by R. J. Jagger
He spotted a wooden yardstick leaning against the wall over in the corner. He walked over slowly, letting her follow him with her eyes, picked it up and studied it. Then he walked back, taunting her with in.
Then he blindfolded her.
He swung the stick and smacked her on the ass.
She jumped.
“This is for you, baby,” he said. “This is to keep you from getting boring. Because if you get boring, what’s the use in having you around? So my advice to you is dance like you mean it.”
Chapter Forty-One
Day Eleven - April 26
Thursday Morning
_____________
A steady stream of rainmakers, partners, associates, law clerks, secretaries and support staff, some whose names she hardly knew, filed in and out of Kelly’s office Thursday morning, glad to have her back, outraged at what had happened, pledging to do whatever they could to help if she needed it.
Northway was conspicuously absent throughout it all.
Kelly hadn’t talked to him since Teffinger searched his house yesterday. Teffinger told her the search would be kept low-key, and it must have been, because either no one in the firm knew about it or they were exercising incredible discretion. It wasn’t on anybody’s lips, even the gossip queens.
Then when all the hoopla started to taper off, Northway called and asked if she could meet him outside on the 16th Street Mall.
He needed to talk to her right away about something very important.
She found him sitting on a metal bench, one of those back-to-back benches, dressed in a dark pinstripe suit and a red power tie. It was actually hot today and she was glad he picked a spot in the shade. He had a large Starbuck’s coffee sitting next to him, cupped in his right hand to keep it from going anywhere. She expected him to look intense and stressed following the search of his house yesterday but for some reason he was the exact opposite.
“Hey there,” she said.
He hugged her, which immediately put her at ease, and said, “Hey there back.”
She sat down next to him and crossed her legs.
“I missed you this morning,” she said.
“Yeah, sorry,” he said. Then, “Here’s what I want you to do. Look straight ahead. Put your eyes on that Hard Rock Café sign and don’t take them off.”
She looked at him, confused. “Michael, this is . . .”
“Ah, ah, ah,” he said. “Hard Rock Café. Look right at the sign and don’t take your eyes off it. I need you to do that for me. Come on.”
She did, wondering what the hell he could be up to. “Okay. Are you satisfied?”
She felt him study her as she stared ahead. “Good,” he said. “Now, don’t turn around no matter what. Do you promise?”
“Jesus, Michael.”
She kept her focus on the Hard Rock Café, feeling stupid but at the same time intrigued as to where this was heading. She could sense him motioning to someone. Then she felt the bench shift slightly and knew that someone had just sat down on the backside of it, right behind them.
“Good,” Northway said. “Now, someone has just joined us but it’s important that you don’t turn around.”
“Why?”
“You’ll understand in a second,” Northway assured her. “In the meantime, do you promise?”
She did.
“Okay, then I guess we can begin.” To someone else, “Your show.”
The person behind them cleared his throat and she could tell it was a man. “I’m the client who solicited Michael to orchestrate that little charade at Rick’s Gas Station,” the man told her, exaggerating his voice to disguise it. Her impulse was to turn around and finally see who the mystery man was but she didn’t.
“So you really do exist?”
“I’m afraid so,” the man said. “Michael asked if I would speak to you so you could hear the story straight from the horse’s mouth.”
He paused while a shuttle bus rolled by and then continued. “Unfortunately, I somehow managed to develop something in the nature of a dark side over the years. I’m not proud of it, and things are getting better now, but there was a time not all that long ago when I wasn’t a very nice guy. The fact is, I was getting increasingly obsessed with the idea of actually killing someone.”
She must have turned her head a little because Northway put a hand on her knee and said, “Hard Rock Café. Remember?”
She focused on the sign again.
“I kept getting these urges, and God help me, but they weren’t going away,” the man continued. “There came a day when thinking about things wasn’t enough. I beat a woman up. I picked her out at random and dragged her into an alley and beat the shit out of her. She was a young woman. Half of me hated myself for doing it, but unfortunately only half. That was the first of a number of other episodes like that.”
The man cleared his throat.
“I was a bad person, I knew that but I couldn’t stop. Things were escalating. I wanted to go to the next level. At night, I spent hours on the Internet, looking in dark corners, getting into chat rooms that would scare the shit out of most people. That led to some private communications with a man. Those communications grew in number over time. He bragged that he had actually killed. At first I didn’t know whether to believe him or not but as he fed me more and more details, I knew. To me, at the time, as sick as it was, it was like a drug. I couldn’t get enough.”
The man stopped talking as an elderly couple strolled by, not more than a few feet from them.
Then he went on.
“I ended up getting a P.O. box and he mailed me pictures of one of the women he killed. At this point, I was more than ready for my first kill. We made an agreement. For his next kill, he would not only send me pictures, but also a lock of her hair, a copy of her driver’s license, and other personal stuff like that. I agreed to do the same for my quote next unquote kill. He followed through with his part of the bargain and sent me a package. Then it was my turn.”
He stopped talking.
Kelly felt the need to prompt him, and said, “So you killed someone?”
“No,” the man said, “I couldn’t go through with it. As much as I thought that I wanted to, in the end, when push came to shove, I couldn’t. The problem was, I owed this man a package. My feeling was, if I didn’t give him one, he would hunt me down.”
“I could see that,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “That’s when I called Michael, to see if he could help get me out of this mess. We decided to fake a death, but it had to be as real as possible, with a real woman, who really disappears, with real witnesses, with a real police report, with real news articles, etcetera.”
“So that’s what we did,” Northway interjected. “Rick’s Gas Station.”
“Exactly,” the man agreed. “After the incident that night Alicia Elmblade posed for some death pictures. I mailed them off, together with a lock of her hair, a copy of her driver’s license and several newspaper articles. Then I decreased my communications with this man and finally ended them all together. I thought everything was done and settled at that point.”
“Of course,” Northway added, “It was important that Alicia Elmblade really disappear, which she did, and was well paid to do so.”
“A hundred grand,” the man emphasized.
Northway added, “We wanted your involvement, Kelly, to give the whole thing a higher dimension of believability. If Alicia Elmblade’s two friends were the only witnesses to her abduction, someone might think it was staged. But if there was a third witness, an independent person totally unconnected to anyone else, and a reputable attorney at that, then the whole thing would rise to the level of veracity that we needed.”
Kelly nodded, understanding.
Everything made perfect sense.
Northway had something else that he apparently wanted her to understand. “To get you to participate,” he said, “I did stretch the truth a little. I told you the woman was escaping from somethi
ng she was afraid of when in reality she was being paid. I had to do that because I couldn’t tell you what was really leading up to all of this. Forgive me?”
She did.
She hugged him, keeping her face pointed at the Hard Rock Café sign.
“Okay,” she said. “Let me just be sure I have a few things straight. You don’t know this yet, Michael, but Sidney Somerville told me that she found a file on your desk once, with pictures of a dead woman, a lock of hair, etc.”
The other man spoke. “That’s the package this other man sent to me. I showed it to Michael.”
Michael nodded.
“That’s correct.”
“Okay.”
“Same thing with respect to the file that your friend Nick Teffinger took out of my bedroom yesterday,” he added. “Those were the first pictures supplied by this man.”
“Okay. That explains that.”
The man said, “That brings us to the second phase of all this. What’s going on now, to my best guess, is this. Somehow this man found out that Alicia Elmblade was a fake. How, I don’t know. But somehow, he must have. He gets a copy of the police report and finds the names of three of the involved people, namely D’endra Vaughn, Jeannie Dannenberg and you, Kelly Ravenfield. He decides to teach everyone a lesson and, hey, why not, he likes to kill people anyway and, coincidentally, you’re all beautiful women and fit his profile. He starts with D’endra Vaughn. He uses her cell phone to call you, Kelly, to let you know you’re next. He succeeds in abducting you last Saturday night but obviously didn’t get the job done. My guess is he’ll go after Jeannie Dannenberg next, or you again. He’ll go after me eventually but not until last. He wants me to experience the guilt of watching everyone else go down first.”
“That’s why we’re paying the California P.I. firm big bucks to find Alicia Elmblade right now,” Northway added. “To warn her and get her some protection. She’ll be on this guy’s hit list, too, if he hasn’t gotten to her already.”
Kelly frowned.
“I told Jeannie she was a target,” she said.
The man spoke. “But not a neglected one. We’ve been giving her a lot of coverage,” he said. “She just doesn’t know it.”
The comment made Kelly think back to the night she met with Jeannie at the bar on Colfax, the rainy night. In hindsight, the mystery man outside in the storm was a friend, not a foe.
The talk went on.
A while later the man—the client—got up and left.
Kelly kept her word, as she should.
She didn’t turn around to look.
As soon as he was away, she wished she had.
Chapter Forty-Two
Day Eleven - April 26
Thursday Morning
_____________
Teffinger forced himself out of bed before the crack of dawn, took a three-mile run, did four sets of fifty pushups, crunched his abs for ten minutes, showered, gobbled down a bowl of Total cereal in his bedroom while he dressed, and was able to get downtown by 7:38.
He was inhaling coffee when the FBI called and reported they had fresh blood.
Two minutes later he and Sydney were headed south. Interstate 25 was thick and slow at this hour of the morning but luckily none of the cars up ahead had decided to crash into one another yet so there were no blocked lanes.
He was in a good mood.
With any luck this latest crime scene would give them the one little break they needed.
He was trying to steer with his knees, using both hands to open the thermos and pour coffee into the cup, when Sydney grabbed them and gave him a look that could have stopped a waterfall.
“What?” he asked.
“You know what your tombstone’s going to say?”
He waited, “No what?”
“Killed by Coffee,” she said. “You’re like one of those guys who gets a fly in the car and keeps swatting at it until you end up running into a light pole.”
Teffinger smiled at the thought.
“What a way to go, huh? Killed by a fly.”
She nodded, handing him the now-filled cup.
“I’ll bet it really happens.”
He agreed.
In fact, he’d come somewhat closer to that exact situation than he would ever admit.
“So, what did you get at the lawyer’s house yesterday?” she questioned. “Anything of interest?”
He told her about the photographs of the dead woman that Baxter found in Northway’s bedroom. That and the fact that photos were not Alicia Elmblade, at least according to Jeannie Dannenberg, who Teffinger had no reason to doubt.
“Clay’s not sure we’ll be able to use them,” Teffinger added, “if it turns out that a client actually gave them to the lawyer and they end up falling under the purview of the attorney-client privilege.”
“Clay’s getting too fat,” she said. “He’s loosing his edge.”
“Not his fault,” Teffinger said. “He’s got diabetes.”
“Really?”
Teffinger nodded.
“I didn’t know that.”
“You’re not supposed to and neither am I, so keep it quiet.”
By the time they got to the Sinclair gas station Teffinger’s bladder was ready to explode. He ran straight to the side of the building, hoping the room was unlocked, but naturally it wasn’t, because that’s the way his life worked. So he ran inside. The kid, Jason Windermere, was at the cash register and started to tell Teffinger something. Teffinger waved him off, leaned over the counter, fumbled around, found the horseshoe and grabbed it.
“Be right back,” he told them.
When he returned, Jason started talking almost immediately. Teffinger gave him his attention, half of it anyway, while he walked over to the coffee pot. “I just wanted you to know, I called Jerold Woodfield down at Metro like you told me to. And guess what?”
“I don’t know. He answered the phone?”
The kid laughed, then told him how he’d gone down to the campus to talk with him, filled out an application for this special scholarship program, and learned yesterday that he’s getting a full four-year scholarship, conditioned on maintaining good grades, of course. Which he planned to do in spades.
“You’ll do good,” Teffinger assured him.
Outside, getting into the car, Sydney looked at him funny. “Okay,” she said, “just tell me what’s going on now so I don’t have to pester you all day.”
He laughed, as if challenged.
“You don’t even know how to pester,” he told her. “Now Baxter, she can pester, she’s a pester-professional. But you? Give me a break.”
“You bankrolled that kid’s scholarship, didn’t you?”
“Now that’s nuts,” he said. “You of all people know my money goes to coffee.”
Five minutes later they came to the first fresh blood. A man’s badly beaten body lay on the ground on the side of the road about fifty yards away from a new Corvette. The local police department was working the scene, with plenty of FBI milling around, but Teffinger didn’t recognize anyone. They hung around for a few minutes and then headed two miles farther up the road, to the house of a farmer called Ben Bickerson.
They checked in with the local sheriff, a man named Russ Smith, and got access to the site. They found Charles Miller in the garage, down on all fours, studying something on the floor. He looked up when they walked in, said “About time,” and stood up.
Then Miller brought them up to speed.
One of the dead man’s daughters, a woman named Rhonda Ellsworth who lives in Florida, called the local police department after she’d been unable to get her father on the phone for a few days. The locals investigated and found the body.
One thing was clear already. Megan Bennett’s abductor had moved over here with his catch after the other farmhouse became compromised as a result of the biker woman’s escape.
“As far as we can tell,” Miller said, “Megan Bennett was tied up in the bed upstairs, and was there
for quite a long time, given the amount of urine on the sheets.”
Teffinger frowned, picturing it.
“Probably some kind of psychological torture,” Miller added. “I can just picture the little prick pretending to abandon her and then sitting back and watching the show.”
A dog barked.
Miller must have noticed Teffinger’s expression, because he volunteered, “That’s the same dog that we found wandering around at the other farmhouse. He lives here.”
“So what was he doing over at the other place?” Sydney questioned.
Miller shrugged.
“Wandered off, I guess, maybe after Bickerson got himself killed.”
For some reason that explanation seemed insufficient to Teffinger. He knew he had to think about that more when he got the chance. Right now he could hardly think at all. He was sick at the fact that the asshole had been right next door to them when they were processing the scene at the other farmhouse and they didn’t even know it. They had him pinned and let him get away. All they had to do was drive over here and check. It would have taken five minutes.
“This guy’s starting to give me a headache,” Teffinger said.
Miller nodded. “The only good thing out of this so far is that Megan Bennett is still alive, bless her little heart. The locals are going to double-check the area one more time to be sure he didn’t dump her around here somewhere, but it seems like he took her with him.”
“She has to be getting weak, though,” Sydney observed. “How much longer can she possibly last?”
Good question indeed.
Shortly before eleven Teffinger got a call from Kelly, who said she needed to talk to him immediately and offered to drive out to where he was if that’s what it took. He said okay, but only if she agreed to swing by a Wendy’s and pick up a combo meal on the way, hold the mayonnaise and onions please. He’d pay her back of course.
She showed up about an hour later and called to say she was down at the end of the driveway and no one would let her in.
Teffinger drove down to meet her and they ended up strolling down the gravel road, he with the burger in one hand and a diet Coke in the other, and she carrying his fries for him. She wore an expensive gray suit, nylons and soft leather shoes with a one-inch heel. A Gucci purse draped over her right shoulder and she smelled like a field of flowers.