Witness Chase (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (13 page)

Some nondescript waiter with a white apron and a lot of smiles ushered them to a booth and then disappeared.

“So, are you still with what’s-his-name, Brad?” Kelly questioned, sliding in.

“Blake,” Fallon corrected her. “No, he’s history.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Now I’m dating Mr. Vibrator.”

Kelly laughed.

“Buy stock in Eveready,” she added. “I’m serious.”

They ordered chicken salads and passed names back and forth while the noise of the place washed over them. Fallon Somerville worked at the law firm as Michael Northway’s personal assistant for four years, before leaving six months ago to do that modeling thing, as she called it. If anyone knew what Northway was up to, or had been up to, it would be Fallon.

“We have a situation at the firm, which is why I needed to talk to you,” Kelly explained. “This is all on the hush-hush, by the way.”

Fallon put on a mischievous face.

“Oooh, juicy.”

Kelly wasn’t exactly sure how to broach the subject, or just how much to disclose. “Have you ever heard anything about a secret group in the firm? A group that Michael Northway’s in?”

Fallon looked confused.

“A secret group? What do you mean?”

Kelly leaned in.

“A group, I get the sense it’s a small one, that takes special care of important clients, something over and beyond legal services.”

Fallon shook her head.

“I never heard of such a thing. Who else is in it, besides Michael?”

“I don’t know,” Kelly said. “He wouldn’t say.”

“Huh.”

“Supposedly most of the partners don’t even know about it.”

“But you do?”

Kelly nodded.

“Michael solicited me to do something.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

Too many details wouldn’t be a good idea at this point. Fallon was a good friend and good person but not the world’s best secret-keeper. “I really can’t get into details.” Then, “Does Rick’s Gas Station mean anything to you?”

Fallon looked genuinely confused.

“No, nothing. Should it? Rick’s Gas Station?”

“No.”

“Jesus, Kelly, what’s going on?” Kelly could see the frustration on her friend’s face and wanted to spill out the story but couldn’t risk having anything get back to Northway at this point, especially details that only she knew.

She played with her fork.

“Let’s just say I’ve got a situation that I’m trying to get my arms around. I know that’s vague but it has to be at this point. Bear with me, please. While you were with the firm, was there anything weird or unusual going on that involved Northway?”

Fallon looked like she was reaching back and had found something. “No,” she said, hesitantly.

“You sure? You look like you’re not sure.”

Kelly could feel her deciding. Then Fallon seemed to weaken. “There is this one thing,” she said.

The waitress appeared from out of nowhere, placed two salads on the table and wanted to know if everything was all right.

Yes, peachy keen.

“Actually, I don’t know if it’s something or not,” Fallon went on. “Maybe there’s an explanation for it, but something did happen one day that I found to be out of the ordinary, to say the least.”

“How so?”

FALLON FINISHED CHEWING A MOUTHFUL
of salad and said, “One day, Michael’s out of the office. He’s going to be gone a couple of hours. Maxine Randolph was working on something for him, helping him get ready for something or other. She calls me, desperate for a file that she thinks is in Michael’s office. So I go in to look. Usually he keeps his desk pretty clean but this particular day it was all jumbled up. So I’m digging around and come across this unlabeled expansion folder, buried under a pile of other files, and open it up.”

Fallon paused.

“And?”

“And, well, inside there are pictures of a dead woman. Ten or twelve of them, of this dead woman, some from farther away, some from close up, from different angles, almost the kind of pictures you’d expect the police to take at a crime scene. And they were graphic. I mean, this poor woman was cut and stabbed and I mean a lot. There was blood all over her face and her clothes. She was such a mess that you just couldn’t believe it. I remember one picture in particular, which was a close-up of a knife sticking out of her stomach.”

Kelly could almost see it and felt her breath stop. “Jesus.”

Fallon nodded.

“Tell me about it. I mean this was really sick stuff. But there were other things in the file, too, besides the pictures. There were photocopies of the kinds of things that you’d find in someone’s wallet, like a driver’s license, credit cards, stuff like that. It was like someone had taken her wallet over to a copy machine and just made a duplicate of everything.”

“That’s weird.”

“That’s what I thought,” Fallon said. “So I naturally try to relate all of this to something that Michael’s working on, a criminal case or a wrongful death or a CNN commentary or something, but I’m not coming up with any matches. And, like I said, the file was unlabeled, which I found really strange, since Michael’s such an obsessive-compulsive organizer. There were some newspaper clippings in there, too,” Fallon added. “Articles about the murder.”

“So she was definitely dead?”

“Oh, yes, definitely. You could just tell that by the pictures.”

“And the pictures? What are we talking about? Three-by-fives, or what?”

Fallon shook her head. “No. They looked more like digital pictures that had been printed out. They were almost full page size.”

“So what was the woman’s name?”

“I don’t know,” Fallon said. “I mean, I looked at the copies of the stuff from her wallet, close enough to tell what it was, but didn’t stop to actually read anything.”

“Okay.”

“Now I wish I had.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, that’s what I was going to tell you. Here’s the weirdest part of all. In the file, there was a regular letter sized envelope, too. I look inside and there’s hair. I’m guessing from the dead woman. Now that really freaked me out.”

“Hair?”

“Hair, a lock of hair, not a lot, maybe fifteen or twenty strands, but actual hair.”

“Damn. So what did Michael have to say about all of this?”

“Nothing,” Fallon said. “I just put everything back the way I found it and waited for him to bring it up. He never did. I kept watching for signs of where it might fit into something he was working on, but never did see a connection to anything. And that was the only time I ever saw it. I made a point of keeping my eyes open when I was in his office after that but never saw it again.”

“Is there any reason to suspect that a client gave him that file?”

Fallon contemplated it. “It’s certainly possible. Lots of people walk into his office and the door gets closed. That file could have come from anywhere.”

“Would you recognize this dead woman, if you saw a picture of her?”

“Maybe but I kind of doubt it,” she said. “I mean her face was covered in blood and had hair matted on it and everything. Plus, the way I talk about it, it probably sounds like I was looking around for a long time, but in reality the whole thing probably lasted less than thirty seconds.”

“When exactly did you come across this file?”

Fallon scrunched her face, obviously going deep, then said, “I’m guessing sometime around a year ago, maybe April or May of last year, give or take.”

Kelly made a mental note that the incident at Rick’s Gas Station was in May.

“Does the name Alicia Elmblade mean anything to you?”

Fallon shook her head negative. “No. Who’s Alicia Elmblade? Is she the dead woman?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. I’m going to try to get a photograph of someone for you to look at, and see if you can tell me whether it’s the dead woman you saw in the file. Will you be home tonight?”

“Yes.” Then, “You look freaked out.”

“I’m coming over tonight.”

A HALF-HOUR LATER, KELLY WALKED
down the 16th Street Mall, heading back to work, knowing that she definitely had to find out if the dead woman in Northway’s file was Alicia Elmblade.

If she could get into Northway’s computer, she might be able to find something, maybe even the digital photos themselves. But that would be just about impossible. First she’d have to somehow get his password, then get some serious quiet time in his office. Plus, would he really be stupid enough to leave an electronic trail if he was actually involved in a murder?

No.

Forget that for now.

It would also be interesting to know if someone took a lock of the dead teacher’s hair, the D’endra Vaughn woman, since her death was obviously connected to Alicia Elmblade somehow. If both women had a lock of hair taken, that would point to a common killer.

That would be worth knowing.

Teffinger would know about D’endra Vaughn’s hair. In fact, he was the only one she could think of to tap for that information, except maybe Sydney Heatherwood.

She spotted an empty bench as she approached California Street, headed in that direction and sat down. She pulled Teffinger’s card out of her wallet and called him on his cell phone. He answered almost immediately.

“Lieutenant Teffinger,” she said. “This is Kelly Ravenfield, the lawyer.”

“Kelly,” he said. “Right. What’s going on?” He sounded like he was glad she called. That was good. She pictured his face and almost felt him there with her.

“Nothing, really. I just thought I’d touch base, see if there was anything else I could do to help you or Detective Heatherwood.”

He paused and she could tell he was thinking about it. “There was something I wanted to ask you,” he said. “But it’s not floating to the surface. Maybe I’ll think of it in a second. How’ve you been? Anyone following you around or anything?”

Was the man outside the bar worth mentioning?

Or would he just think she had an overactive imagination?

“You know, I’m not sure,” she finally said. “But Tuesday night, I was in this place, a bar, and there was a guy walking around outside in the rain. For some reason it creeped me out.”

“What’d he look like?”

“I have no idea.”

“Mmm. Was he big, small, young, old, black, white?”

“He was big, that much I could tell. And muscular, you could tell by the way he moved.”

“A big guy, huh?”

“Yes.”

“And muscular?”

“I’m guessing so.”

“Interesting.”

“How so?”

He paused and said, “Nothing in particular,” but she could tell that something had struck a cord with him.

“Oh,” she said, as if surprising herself with an afterthought. “Maybe you could help me with something. I was talking to another lawyer in the firm about D’endra Vaughn, he used to do some criminal law work, and he asked me if a lock of her hair had been cut off. I know you showed me the pictures but I couldn’t remember looking at her hair that close one way or the other. It’s just been bugging me ever since he asked.”

“No, no hair missing,” Teffinger said.

“So that’s something that you look for, then?”

“Not always, necessarily. But in this case, there was enough strangeness involved to suggest that we might be dealing with a souvenir collector, so we paid pretty close attention to the possibility of things like missing hair, missing fingernails, missing jewelry and the like.”

“Well,” she said, “that answers that.”

THAT NIGHT, AFTER WORK, SHE DROVE
over to Jeannie Dannenberg’s apartment to pick up the one and only photograph that Dannenberg had with Alicia Elmblade in it. While she was there, Jeannie—who was obviously feeling no pain—took the opportunity to report that she’d been able to track down quite a few of Alicia Elmblade’s old friends, thanks to the use of the rental. Not a single one of them has heard from Alicia since last May.

Kelly drove the photograph of Alicia Elmblade straight over to Fallon’s house in Cherry Creek and showed it to her.

“Is this the woman you saw in Michael Northway’s file?”

Fallon studied it hard and shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

“Could it be the same woman?”

“It could be but it could not be, too,” Fallon corrected her. “This woman does strike me as being about the right age and the general level of attractiveness. Other than that, though, it’s impossible to tell. Remember, I only saw that file for a few seconds and that was a year ago.”

Kelly felt her frustration level push towards the limit.

“Look harder. Is this the woman in the pictures or not? Just give me your best guess.”

“My best guess?”

“Yes.”