Attorney's Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) (24 page)

She wasn’t quite so invisible.

Hannah pulled a brush out of her purse, ran it through London’s hair and said to Venta, “She’s a cutie, this lawyer of yours.”

“Yes she is.”

London only half heard the words, too focused on the case. “I’m really glad we held off on suing V&B,” she said. “I’m starting to get more and more convinced that V&B may end up being our best friend and that this Thung firm may end up being the real culprit.”

THEY HEADED TO LONDON’S APARTMENT, fired up the Gateway and settled back to see what cyberspace had to say about their new friend.

HUNTR.

The Porsche was registered to one of the Thung firm’s Denver partners, Virotte Pattaya, who lived in upscale Greenwood Village. He was the same person who London initially followed into the elevator and got a strange look from. According to the photos on the firm’s website, though, the man driving the Porsche wasn’t Pattaya, but was a 42-year-old named Kiet, a partner in the firm’s Bangkok office. He must be borrowing the vehicle while he was here in the States.

Suddenly Venta beamed.

“What?”

“I remember where I saw Kiet,” she said. “He was in the bar, the one that I followed Bob Copeland into the night I got abducted.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

Good.

Very good.

“He was in a booth,” she added. “He had three or four women wrapped around him and he had his hands all over them. They were having a good time.”

Hannah frowned.

“I’ll bet the little freak was watching you the whole time to be sure everything went as planned,” she said.

Venta nodded.

“That’s my guess,” she said.

“He needs to be held accountable,” Hannah added.

“Yes he does.”

THAT EVENING AFTER DARK, the three women waited down the street from Virote Pattaya’s fancy Greenwood Village estate to see if the Porsche made a move. London chuckled and said, “I’m going to rely on you two since stalking wasn’t on the Bar Exam.” Shortly after 10:00 the garage door opened, the 911 emerged with Kiet at the wheel and disappeared down the street.

They followed, north on Colorado Boulevard to a strip club in Glendale called Shotgun Willies.

“One of us needs to go in,” Venta said. “It can’t be me because he knows me.” Then to Hannah, “Give me a number between one and ten.”

“Four.”

Then to London, “Your turn.”

“Seven.”

“It was nine,” Venta said. “London goes in.”

They gave her money.

Then she headed in.

INSIDE SHE FOUND EIGHT OR NINE OR TEN STAGES, each one filled with a gyrating woman more striking than the other. None were in Venta’s league, or even Hannah’s for that matter, but any one of them could break a heart with the blink of an eyelash. Kiet sat at one of the bars, facing the stages, with two lovelies already snuggled up to him.

Money.

The women must smell it.

London walked to the end of the bar and ordered a draft. A man appeared from out of nowhere and hit on her.

He wasn’t bad looking, nicely dressed in a suit and tie, tipsy but not falling-down sloppy.

He helped her blend in so she let him stay.

KIET SPENT THE NEXT HOUR GETTING LAP DANCES and then left. London got back in the car with Venta and Hannah, and they followed him through the fringe areas of lower downtown where he pulled into a metered lot on Wazee and killed the engine. Ten minutes later a black sedan with deeply tinted windows pulled up next to him.

Kiet got in, then came back out almost immediately and took off.

Venta stayed where she was.

“You’re losing him,” Hannah said.

“I’m going to follow the sedan,” she said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Instinct I guess.”

They followed the sedan.

72

Day Nine—June 19

Tuesday Afternoon

TEFFINGER WAS SITTING AT A RED LIGHT on 8th Avenue, tapping his hand to “Dancing in the Dark” and waiting to cross Colorado Boulevard, when Barb Winters from dispatch called and said, “Are you in the mood to look at a dead guy?”

Teffinger frowned, glanced at Sydney and muttered, “Another one.” Then, into the phone, “Who is it?”

“Some guy named Porter Potter,” she said. “The responding officers said it looked like he slipped and hit his head on the bathroom floor. Kate Baxter’s on her way over.”

There was a time when Teffinger went to every scene.

Day or night.

Rain or shine.

Someone dies.

He sees them.

But he simply didn’t have that kind of time any longer, especially when first indicators pointed to nothing more than a garden-variety accident.

“Thanks for the call,” he said. “Tell Baxter I won’t be able to make it.”

“You’re not heading over?”

“Can’t,” he said. “I’m up to my eyeballs in alligators.”

“That’s supposed to be ass,” she said.

“What is?”

“The alligators,” she said. “You’re supposed to be up to your ass in ’em, not your eyeballs.”

“Yeah, well, they passed the ass a long time ago.”

Ten minutes later, with coffee in hand, Teffinger and Sydney walked in the front door of Alan English’s house.

THE FRESH BONDAGE PICTURES were probably on CDs. They started in the den, where English’s computer had been found. The only CDs there appeared to be store-bought. They bagged them anyway.

They expanded the search into the bedroom.

The basement.

The garage.

Time passed.

“Maybe they don’t exist,” Sydney said.

Teffinger kept searching without looking up.

“They exist.”

An hour later they still hadn’t found anything.

“I’m starved,” Sydney said.

Teffinger was too.

They headed over to Colorado Boulevard looking for something cheap and fast—a McDonald’s or Wendy’s or something like that—with “Surf City” on the radio.

“That’s what I don’t understand,” Teffinger said.

“What?”

“Some guys are Jan and Dean and spend their time checking out the parties for the surfer girls,” he said. “I’m the guy stuck in a traffic jam, spending my time trying to figure out if my girlfriend is a murderer.”

Sydney punched the up button on the radio and “Surf City” instantly turned into Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.”

“There,” she said. “Problem solved.”

Teffinger grinned.

“And tell that FBI profiler friend of yours to stop messing with the stations,” Sydney added. “All she’s doing is making more work for me.”

“She thinks she has rights,” Teffinger said.

“So do you,” she said. “That doesn’t mean she does.”

He laughed.

A McDonald’s popped up on the right. The drive-thru was jammed up nearly all the way to the curb but Teffinger pulled in anyway. “Too many people in this city,” he said.

BACK AT ENGLISH’S, they found nothing. Then Teffinger discovered something interesting, namely a wall safe hiding silently behind a painting in English’s bedroom. He said, “They’re in here,” and ripped it out using a sledgehammer and crowbar from the garage.

It fell to the carpet with a thud and was every bit of eighty pounds, not to mention awkward.

Teffinger muscled it up into a bear hug, did a Frankenstein walk out to his truck and got it into the bed.

Sydney brushed plaster off his shirt.

Then they locked up and fought traffic on the way back to headquarters, not getting a single good song on the radio except “California Dreaming.”

BACK AT HIS DESK, cooling his heels until the lab could get the safe open, Teffinger pushed papers and tried to not get too nervous. Kate Baxter showed up mid-afternoon and took a chair.

“Sorry I couldn’t join you,” Teffinger said. “What was the guy’s name again?”

“Porter Potter.”

“Tell me it was an accident,” he said. “I don’t want any more job security around here.”

“It was,” she said.

He nodded.

“Chalk up one for the good guys,” he said.

“Right.”

“Winters said he hit his head or something.”

“He fell changing a light bulb,” Kate said.

“Well that’s dumb.”

“Drunk is more like it.”

Teffinger grinned. “One more example of Don’t Drink and Do Stuff.”

Kate laughed.

“The poster child.”

Then a serious expression washed over her face.

“What?” Teffinger asked.

“He might have been drinking because of his daughter,” she said. “Do you remember that airplane crash at the Jefferson County Airport earlier this year? The one where six people died?”

No.

He didn’t.

“She was on that plane,” Kate said.

“That’s a shame.”

She nodded.

“He still has her pictures all over the place,” she added. “Dozens of them. She looks a lot like Tessa Blake.”

“My Tessa Blake? The Molly Maid?”

Kate nodded.

“They could have been sisters,” she added.

73

Day Nine—June 19

Tuesday Afternoon

JEKKER GOT ANOTHER HOUR OF HIS LIFE sucked away in the canyon traffic jam. Then the idiots in charge announced that the road wouldn’t reopen at all. It would be closed for the indefinite future because the boulder needed to be blasted into manageable chunks to be removed. Also they were bringing experts in to look at the canyon walls to determine if other outcroppings were in danger of breaking off. Everyone had to turn around and squeeze through Morrison, which had been designed for horses and wagons instead of a New York rush hour.

Damn it.

Damn it.

Damn it.

Move your ass.

Get the hell out of my way.

Don’t try to squeeze in front of me you jerk.

I’ll take you down.

I’ll take you down to Chinatown.

Jekker was so frazzled by the time he finally punched through all the congestion and got to the wide-open lanes of C-470 that he couldn’t even sing along with Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights.”

The canyon closure was more than an inconvenience, it was the death knell for one of the two escape routes from the boxcars.

Now there was only one way out and one way in, namely a long circular route of many miles up I-70, through Evergreen and then back down Highway 74.

What a pain in the ass but he had no choice, so that’s the route he took.

THREE MILES FROM THE BOXCARS, Jekker encountered a police roadblock. A baby-faced cop told him that the canyon ahead was closed due to an accident and possible rockslides, but then let Jekker through when he told him he had a place up the road, this side of the accident.

“Just keep a lookout,” the cop said.

“Will do.”

Jerk.

How was Jekker supposed to do that?

Be looking up as he drove?

Two miles later something weird happened. A helicopter sat on the canyon road. Two others circled directly above. The chopper must have just landed because there were no cars by it.

Three people stood outside, two men and a woman.

Jekker recognized the woman.

She was Jena Vernon, the green-eyed TV 8 reporter, blond, very hot.

He actually had a dream about her once. They were making out in the backseat of a car at night. She was a dog in heat, insatiable, nothing more than a heaping pile of animal lust. She had Jekker’s cock in her hand and was trying to get him to put it in, but he was holding out, teasing her, making her beg for it. That’s when a pack of flying monkeys showed up and carried the car into the sky, miles and miles above the earth, almost into outer space, and dropped it.

Weird.

JEKKER PULLED UP TO THE CHOPPER AND STEPPED OUT.

“You guys okay?” he asked.

A man wearing jeans and T-shirt, no doubt the pilot, said, “We’re fine. But if you’re trying to get up the road, this bad boy isn’t going anywhere for a while.”

It turned out that they had been covering the car that got squashed by the boulder, developed problems and made an emergency landing. A mechanical crew was en route to evaluate the aircraft but probably wouldn’t be able to repair it in place. That meant that a crane would need to be brought in to lift the aircraft onto a flatbed.

“We’re looking at some serious time,” the pilot said.

Jekker half listened as the pilot talked and half focused on Jena Vernon, now sitting on the riverbank and tossing rocks into the water. She wore beige cotton pants and a short-sleeve white blouse, simple but sexy. He walked over and sat down.

“You see that boulder sticking out of the river over there?” he asked, pointing.

She did.

“I’m not going to tell you my name unless you can hit it with a rock.”

She checked him out then stood up and threw a rock.

She missed and threw another.

And another.

And another.

Then she hit it, just barely, on the side, but a hit nonetheless.

She sat down and said, “Okay, so what’s your name?”

“Dylan.”

She shook his hand.

“I’m Jena Vernon.”

“I know,” he said.

Five minutes later her phone rang. She told Jekker, “Excuse me a moment,” and answered. Then, into the phone, “Teff—no, I’m okay—honest—well, yeah, there is one thing you could do now that you mention it—get me drunk and take advantage of me—I am serious—”

She hung up and said, “An old friend of mine.”

“Lucky guy,” he said.

74

Day Nine—June 19

Tuesday Night

THE THREE WOMEN FOLLOWED THE BLACK SEDAN as it looped around towards Larimer Square but then lost it after getting stuck at a light. That was fine with London. Her watch said midnight and her body said sleep.

Twenty minutes later she was back at her apartment. She took a quick shower and stretched out face down in bed, wearing flannel pajama shorts and a tank top, barely awake. She didn’t look up when Hannah turned off the living room lights and walked into the room.

“Long day,” Hannah said.

“Mmm.”

“What you need is a backrub,” Hannah said.