dressed for the job below, wearing dark blue drawstring pants, a white T-shirt with a yellow smiley face, and her weapon in plain view, riding in a leather holster on her hip. The T-shirt hugged her chest tighter than normal and Teffinger found himself glancing in that direction for a split-second longer than he probably should have.

  “Bingo,” she said, handing him a manila file folder.

  He took it.

  The words “Attorney-Client Privilege” were handwritten on the tab. He opened it up and inside found ten large color photographs depicting a woman who was obviously and undeniably dead.

  “Someone took her down hard,” Baxter noted.

  “I’d say.” He couldn’t remember seeing such livid trauma before, except for maybe D’endra Vaughn.

  Then to Baxter, “Do you recognize her?”

  No she didn’t.

  “Me either. Where’d you find this?”

  “There,” she said, pointing to an elegant maple cabinet over in the corner. “It was locked but I found the key in the top drawer of the nightstand.”

  Teffinger walked over.

  “Let’s see what else we have in this little fellow.”

  Unfortunately, the little fellow was spent. No drivers’ license, no newspaper articles, no envelopes with souvenir hair, just the photos. In fact, by the time all was said and done, there was nothing else anywhere in the house.

  Just the one set of photos.

  Sidney Somerville, Northway’s prior secretary, would need to be called down to the department to tell them if these were the same pictures she saw on Northway’s desk last year. Teffinger doubted they were, however, since none of the pictures depicted a knife in the woman’s stomach. In fact, two of the pictures showed her midsection, both without any visible trauma whatsoever to that area.

  He excused himself for a moment, went into the bathroom, closed the door and dialed Kelly. She answered on the second ring. He could hear “Born to Run” playing in the background.

  “Where are you?”

  “En route back to Denver,” she said. “Why?”

  “I have some photographs that I need Jeannie Dannenberg to take a look at,” he said. “They’re pictures of a dead woman and I need her to tell me if it’s Alicia Elmblade.”

  “I’m sure she’ll do that.”

  “Yeah, I know but I want to do it now, tonight if possible,” Teffinger said. “And she needs to look at them downtown, at the department, so we can get a videotaped statement. Can you ask her if she’ll do that?”

  He heard the two women talking.

  Then Kelly was back on the phone.

  “She will but there are two conditions.”

  “Oh? And what might those be?”

  “The first is, you have to take us to Rodizio’s afterwards.”

  Rodizio’s?

  He didn’t know the place.

  She must have felt his mental gap because she added, “It’s in LoDo, by Union Station. It’s one of those Brazilian places where they keep bringing meat to your table until you pass out.”

  “Is that the place with the rattlesnake?”

  “That and about fifty other things.”

  “Okay,” he agreed. “Done, but I’m not eating rattlesnake. What’s the second condition?”

  He heard Kelly talking to Jeannie again, then she was back on the phone. “Okay, brace yourself. She says the second condition is that you have to spend the night at my place, so she’ll know I’ll be safe.”

  Teffinger smiled. “Tell her no way.”

  More talking, then, “She says take it or leave it.”

  “Tell her I can subpoena her ass.”

  More talking. He says he wants to slap your ass.

  “Hey, that’s not what I said.”

  They’d just passed Vail, which meant they’d be down at the department in about two hours. That would give him time to finish up here and do the chain-of-custody paperwork.

  He came out of the bathroom and hadn’t taken more than ten steps when his phone rang.

  It was Kelly.

  “Hey, I just had a thought,” she said. “Take a picture of one of those photos with your cell phone and send it to me.”

  Good idea.

  He did.

  “Jeannie says that’s not Alicia,” Kelly said.

  Teffinger scratched his head.

  “It’s not?”

  “No.”

  “Is she sure?”

  “She’s positive. She’s never seen the woman before and neither have I.”

  Teffinger scratched his head.

  Who are you, darling?

  Chapter Forty

  Day Ten - April 25

  Wednesday Afternoon

  _______________

  Ganjon set an empty Coke can on top of the rock, then walked back twenty paces, picking up three good-sized throwing stones as he went. He fingered them, shifted the best one to his right hand and held the other two in his left. He concentrated on the can, judging the distance, and bounced his right hand up and down to get a better feel for the weight of the rock. Then he threw it with all his might. It flew horizontal through the air, easily over a hundred miles an hour, and ricocheted off the rock about two inches to the right.

  He repeated the routine and threw again

  This time hitting it dead-on.

  Knocking it back a good twenty feet.

  That was better.

  Imagine that hitting you on the side of your stupid head.

  He walked back over to set it up again, thinking about the TV news report that he couldn’t get out of his mind. It was a short community-interest piece on the homeless assistance shelter in Denver. Some associate with the shelter was being interviewed and the interview was taking place in front of the shelter. In the background, sitting on the steps of the shelter, with a wounded left arm, was none other than the biker bitch.

  He’d recognize her anywhere.

  The fact that she would be hanging around Denver for a day or two or three made some sense. She went to the cops and told them where the farmhouse was. Now, they were probably having her look through mug shots and working with a composite artist. Also, they would be putting pressure on her to be available just in case they caught their man and needed her to pick him out of a lineup.

  On
the other hand, it could be a trap.

  One very clever little trap.

  The cops knew he would be watching the news. They knew that he’d want to know if they were broadcasting a composite of his face, which they weren’t, at least not yet. They also knew that he would like nothing better than to get his hands around the biker woman’s filthy little tattooed neck.

  So, the question was, had they set her up as bait?

  Or had he just stumbled on one of those wonderful little gifts that life hands you every now and then?

  Quite frankly, the situation intrigued him both ways.

  With the Coke can reset in place, this time he walked back twenty-five paces and picked up only one rock on the way.

  A robin flew overhead and he threw at that instead of the can, knocking it out of the sky. It landed on the ground with a thud and flapped one wing, unable to move the other. Ganjon walked over, watched it struggle for a few moments and stepped on its head.

  “Wrong place, wrong time,” he said.

  He walked back to the building, an abandoned pre-fabricated metal structure that was probably a small machine shop at one point, now gutted and abandoned.

  “You’re going to dance for me,” he told Megan Bennett.

  Five minutes later he had her naked in a standing spread-eagle position, with her arms stretched up tight and roped to an overhead I-beam. He kept her feet apart with an old broom handle made into a spreader bar.

  He had her drawn tight, barely able to move.

  No wiggle room for this girl.

  He took off his shirt and walked around her, letting her feel his power. He ran a finger in a circle around her belly button. Then gently up her side, up her arm and back down, just a touch, barely perceptible. He grabbed her pubic hair and pulled tighter and tighter until she made a noise through the gag.

  “Quite a predicament,” he said.