Witness Chase (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (18 page)

Inside he untied her, told her to take off the T-shirt, which she promptly did, and watched the wonderful muscles in her body work while he let her make a pitcher of lemonade.

Suddenly his cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his front pants pocket and looked at the number. It was the South Beach brat, Jay Yorty.

This call could mean money.

“Okay,” he said. “This is your first test. I’m going to answer this with you standing right there. If you scream anything out, then so much for your promise.”

“No problem,” she said. “You’ll see.”

He pressed the green button on the phone, giving her a warning look.

“Jay,” he said in as upbeat a voice as he could muster. “Are you saving me any of those South Beach women or are you getting them all lined up for yourself?”

Yorty sounded high on coke but eventually got to the point. He was glad he caught Ganjon still in Denver. He wanted him to go back to Donald Vine’s and see if he could get as good a deal on the ’57 Chevy as he did on the Porsche.

It wouldn’t hurt to have a ’57 in his collection, if it was the right one and the right price.

Ganjon watched as Megan Bennett poured lemonade from the pitcher into two glasses filled with ice. She walked over and handed one to him.

“Here you go,” she said.

He took it and drained half the glass.

Yorty said, “Sounds like you’re busy getting lucky, so I’m signing off, partner. Call me tomorrow with some good news on that ’57. Okay?”

“You got it.”

GANJON PUNCHED OFF, SET THE PHONE DOWN
on the table and looked at the woman. “That must have been frustrating, not knowing whether to shout out or not.”

“No, I told you . . .”

“You should have,” he said.

God it felt great telling her that.

Suddenly his cell phone rang again. Incredibly, the woman jumped for it, astonishingly fast, and grabbed it just before he did.

Goddamn bitch!

She bolted out of the kitchen, phone in hand, looking at it as she ran, trying to find the right button to push.

He all but ran through the kitchen table and lunged for her.

He missed and landed flat on the floor.

Damn!

The wind shot out of his lungs and his muscles didn’t want to work.

He got up by sheer force and stumbled.

She ran out the front door and shouted into the phone.

Her voice was frantic.

Help me please!

I’m Megan Bennett!

I’m in a farmhouse!

He’s going to kill me!

He charged after her, his brain burning with a thousand fires.

The lying little whore just made her last mistake!

Chapter Nineteen

Day Five - April 20

Friday Noon

_________

TEFFINGER TOOK A BITE OF A SUBWAY SANDWICH,
turkey with everything except mayo, as he and Katie Baxter stared at the tube. The Channel 7 noon news kicked off with the Megan Bennett story, thirty beautiful seconds worth.

“That was intense,” she said. “You can look downright mean sometimes, do you know that?”

Teffinger shrugged.

“This is it,” he said. Megan Bennett would be one of the top news stories for at least the next three or four days. Someone out there could pick up the phone any minute and give them the critical lead they needed.

Baxter wrinkled her forehead. “So what was that deal with your reporter friend, Sarah Upjohn, when the press conference was over?”

Teffinger looked as innocent as he could but had a pretty good idea what she was talking about. “What do you mean?”

“I saw her rubbing the twins all over you.”

“That was an accident,” Teffinger explained.

“Oh, please,” Baxter said.

He shrugged.

“The twins have a mind of their own. What can I say?”

She looked incredulous. “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to buy her for what she’s worth and sell her for what she thinks she’s worth. I could use the money.”

Teffinger smiled.

“You could retire.”

“We could both retire.”

SHE PUSHED A PIECE OF PAPER ACROSS THE DESK.
“The FBI number you asked for,” she reminded him. “Are you calling in a profiler or something?”

Teffinger picked it up then dialed the number of the FBI Field Office, Cincinnati, Ohio, which had jurisdiction over Columbus. While it rang he shook his head.

“No, something else.”

After talking to a short string of people, more than he really had time for, he was finally connected with someone who could actually help him, namely the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Charles Miller. Teffinger filled him in on the Megan Bennett case and the fact that she reportedly bumped into an FBI agent shortly before she disappeared.

“So the way I understand what happened,” Teffinger explained, “according to this coworker of Megan Bennett, is that this FBI agent was working on a case involving the murder of an OSU woman, as well as two other abductions that were believed to be related. He then manages to bump into Megan Bennett, halfway around the world, years later, who just happened to have gone to the same school where the killings took place. Shortly after that conversation she disappears. Call me skeptical but there are a few more coincidences going on here than I’m used to.”

Teffinger felt a long pause on the other end of the phone.

“This is interesting,” Miller said. “Very interesting. I can confirm that this office was in fact heavily involved in the investigation of an OSU student by the name of Beth Williamson, which would have been, let’s see, I’m guessing about five years ago now. The person assigned with primary responsibility for the case is Special Agent Sam Dakota, who just happens to be one of our best. But he wasn’t in Denver last week, or even last year.”

“He wasn’t?” Teffinger questioned.

“No,” Miller said. “He’s right here in town and has been. Of course, everyone in the office knows about the case, so I’m trying to think of who else might have been in Denver recently, but, quite frankly, no names are jumping up. No one’s there on assignment there out of this office, that’s for sure. And as for vacations, no, no agents have been off for at least three weeks.”

“Interesting,” Teffinger said. “But there was an actual case, though? Involving an OSU woman?”

Teffinger took another bite of the Subway as soon as he stopped talking and chewed with a purpose. He was starved for some reason.

Baxter, who was listening to the conversation, made a face at him, which meant he was chewing with his mouth open.

“Oh, most definitely,” Miller confirmed. “This is all extremely confidential, which you already know, but here’s the long and short of it. The OSU woman, Beth Williamson, drops off the face of the earth one day. The Columbus police find her about three weeks later. Someone sealed her in a 55-gallon drum, naked and without any food or water, and set her out in the woods, about two hundred yards off an old gravel road. Nice guy that he is, he punched air holes in the top. Needless to say, she lived a whole lot longer than she wanted to.”

“Jesus,” Teffinger said.

“Yeah,” Miller said. “Exactly. The Columbus P.D. had never seen anything like that before and brought us in when they hit a wall.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh,” Miller said, “let me back up. The information about the drum was held close to the vest. The official statement, as far as public information goes, is that she was found in the woods.”

“Understood.”

“Okay, so we start working the case pretty hard,” Miller continued. “We find out that the deceased was enrolled in an upper-level psychology class taught by a professor by the name of . . . ah, crap, I can’t remember his name . . . but it’s not important anyway. What is important is that this professor, as part of his class, had his students write a couple of paragraphs describing the way they’d most hate to die. He was going to do some kind of correlation to match the responses to personality traits or some such bullshit. It was all psychobabble to me. Anyway, what do you think the Williamson woman wrote about?”

“I think I know,” Teffinger said.

“Well, then you’re a smart fellow,” Miller said, “She wrote about being stuffed inside a drum and dumped in the woods to rot a slow death.”

“Damn.”

“Major damn,” Miller agreed.

“So what did you come up with?”

A pause.

“Special Agent Dakota would be the best person to answer that,” Miller said. “He’ll be back in the office later this afternoon, and I’ll have him call you if you’d like.”

“I’d like.”

“The investigation was exhaustive to say the least. We also got the media involved and that generated hundreds of tips. We investigated the professor as a suspect but eventually dismissed him. The file takes up eight file cabinet drawers, to give you an idea.”

Teffinger was impressed.

“The biggest case I ever had only took up three.”

“There you go, then.”

“Did you get any information on the suspect’s size?” Teffinger questioned. “The reason I ask is, we have reason to believe that the person who took Megan Bennett out here in Denver may be a pretty big guy, I’m talking somewhere in the six-four range.”

“You know,” Miller said. “I’m trying to think. Special Agent Dakota would know this better than me, but I’m pretty sure we pegged our suspect as extremely strong, based on some calculations we did relating to the movement of the drum. I’m not sure that we ever translated that to a body height, though.”

“Good enough,” Teffinger said. “What about the other two abductions?”

“Okay,” Miller continued. “Two other female students were also both from this professor’s psychology class. They disappeared after the Williamson woman, in separate incidents. The first one disappeared the next semester, which would have been the fall semester, and the second one disappeared during the spring semester the next year. Neither one of them was ever found. In fact, we were never even able to identify the locations they were abducted from.”

“But both had been enrolled in this professor’s class?” Teffinger questioned.

“Yes,” Miller said. “The three cases are definitely connected. Some day their bodies will show up and we’ll be able to verify it. Right now we need fresh blood to move the investigation forward.”

“Well, it looks like I might have that for you. One question,” he said. “Do you remember whether Megan Bennett was in this psychology class?”

“Not off the top of my head,” Miller said. “But I can look it up pretty easy and get back to you.”

“Any chance you could do that right away?”

“That’s two questions.”

Teffinger smiled. “You FBI guys don’t miss a thing, do you?”

“That’s three questions.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER THE FAX MACHINE
gurgled. Teffinger walked over and pulled out two pages. The first was a cover sheet from Special Agent Charles Miller.

Lieutenant Teffinger: Megan Bennett was in fact enrolled in the psychology class we talked about. Attached please find a copy of the paper that she submitted to her professor. Looks like you have our fresh blood.

Teffinger turned to the next page and read the description that Megan Bennett had provided as to the way she’d most hate to die.

He walked back to his desk, set the fax on top of a pile of papers and sank into his chair. Then he closed his eyes and started to work out the details of what it would be like to go like that.

Baxter’s voice suddenly appeared from out of nowhere.

“Nick, what is it?”

He opened his eyes and found her standing in front of his desk.

“Picture this as a way to die,” he said. “You’re strapped into a chair and you have a helmet over your head, sealed at your neck. Air is fed into the helmet from a blower. As long as the blower’s on, no problem, you have plenty of air. But the blower shuts off every five minutes. You have a switch in your hand, taped there, so you can’t drop it. You press the switch and the blower kicks back on and runs for another five minutes. No problem. Except you sit there hour after hour after hour and sooner or later you start to get sleepy. You need to stay awake to keep turning the blower back on. Now you’re up twenty-four hours, now thirty-six, now forty-eight. Now you’re hallucinating and fighting like a madman to not fall asleep. But you know you can’t stay awake forever.”

She looked troubled.

“Sounds like something out of a Hitchcock movie.”

He nodded.

“Yeah. On one of his more morbid days.”

Chapter Twenty

Day Five - April 20

Friday Evening

__________