Attorney's Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) (2 page)

He had only soloed this particular climb once before and it hadn’t been pretty.

He’d gotten into a jam about twenty-five feet up, in a position where he couldn’t go up or down, wedged in an off-width crack. He stayed there for as long as he could—ten minutes or more—and finally resigned himself to the fact that it was time to jump.

Unfortunately there were no good landing spots, only rocks.

He picked the place least likely to kill him, let go and kicked off at the same time, twisting on the way down and then shielding his head with his arms and hands just before impact.

The plan worked.

He broke a leg but lived.

That was four years ago when he was twenty-nine.

THIS TIME HE WOULDN’T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE. Plus he was in better shape now—down to 208 ripped pounds. Before, he had pretty good abs, a six-pack.

Now he had an eight-pack.

And whereas before he could only do forty-five pull-ups, now he could do fifty.

Still, the mountain worried him.

He stayed to the right, avoiding the troublesome area, even though the face was steeper there. He wished he had gotten here an hour earlier. The twilight was actually starting to slip into darkness. The rock was getting colder and starting to suck his warmth. In another thirty minutes or so it would be downright dangerous. The climb would take at least that long, even with no glitches.

He got to the place he made it to before, but this time was ten feet to the right.

He kept climbing.

Five feet higher.

Now thirty feet above the ground with lots of exposure.

Then something bad happened.

The wall actually extended outward, past vertical, plus there was no way to go either to the right or the left. He remembered seeing a chimney somewhere in the area, but couldn’t remember exactly where. He would either have to downclimb, which was always dangerous, or do a dynamic move—jump up and catch an overhang with his hands, dangle, and just hope there was somewhere to go up once he got there.

He jumped.

His hands caught the edge.

The abrasion of the rock immediately assaulted his fingers.

He hung there for a second until he got a solid bomber-hold. Then he pulled up with his arms to where he could see above.

Damn it!

There was nowhere to go.

The rock above him was totally vertical for a good ten feet with no crevices or cracks to grab.

He hung there for five minutes.

Then looked below and picked the least insane spot to land.

5

Day Two—June 12

Tuesday Morning

LONDON WOKE EARLY Tuesday morning and decided her apartment was too small. In fact, her whole life was too small. She got the coffee going, fired up her laptop and logged on to the Colorado Bar Association website to see if any new job openings had been posted in the last twelve hours.

None had.

Well, that wasn’t exactly true.

One had.

Vesper & Bennett was looking for an associate to add to its intellectual property department. She may as well apply to be the president of the whole freaking universe.

She ate a nonfat yogurt, snapped the plastic spoon in half before throwing it away, put on a baseball cap and pulled her hair through the back. Then she carried her 20-speed Trek bicycle down the apartment stairway to ground level. Fifteen minutes later she arrived at the 24-Hour Fitness on Alameda where she worked the weights for a half hour and then hit the elliptical trainer until her T-shirt was soaked.

She wasn’t big; five-three, a hundred and five pounds.

Some people might say she was too small but she liked her size. It fit her personality. Plus she was in good shape and her body moved easily. She could get up and sit back down a hundred times a day and never even notice. If she needed a paper clip, and it was on the other side of the room, she’d just go over and get it; no problem.

She liked her proportions too.

Her chest would never turn heads. Her thighs, ass and stomach, on the other hand, were just about perfect. When guys felt her up that’s where they spent their time. In the bedroom, men liked to have her on top because she was so light and such a good wiggler, not that she’d wiggled in over four months.

She was the cute librarian when she pulled back her hair.

When her hair came down she was a lot more than cute, and when she let her stomach muscles show, heads turned.

She showered at the club and then peddled the Trek over to the Starbucks on Alameda. When she arrived, the woman—Venta Devenelle—was already waiting for her.

YESTERDAY, WHILE PICKING PLATES OFF THE FLOOR, London got a good enough look at Venta to tell that she was incredibly attractive. Now she realized that the woman was even more beautiful than she initially realized.

She was five-eight or nine with a strong body and long blond hair—a California lifeguard meets movie star look.

Most of the men in the place had half an eye on her.

They drank two cups of coffee, chatting about everything and nothing, before Venta got to the point of the meeting.

“Okay, so here’s the deal,” Venta said. “I’m a private investigator with a small office on Market Street, in San Francisco. About two months ago, in early April, I got a strange phone call. The caller said he was with a law firm, but didn’t want to disclose the name of it because the firm wanted to hire me for a highly confidential matter, so confidential that they didn’t even want the name of the firm in my files. It turned out that the firm wanted to get some dirt on a man named Bob Copeland.”

“Why?”

“Good question,” Venta said. “The same one I asked, as a matter of fact. But the man wouldn’t say. Anyway, the firm had information that Copeland was going to be traveling to Bangkok. They suspected that he was going there to have sex with lady-boys. You know what a lady-boy is, right?”

No.

London didn’t.

“Well, they’re basically young Asian men who look and act exactly like girls, except that they have a cock,” Venta said.

“Oh.”

“Most of them are actually quite beautiful,” she added. “Anyway, the firm wanted me to follow Copeland to Bangkok and confirm that he was screwing lady-boys. I was also supposed to get as much documentation as I could.”

“Meaning photographs?”

“Exactly,” Venta said. “Preferably of Copeland and a lady-boy mingling or drinking together, but if not that, at least pictures of him walking in and out of bars that had reputations for lady-boys. I was supposed to take a digital camera. Then, if I got pictures, I was supposed to download them to my laptop and email them to myself. That way I could download them once I got back in the States and would still have them even if my camera and laptop got lost or stolen.”

“Clever,” London said.

“Routine, actually,” Venta said. “Anyway, I struck a deal with the law firm. They agreed to pay me a total of $20,000—win, loose or draw—plus all my expenses. Half was to be paid up front and the other half was to be paid on completion. Ten thousand dollars in cash arrived at my office by courier the next day. With that money I bought a roundtrip plane ticket to Bangkok and took off.”

She paused.

Her lower lip trembled for a second.

“What happened next is a long story,” she said. “A long ugly story.”

6

Day Two—June 12

Tuesday Morning

A WARM MORNING LIGHT crept into Teffinger’s bedroom and washed it with a golden patina. Venta lay on top of the covers sound asleep. Teffinger got out of bed as unobtrusively as he could, looked at the woman’s incredible naked body for a few seconds and decided he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth. He showered downstairs so as to not wake her, left a note on the kitchen table and ate a bowl of cereal in the Tundra as he drove east on the 6th Avenue freeway to headquarters.

He flicked the radio stations and got mostly jock-talk until he got to 105, the oldies station, just as “Black Velvet” started playing. He left it there and concentrated on trying to not get blinded by the sun as it lifted off the horizon directly ahead of him.

As usual, he was the first person to arrive at work.

He kick-started the coffee machine and put his cup under the flow as soon as it started, filling the cup only halfway and then adding hot water.

It was too strong, almost downright nasty but better than waiting.

Alan English was starting to turn into a mystery. After talking to the girlfriend last night, a woman by the name of Barbara Smith, Teffinger didn’t think she did it.

From what he had learned so far, English was the pilot of a jet jointly owned by six companies. He had just returned from Bangkok and apparently got stabbed in the back before he even got his suitcases out of his car.

The girlfriend would have known when he was coming back.

She also had a key.

But so far she didn’t have a motive.

She seemed to be telling the truth about not having a clue why English got killed or who did it.

Nothing had been taken from the man’s house, so rule out robbery.

SYDNEY HEATHERWOOD SHOWED UP AT 7:30, gave Teffinger a weird look, and headed to the coffee pot without saying anything. She plopped down in the seat in front of his desk and took a noisy slurp from a disposable cup. She wore a white blouse that looked extra crisp against her African American skin. Teffinger stole her out of vice more than a year ago. Although she was technically still the newbie of the homicide unit, she had already cut her teeth on Denver’s worst.

Adam Sorensen.

Degan Jacks.

Rickey Lost.

“Someone said they saw a woman sitting in your truck last night, while we were processing the scene,” she said.

He shrugged.

“That’s true.”

“A black woman?”

“No, white.”

She frowned. “They’re always white, Teffinger. When are you going to get a black one?”

“I’ve had black women,” he said.

“And?”

“And, they were all nice. I got no complaints. This particular one just happens to be white.”

“How many black women have you had, all told?”

“I don’t know.”

“More than five?”

“I don’t know, I don’t keep count.”

She rolled her eyes.

“All men keep count, Teffinger. So more than five—or what?”

He leaned back.

“Yeah, more than five.”

“More than ten?” she asked.

“I don’t know. About ten, maybe. Why?”

“Nothing. I just want to be sure you’re not missing out on the best thing in life.”

“So you’re taking care of me, is that what it comes down to?”

She nodded. “Someone has to. Tell me about whitey. Is she just another bed-buddy or are we all going to have to put up with you going gaga again?”

TEFFINGER TOLD HER THE STORY. The woman—Venta Devenelle—was a private investigator from San Francisco. She was in the process of relocating her practice to Denver and happened to see Teffinger on the news a couple of weeks ago. She liked him, did some investigation and decided that he was a solid guy—someone worth meeting.

So she tailed him last night, hoping he would end up somewhere public—a restaurant or something—where she could accidentally bump into him and make his acquaintance.

They ended up meeting and hit it off.

End of story.

“That’s your story?” Sydney asked.

“Yeah. Why?”

She laughed.

“Don’t get me wrong, Teff, you’re not half bad looking,” she said. “But do you really believe that a woman’s going to see you on the news and get so lightheaded that she has to hunt you down?”

He cocked his head.

“You think she’s lying?”

“Damn straight she’s lying,” Sydney said. “The only question is—why? My guess is this. She’s going to want to tap you in connection with her P.I. work. First she’ll sleep with you. Then, a month or two from now, you’ll get a phone call. Teff, could you do me a little favor, and run some prints for me? What do you know about a guy named Joe Blow?”

She laughed.

“What?” he questioned.

“No, here’s the phone call you’re going to get,” she said. “Teff, I happened to be in someone’s house, just snooping around a little, nothing serious. Anyway, there was a big misunderstanding and I just happened to get arrested. Would you have time to come down here and straighten things out for me?”

Teffinger knew he was supposed to laugh but didn’t.

“Do you really think she’s using me?”

She got serious.

“You’re a stud, Teff,” she said. “If we didn’t work together, I’d take a run at you myself. But this is too much of a coincidence. Maybe I can see it better because I’m a woman and can read women better than you. Normal women don’t see guys on TV and then hunt them down. Something fishy is going on. My advice to you is to watch your back.”

He chewed on the words.

“And above everything else,” she added, “don’t let the little guy get involved. And especially don’t let him call the shots.”

“The little guy?”

“The little guy, Mr. Happy, Bob, whatever it is that you call him,” she said.

He laughed.

“I’m serious, Teff,” she said. “I know you’ve been looking for someone to be in your life and I know you’ve had some bad luck. I just don’t want to see you have even more bad luck.”

Teffinger stood up, walked over to the coffee pot and refilled. Then he turned and said over his shoulder, “She’s incredibly hot. Did I mention that?”

“Did you hear a word that I just said?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Have you been talking?”

She gave him a sideways look. “Don’t blame me when it all goes south. I did what I could.”

He wrinkled his forehead.

“What?” she asked.

“So is what you said true?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said that if we didn’t work together, you’d take a run at me yourself.”

“I never said any such thing.”

“Oh, okay,” he said. “Too bad, though, because I would have said, Ditto.”

7

Day Two—June 12

Tuesday Morning

LOWER DOWNTOWN—LODO—WAS AN UPSCALE HOTSPOT at the northern edge of Denver given to trendy bars, restaurants and shops, all anchored by Coors Field. Jekker’s loft sat smack dab in the heart of the matter. He stepped onto his balcony with a cup of hot coffee in hand and looked down.