Attorney's Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) (4 page)

He swallowed.

She slipped into the booth next to him and whispered in his ear, “I’m still shaking.”

He grinned.

“Good,” he said. “Then my evil plan worked.”

“Worked isn’t even the word,” she said. “I’m already addicted.” She put her hand on his leg. “So when do I get my next fix?”

The waitress suddenly showed up.

They ordered.

Then Teffinger jumped headfirst into the subject, the dreaded subject, on his mind. “One of my partners, a detective by the name of Sydney Heatherwood, found out about you and asked me a bunch of questions this morning,” he said. “When I explained what happened, she said that you were up to something. She said you were probably snuggling up to be able to tap me for information to help your P.I. practice.”

Venta tilted her head.

“And what did you say?” she asked.

“Well, I basically told her she was wrong.”

“And yet you’re bringing the subject up,” Venta said, “which means you have your doubts. I’m disappointed. I thought we had a connection.”

“We do. It’s just that Sydney has this sixth sense about people, especially women.”

“Well she’s wrong,” Venta said. “Are you sleeping with her?”

Teffinger raked his hair back.

“No.”

“Have you ever slept with her?”

“No.”

“Have you ever wanted to sleep with her?”

He shrugged.

“She’s my partner,” he said. “I can’t have those kinds of thoughts.”

Venta took a sip of tea and said, “Here’s some stuff you’ll find out about me as time goes on. First, my P.I. practice is totally confidential, which means I’m not even going to tell you what I’m doing, much less ask you for help. Second, I will never, ever, either directly or indirectly, ask you for help or a favor in any way, shape or form. That’s not the way I operate. But most importantly, I would never put you in a compromising position. That wouldn’t be right of me. Or fair to you. I’ve never had any intention of anything like that happening and it never is going to happen, plain and simple.” She looked into his eyes. “Any questions?”

He nodded.

“Just one.”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you still addicted, or did I blow it?”

She squeezed his hand.

“I could use a fix right now, to tell you the truth.”

10

Day Two—June 12

Tuesday Night

JEKKER HUGGED THE PITCH-BLACK SHAPE of a thirty-foot Ponderosa pine in the backyard of a house, waiting for his little black-haired target—Tessa Blake—to show up. A sliver of moon floated in the east but didn’t throw enough light to expose him.

Still, to be extra cautious, he wore a ski mask.

The woman should show up any time now.

He fingered the black hood in the left pocket of his sweatshirt. Once he got his knife to her throat, and tied the hood over her head, she’d calm down considerably.

The plan was a pretty good one.

Jekker drove around until he found a house for sale that looked like no one was living there. From a payphone he called Tessa Blake and said she was recommended by the people on Birch Street, where Jekker had followed her this morning in her Molly Maid car. He said he was a real estate agent by the name of Jim Hansen who needed a house dusted and vacuumed in preparation of a big showing tomorrow morning.

“If I pay you direct, can you go over tonight?”

They talked money, so much money that she said, “Okay, but don’t tell anyone.”

“There’s a lockbox on the front door but someone took the key,” Jekker said. “What you need to do is go around to the back. We leave the sliding glass door unlocked.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll have some wallpapering going on until about nine,” he said. “But you can show up any time after that.”

“Like, 9:30?”

“That’ll work,” Jekker said. “I’ll leave the money in an envelope on the top cabinet to the right of the kitchen sink.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks. I really appreciate it. And please do a good job. This is really important.”

That was this afternoon.

Now it was 9:28 p.m.

Suddenly headlights flickered up the street.

Game time.

A VEHICLE PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY, the engine stopped and the headlights went off. A car door opened and shut. A trunk opened and shut. Thirty seconds later a dark shape came around the rear corner of the house. As best as Jekker could tell, the woman carried a vacuum cleaner in one hand and an oversized bag in the other, no doubt filled with paper towels and cleaning products.

Jekker left his hiding spot at exactly the right time and approached with coffin-quiet steps.

The woman didn’t have a clue, even as he closed the last five feet.

He brought his left hand from behind and clamped her mouth shut while he brought the knife to her throat with his other hand. “Don’t make a sound!” he warned.

She froze.

He held her tight, immobile, until his gut told him that she had decided not to do anything stupid, then he put the hood over her head. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “This is so you don’t see my face. That way I’ll be able to release you again. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said. “You’re doing just fine. All this will be over in a minute. Put your hands behind your back.”

She did.

He pulled out the rope.

“All you have to do is cooperate and nothing bad will happen.”

Before he got her tied, a voice cut the night, a second woman’s voice, rounding the back corner of the house.

“You’re not going to believe what that jerk brother of mine just told me.”

Then Tessa Blake screamed.

Jekker pushed her to the ground and ran towards the other woman, fast, with the knife in hand.

She turned and ran but not fast enough. Jekker reached for her hair, got it, then yanked as hard as he could, so hard that her body stopped moving forward and actually lifted off the ground as her head snapped back.

11

Day Two—June 12

Tuesday Afternoon

ALTHOUGH LONDON TOLD VENTA that she’d be her attorney, the cold reality of the undertaking made her hands tremble as she paraded around Tuesday in her waitress apron and delivered food to people who hardly noticed she existed.

She probably couldn’t get a job with Vesper & Bennett as a secretary much less a lawyer, so how was she supposed to cross swords with even one V&B attorney, much less an army of them? They’d cut her to ribbons before she took ten steps towards the courthouse.

She needed to back out and called Venta during a break to tell her.

“I’ve been giving this a lot of thought,” London said. “You need to get a real lawyer. There’s no way I can—”

“Stop,” Venta said.

“But—“

“Ah, ah, ah,” Venta said. “I know where you’re headed and I’m not interested in hearing it, so save your breath. You’re my lawyer, so get used to it.”

“You’d be better off with someone experienced,” London said. “You really would. I hate to lose my first client, but that’s the cold hard truth. Hell, I don’t even have a fax machine. But that’s not the point. The point is that I don’t have the experience or the depth to go after a target as big as V&B. It would be like a mosquito trying to eat an elephant.”

Venta laughed and said, “Maybe we don’t need to eat it. Maybe we just need to give it a good bite and infect it with a disease.”

“I’m serious,” London said. “They’ll put up a scorched-earth defense.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s where they bury you in paper, file one motion after another, don’t produce documents unless ordered by the court, pull witnesses out of thin air, and basically scorch the earth for anything and everything that could possibly help them win. They could throw two or three million dollars in billable hours at the case and never even blink.”

Venta paused on the other end then said, “Speaking of money, I don’t have any. Did I mention that before? The little that I do have is already earmarked to keep food in my stomach and gas in my car. So I won’t be able to pay you anything. You’ll have to take the case on a contingency fee basis.”

WHEN LONDON GOT OFF WORK MID-AFTERNOON, instead of peddling the Trek to the bus stop on Colfax Avenue as usual, she headed into the heart of Denver’s bustling financial district and found a place to lock the bike at the bottom of the Cash Register Building at the corner of Lincoln and 17th Street—a tall office building with a top shaped like an old cash register.

She stepped into a fancy marble elevator wearing her jeans, T-shirt and tennis shoes and pushed the button for floor thirty-four, the lowest of the four floors that housed Vesper & Bennett.

On the way up she noticed a large ketchup stain on her shirt.

Damn.

It looked like blood.

The elevator dumped her into a common area.

To the right was a wall of glass.

She looked for a restroom, found none, then swallowed and pushed through fancy doors into a space that could very easily have been a wing from the Louvre. She knew nothing about art but even her untrained eye registered the fifteen or twenty oil paintings as important and rare.

The place oozed money and power.

The receptionist—a conservatively dressed woman—sat at a contemporary glass desk that resembled a futuristic command center. She wore a hands-free telephone and directed incoming calls to their destinations on a nonstop basis. She momentarily fixed her eyes on London’s ketchup stain but kept all expressions off her face. Behind her, in a glass-walled conference room with a commanding view of the Rocky Mountains, twelve or fifteen attorneys sat in high-back leather chairs at a cherry wood table, concentrating on a professionally dressed woman giving a Power Point presentation.

Two attorneys walked into the area, talking intently, and disappeared down a hall at the opposite end.

Neither of them looked at London.

So this is what the elephant looks like.

It was even bigger than she thought.

She turned and walked out.

It wasn’t until she got in the elevator that she noticed her hands trembling.

SHE GOT BACK TO HER APARTMENT AFTER FIVE and peddled past her worn-out, broken-down Chevy—a vehicle that hadn’t run in six months because a new transmission hadn’t fallen out of the sky and landed in it. It still served a purpose, though, as a storage unit. She kept her winter clothes in the trunk and all of her old law books in the back seat.

There was no need to worry about anyone taking the radio.

They did that long ago.

She ate a Lean Pocket off a paper plate as she paced back and forth.

Damages weren’t the issue.

If there was liability—emphasis on the if—the damages were huge. London couldn’t even begin to guess what a jury might award to redress a woman who had been held in sexual slavery for over a month. It would probably be a pile of money that could be seen from outer space.

So the issue wasn’t damages.

The issue was liability.

How could London possibly prove that the most prim and proper law firm in Denver—correction, in the world—was engaged in a conspiracy to enslave a woman? The concept seemed so bizarre. What jury would possibly believe that without a pile of proof?—a pile that could be seen from outer space, to be exact.

12

Day Three—June 13

Wednesday Morning

TEFFINGER LIVED ON A DEAD-END STREET nestled in the side of Green Mountain where the houses looked down on Denver fifteen miles to the east. His house was a green split-level, third from the end, backing to the mountain. The neighborhood had no flowers because flowers were deer candy. Foxes, rabbits and rattlesnakes roamed the mountain. At night, the coyotes barked, and every once in a while the skunks stank. Traffic noise didn’t reach this far.

Teffinger had drapes in his bedroom but never closed them.

He needed the room to lighten when the sun came up, just to be absolutely sure he didn’t waste a minute of the day. He liked the night but loved the day.

Nothing got him more stressed than waking up late.

This morning he woke an hour before sunrise because that’s the only time he could carve out of his life to jog. His body wouldn’t let him get out of bed right away, so he turned onto his back.

Venta lay next to him breathing deep and steady.

Listening to her, right then and there, he realized something. She needed to move in with him, today, so he could repeat this moment tomorrow and the next day and the next.

He must have shifted his weight because Venta moaned and said, “Are you awake?”

“No.”

She climbed on top of him and wiggled until he got hard.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “My life doesn’t work like this.”

“It does now,” she said.

HE HADN’T BEEN AT HEADQUARTERS for more than fifteen minutes, not even long enough to inhale the first pot of coffee, when dispatch called and said, “Got some more job security for you.”

Teffinger fired up a second pot of coffee, filled a thermos, and then headed to the crime scene, which turned out to be a vacant house on the south edge of Denver, a house for sale.

A white Molly Maid car sat in the driveway. Three uniforms were in the process of stringing tape around the perimeter of the property.

Teffinger recognized one of the officers—Adam Woods—a triangular bodybuilder with a taste for steroids, one more guy who had traded his hair for muscles.

“I’ll be damned, the big guns,” Woods said when he spotted Teffinger.

“Still pumping, I see.”

“You got to do what you can,” he said.

According to Woods, the neighbor looked out the kitchen window this morning, saw a body and called the police. “She came over when we got here,” Woods said. “Other than seeing the body this morning, she doesn’t know anything.”

“She didn’t hear anything or see anything?”

“Nada.”

“Does she know when the Molly Maid car showed up?”

Woods frowned.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her that.”

A black-and-white magpie landed on the roof of Teffinger’s truck. He walked over and shooed it off.