Witness Chase (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (31 page)

The attorney, Michael Northway, Esq., called him on his cell phone just as he was climbing the west side of the divide towards the Eisenhower Tunnel. Northway reported that the private investigator in California had made significant strides in the effort to locate Alicia Elmblade and was hopeful that he would actually find her within in the next two or three working days.

Details?

No.

The lawyer wasn’t at liberty to provide those.

Once Alicia Elmblade was located, Northway would have her contact Teffinger directly and he could interview her to his heart’s content.

“Then you can apologize,” Northway added.

Most of the rest of the drive was spent on the phone with Clay Pitcher, Esq., the Assistant District Attorney for Denver, trying to talk him into getting a search warrant for Northway’s house. Nick had known Clay forever. He was a slow-moving man with a barrel chest and yellow cigar teeth, who looked like he ought to be selling used cars somewhere. He usually wore a beige suit, not buttoned and couldn’t be, not for two years now. He punched out at 4:43 p.m. every day and was only eight years short of retirement. In spite of all that, however, he was a damn fine lawyer when he wanted to be, and had a sense of justice that could still get him riled up at times.

Getting him to cross swords with Holland, Roberts & Northway, LLC, wouldn’t be easy, though.

Teffinger had Katie Baxter fax over a half dozen photos of D’endra Vaughn’s dead body, so Clay could see the trauma and pain for himself. Teffinger told him everything he knew about Rick’s Gas Station and Northway’s involvement that night. He got Clay to admit that the attorney’s conduct amounted to a conspiracy to commit an obstruction of justice, even if it turned out that Alicia Elmblade hadn’t been killed. That meant that they had an actual crime to base a search warrant on.

Then he called in every marker he had, pleaded, begged, and had a box of bagels delivered.

Finally, Clay called him just as he was merging from I-70 onto the 6th Avenue freeway in Golden, only fifteen minutes away from the office.

“Okay,” Clay said. “Come on over and we’ll work up an affidavit.”

Teffinger slapped the dashboard with excitement.

“It was the bagels, wasn’t it?”

The D.A. smiled.

“Well it was either that or your abilities of persuasion. You figure it out.” Then the D.A.’s voice got more serious. “We’re going to keep this low-key, though, to keep this guy’s reputation intact in case we’re barking up the wrong dick. That means we’re going to arrive for the search in unmarked cars and do whatever it takes along the way to keep this under the media’s radar screen.”

That was fine with Teffinger.

THE PAPERWORK, AND GETTING A JUDGE
to sign off on the whole thing, took more than two hours. By mid-afternoon, however, they were knocking on Northway’s front door and handing the warrant to a cleaning lady when she answered.

“He’s a good man,” she told them. “This is wrong.”

Teffinger nodded.

“He’s a great guy. We just need to look around a little.”

Teffinger couldn’t help but try to put a price tag on the place. Three million? Four? Five? He really didn’t have a clue. The entry vestibule alone probably cost more than his house.

They hadn’t been inside more than ten minutes when Clay Pitcher, who insisted on coming, received a call. It was Richard Ferguson, Esq., one of the senior partners at Holland, Roberts & Northway, LLC. Within the next half hour, the law firm would be filing a motion to quash the search warrant and a motion to seal anything taken. Mr. Ferguson wanted to confirm where Mr. Pitcher could be reached this afternoon for an emergency telephone conference with the judge.

Teffinger watched him take the call and could tell that the pushback had already started. Eventually, the D.A. put the phone back into the pocket of his coat, shrugged and said, “Wrong number.”

Teffinger smiled.

“Well that’s good. From the look on your face, I thought it was the IRS.”

Teffinger was in the attorney’s den when Baxter shouted at him to come upstairs.

He found her in the master bedroom. She was as usual dressed for the job below, wearing dark blue drawstring pants, a white T-shirt with a yellow smiley face, and her weapon in plain view, riding in a leather holster on her hip. The T-shirt hugged her chest tighter than normal and Teffinger found himself glancing in that direction for a split-second longer than he probably should have.

“Bingo,” she said, handing him a manila file folder.

He took it.

The words “Attorney-Client Privilege” were handwritten on the tab. He opened it up and inside found ten large color photographs depicting a woman who was obviously and undeniably dead.

“Someone took her down hard,” Baxter noted.

“I’d say.” He couldn’t remember seeing such livid trauma before, except for maybe D’endra Vaughn.

Then to Baxter, “Do you recognize her?”

No she didn’t.

“Me either. Where’d you find this?”

“There,” she said, pointing to an elegant maple cabinet over in the corner. “It was locked but I found the key in the top drawer of the nightstand.”

Teffinger walked over.

“Let’s see what else we have in this little fellow.”

Unfortunately, the little fellow was spent. No drivers’ license, no newspaper articles, no envelopes with souvenir hair, just the photos. In fact, by the time all was said and done, there was nothing else anywhere in the house.

Just the one set of photos.

Sidney Somerville, Northway’s prior secretary, would need to be called down to the department to tell them if these were the same pictures she saw on Northway’s desk last year. Teffinger doubted they were, however, since none of the pictures depicted a knife in the woman’s stomach. In fact, two of the pictures showed her midsection, both without any visible trauma whatsoever to that area.

HE EXCUSED HIMSELF FOR A MOMENT,
went into the bathroom, closed the door and dialed Kelly. She answered on the second ring. He could hear “Born to Run” playing in the background.

“Where are you?”

“En route back to Denver,” she said. “Why?”

“I have some photographs that I need Jeannie Dannenberg to take a look at,” he said. “They’re pictures of a dead woman and I need her to tell me if it’s Alicia Elmblade.”

“I’m sure she’ll do that.”

“Yeah, I know but I want to do it now, tonight if possible,” Teffinger said. “And she needs to look at them downtown, at the department, so we can get a videotaped statement. Can you ask her if she’ll do that?”

He heard the two women talking.

Then Kelly was back on the phone.

“She will but there are two conditions.”

“Oh? And what might those be?”

“The first is, you have to take us to Rodizio’s afterwards.”

Rodizio’s?

He didn’t know the place.

She must have felt his mental gap because she added, “It’s in LoDo, by Union Station. It’s one of those Brazilian places where they keep bringing meat to your table until you pass out.”

“Is that the place with the rattlesnake?”

“That and about fifty other things.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “Done, but I’m not eating rattlesnake. What’s the second condition?”

He heard Kelly talking to Jeannie again, then she was back on the phone. “Okay, brace yourself. She says the second condition is that you have to spend the night at my place, so she’ll know I’ll be safe.”

Teffinger smiled. “Tell her no way.”

More talking, then, “She says take it or leave it.”

“Tell her I can subpoena her ass.”

More talking. He says he wants to slap your ass.

“Hey, that’s not what I said.”

They’d just passed Vail, which meant they’d be down at the department in about two hours. That would give him time to finish up here and do the chain-of-custody paperwork.

He came out of the bathroom and hadn’t taken more than ten steps when his phone rang.

It was Kelly.

“Hey, I just had a thought,” she said. “Take a picture of one of those photos with your cell phone and send it to me.”

Good idea.

He did.

“Jeannie says that’s not Alicia,” Kelly said.

Teffinger scratched his head.

“It’s not?”

“No.”

“Is she sure?”

“She’s positive. She’s never seen the woman before and neither have I.”

Teffinger scratched his head.

Who are you, darling?

Chapter Forty

Day Ten - April 25

Wednesday Afternoon

_______________

GANJON SET AN
empty Coke can on top of the rock, then walked back twenty paces, picking up three good-sized throwing stones as he went. He fingered them, shifted the best one to his right hand and held the other two in his left. He concentrated on the can, judging the distance, and bounced his right hand up and down to get a better feel for the weight of the rock. Then he threw it with all his might. It flew horizontal through the air, easily over a hundred miles an hour, and ricocheted off the rock about two inches to the right.

He repeated the routine and threw again

This time hitting it dead-on.

Knocking it back a good twenty feet.

That was better.

Imagine that hitting you on the side of your stupid head.

He walked back over to set it up again, thinking about the TV news report that he couldn’t get out of his mind. It was a short community-interest piece on the homeless assistance shelter in Denver. Some associate with the shelter was being interviewed and the interview was taking place in front of the shelter. In the background, sitting on the steps of the shelter, with a wounded left arm, was none other than the biker bitch.

He’d recognize her anywhere.

The fact that she would be hanging around Denver for a day or two or three made some sense. She went to the cops and told them where the farmhouse was. Now, they were probably having her look through mug shots and working with a composite artist. Also, they would be putting pressure on her to be available just in case they caught their man and needed her to pick him out of a lineup.

On the other hand, it could be a trap.

One very clever little trap.

The cops knew he would be watching the news. They knew that he’d want to know if they were broadcasting a composite of his face, which they weren’t, at least not yet. They also knew that he would like nothing better than to get his hands around the biker woman’s filthy little tattooed neck.

So, the question was, had they set her up as bait?

Or had he just stumbled on one of those wonderful little gifts that life hands you every now and then?

Quite frankly, the situation intrigued him both ways.

With the Coke can reset in place, this time he walked back twenty-five paces and picked up only one rock on the way.

A robin flew overhead and he threw at that instead of the can, knocking it out of the sky. It landed on the ground with a thud and flapped one wing, unable to move the other. Ganjon walked over, watched it struggle for a few moments and stepped on its head.

“Wrong place, wrong time,” he said.

HE WALKED BACK TO THE BUILDING,
an abandoned pre-fabricated metal structure that was probably a small machine shop at one point, now gutted and abandoned.

“You’re going to dance for me,” he told Megan Bennett.

Five minutes later he had her naked in a standing spread-eagle position, with her arms stretched up tight and roped to an overhead I-beam. He kept her feet apart with an old broom handle made into a spreader bar.

He had her drawn tight, barely able to move.

No wiggle room for this girl.

He took off his shirt and walked around her, letting her feel his power. He ran a finger in a circle around her belly button. Then gently up her side, up her arm and back down, just a touch, barely perceptible. He grabbed her pubic hair and pulled tighter and tighter until she made a noise through the gag.

“Quite a predicament,” he said.

He spotted a wooden yardstick leaning against the wall over in the corner. He walked over slowly, letting her follow him with her eyes, picked it up and studied it. Then he walked back, taunting her with in.

Then he blindfolded her.

He swung the stick and smacked her on the ass.

She jumped.

“This is for you, baby,” he said. “This is to keep you from getting boring. Because if you get boring, what’s the use in having you around? So my advice to you is dance like you mean it.”

Chapter Forty-One