Confidential Prey (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (5 page)

Teffinger followed him to the burgundy awnings of Marlowe’s at 16
th
and Glenarm, where the man disappeared inside. It was a place to see and be seen, a frequent haunt of the rich, relevant and upwardly mobile, especially lawyers. Teffinger had eaten there only twice in his life. Both times involved women he was trying to impress.

He hung outside for five minutes, deciding, and then headed in.

North was in a back corner booth with a leggy blond ten years his junior.

Teffinger slid in and said to the woman, “Can you give us a minute in private?”

She looked at North with confusion.

He said, “Just stay put. We’ll be right back.”

Then he led Teffinger into the main room near the end of the bar. He put on a mean face and said, “What’s going on?”

“A woman’s going to die tomorrow night.”

“I know that.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“It makes me feel like the world’s a sick place,” North said. “It also makes me feel like you’re trying to pressure me.”

“I don’t want anyone to die,” Teffinger said.

“I’m sure you don’t.”

“If I find out you’re dirty in this in any way, even a scintilla, you’re going down. If I even think you’re dirty, you can kiss your reputation as a defense lawyer in this town goodbye. I’ll make damn sure that any client represented by you or anyone else in your firm never gets a plea deal, not even a little one. You can tell every one of your clients the minute they walk in the door that they’re going to have to go to trial.”

North frowned.

“What do you want from me?”

“Tell me who your L.A. connection is.”

“I can’t do that.” The man sighed. “Look, Teffinger, I know none of this is fair. I understand that it takes a lot of guts to try to shake someone like me down. I respect you for it, I really do. My advice to you is simple. I’m a conduit to the man you want. Think of the right questions. I’ll pass them along and get you whatever responses come back your way. The ball is in your court, not mine. If I were you I’d spent less time trying to shake me down and more time trying to figure out how to use me.  Do it through Raverly, that’s the protocol. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a luncheon engagement.”

Teffinger left.

If North was dirty, Teffinger didn’t detect it.  All he could see was a man of convictions, twisted convictions, possibly, but convictions nonetheless.

He was five minutes into his walk back to homicide when he turned around and went back to Marlowe’s. North was in the booth with his hand under the table on the woman’s leg.

Wine glasses were in front of them, half empty.

Teffinger put his hands on the table and leaned his face into North’s.

“Tell the guy no more talk. If he has something he wants to say, tell him to be a man about it and call me directly. I’m not interested in playing games with cowards.” He pulled a pen out of his pocket and wrote digits on the tablecloth. “That’s my number, day or night.”

Then he was gone.

Day Fourteen

August 16

Tuesday Afternoon

Back at homicide
the chief wasn’t pleased and creased every line in his 50-year-old face to prove it. “We had a direct line of communications going with the guy and you slammed it shut. What the hell were you thinking?”

“I’m tired of playing games.”

“That’s your answer?”

Teffinger headed for the coffee pot, filled up and took a sip.

“Good stuff,” he said.

“Teffinger—”

“He’ll call.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.” He exhaled and said, “We don’t have time to do things by the book. I got a gut instinct and I acted on it and now it’s done. This guy wants to dance. Trust me, the music hasn’t stopped playing.”

The chief scrunched his face.

“I don’t even know what the hell that means.”

Teffinger smiled.

“Neither do I. It sounded pretty good though, didn’t it?”

Teffinger’s desk
was in the main homicide room, an ordinary cubical with a beat-up desk, a squeaky vinyl chair and a view out the window to the bail bond houses across the street, painted in cartoon colors. His predecessor had a real office, one with a door that shut and got as quiet as a tomb if you wanted it to. Teffinger could have had it when he was promoted to the head of homicide three years ago.

He even tried it out for two days.

The walls were a vice.

The stillness of the air was a crypt.

In the evening after everyone left, he scooped up all his papers and reclaimed his old spot. He told everyone it was because it was closer to the coffee pot, but when they paced it off it was actually three steps farther.

He didn’t care.

He could breathe there.

Right now,
he paced next to the window, throwing mean glances at his cell phone sitting there in the middle of his desk, as if he could will it to ring by sheer willpower.

It didn’t ring.

Minute after minute after minute passed and it didn’t ring.

Then one of the detectives from the property division walked into the room, a non-confrontational woman by the name of Joanne Lee who’d been given the dubious assignment of going through Teffinger’s old cases to see if anyone popped out as having a motive to murder him, over and above the ordinary.

“I’ve been concentrating on release records,” she said, referring to felons who recently got paroled. “There’s none with your name tattooed on their forehead, at least that I can see.”

He nodded.

He also didn’t care.

Sure, he was a target, but things had been calm for two weeks, not to mention he had bigger things on his mind.

“I did find one thing of interest, though,” she said. 

Teffinger cocked his head.

“Go on.”

“Well, do you remember that guy you killed with your hands last year.”

Teffinger winced.

He remembered.

Everyone remembered.

Teffinger had been tailing the guy in connection with three recent murders. A confrontation erupted and Teffinger defended himself, choking the man to death with his bare hands in the process. Afterwards, they found out he was the wrong man.

The killing was ruled justifiable and Teffinger was cleared following an investigation. Still, deep down in his bones in the middle of the night when no one was looking, he had to admit that he probably could have backed off.

“I remember him,” he said.

“Well, get this,” Joanne said. “Somehow Raverly Phentappa is connected to him. She’s that hot little CNN gal that everyone drools over.”

The words dropped with the weight of a planet.

“You’re kidding, right?”

No, she wasn’t.

She wasn’t kidding at all.

“How’s she connected?”

“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “She was at his funeral though.” She handed Teffinger a photo and said, “See, that’s her right there. Do you recognize her?”

He did.

Just like that
the ceiling was too low, the windows were too small and the walls were too close. He needed air and needed it now.

Outside he walked at a maniac pace.

The sun beat down and soaked into every pore of asphalt and wood and plant and bug and dog in the city.

It sucked the juice out of Teffinger’s body.

He didn’t care.

He had a question on his mind.

Was Raverly the one who tried to kill him?

Was she avenging Rekker’s death?

His phone rang.

A man’s voice came through, one he didn’t recognize.

“You wanted me to talk to me,” the man said. “So here I am.”

“I’m not in the mood right now,” Teffinger said.

He hurled the phone at a telephone pole.

It hit and shattered.

Day Fourteen

August 16

Tuesday Afternoon

Back at homicide
he headed up to forensics and dumped the contents of his cell phone on Paul Kwak’s desk next to a bag of celery and carrots.

“What’s with the rabbit food?”

“It’s the wife’s idea,” Kwak said. “She says I’m getting fat?”

“Getting?”

“Not funny. It turns out these are actually negative calories. It takes more calories to chew them than you get.”

“Well, be careful you don’t disappear altogether. Someone called me on that cell phone a half hour ago. See if you can find out who.”

Kwak gave it a curious stare.

“What happened to it?”

“It dropped out of my pocket.”

“Were you in a plane at the time?”

“Yeah, let’s say that.”

“Oh, by the way, you still have that ’67, right?”

Yes, he did.

“I know a guy who’s looking for one.”

“Mine’s not for sale.”

“If you change your mind let me know.”

“Tell the guy he can buy my first son after he’s born. That car is staying in my garage, though.”

He got
a new cell phone and had the old number forwarded to it. Then he called Sydney, who’d left him three messages.

“Okay,” she said, “Ashlyn White was a senior associate in Petcher & Sands, which is San Francisco’s biggest law firm. We’re operating under the assumption that her death was somehow connected to her law practice. Right now we have three detectives down here at the firm interviewing every single employee.”

“How many is that?”

“Close to three hundred, including support staff,” she said. “So far no one has much to say about Ashlyn other than she was a great person and they’re totally baffled. There’s a lot of whispering going on about one of the uppity-ups though, a senior partner by the name of Austin Bent.”

“What kind of whispering?”

“The kind that suggests he might be involved in something heavy.”

“Like what?”

“Unknown.”

“So what’s your theory? That he killed Ashlyn?”

“That’s possible; or even more possible, he might have hired someone to kill her,” she said. “Maybe Ashlyn found out something she wasn’t supposed to. Maybe she was going to turn it over to the police.”

“That’s speculation,” Teffinger said.

“Yeah, but it’s speculation that fits,” she said. “Assume for the moment that Bent hired somebody to kill Ashlyn and assume that person who killed her is the Mr. K you’ve been talking to, which is just about certain given that he knew where the body was. What that means is that Mr. K is a killer for hire.”

“An assassin?”

“Use whatever word you want,” she said. “The bottom line is that the woman he’s going to strike in Denver tomorrow night is someone prearranged, someone he’s getting paid to hit.”

Teffinger scratched his head.

It made sense but it didn’t quite fit.

What was wrong?

Then it came to him.

“Part of his other history is Brooklyn Parks,” he said. “I’ve known her since high school. There’s no way she would ever be a hit. She was just your basic nice person through and through.”

“That doesn’t mean she wasn’t a hit,” she said. “Anyone can become a hit. She could have seen something she shouldn’t have. Someone might have told her something. She might have had a secret life. You never know.”

Teffinger frowned.

“He ran her over out in the desert,” he said. “That’s not the way a hit goes down. That was fun.”

“Well, maybe we’re both right. Maybe he’s an assassin who also kills on the side for kicks.”

Teffinger chewed on it.

Then he said, “See if you can find out who Bent was talking to prior to Ashlyn’s murder. I’m starting to think you’re right in that Mr. K may very well be on that list.”

Day Fourteen

August 16

Tuesday Evening

The emotion
of the afternoon burned off and got replaced with a silent sense of doom as the day waned on and the evening crept in. Hurling the cell phone into the telephone pole was now something Teffinger would take back a hundred times if he could.

Raverly called North every half hour throughout the day.

The man never answered.

When she called the firm directly, she was told North was out of the office for the rest of the day. She left messages for him to call.

He never did.