Witness Chase (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (33 page)

When he returned, Jason started talking almost immediately. Teffinger gave him his attention, half of it anyway, while he walked over to the coffee pot. “I just wanted you to know, I called Jerold Woodfield down at Metro like you told me to. And guess what?”

“I don’t know. He answered the phone?”

The kid laughed, then told him how he’d gone down to the campus to talk with him, filled out an application for this special scholarship program, and learned yesterday that he’s getting a full four-year scholarship, conditioned on maintaining good grades, of course. Which he planned to do in spades.

“You’ll do good,” Teffinger assured him.

Outside, getting into the car, Heatherwood looked at him funny. “Okay,” she said, “just tell me what’s going on now so I don’t have to pester you all day.”

He laughed, as if challenged.

“You don’t even know how to pester,” he told her. “Now Baxter, she can pester, she’s a pester-professional. But you? Give me a break.”

“You bankrolled that kid’s scholarship, didn’t you?”

“Now that’s nuts,” he said. “You of all people know my money goes to coffee.”

FIVE MINUTES LATER THEY CAME TO
the first fresh blood. A man’s badly beaten body lay on the ground on the side of the road about fifty yards away from a new Corvette. The local police department was working the scene, with plenty of FBI milling around, but Teffinger didn’t recognize anyone. They hung around for a few minutes and then headed two miles farther up the road, to the house of a farmer called Ben Bickerson.

They checked in with the local sheriff, a man named Russ Smith, and got access to the site. They found Charles Miller in the garage, down on all fours, studying something on the floor. He looked up when they walked in, said “About time,” and stood up.

Then Miller brought them up to speed.

One of the dead man’s daughters, a woman named Rhonda Ellsworth who lives in Florida, called the local police department after she’d been unable to get her father on the phone for a few days. The locals investigated and found the body.

One thing was clear already. Megan Bennett’s abductor had moved over here with his catch after the other farmhouse became compromised as a result of the biker woman’s escape.

“As far as we can tell,” Miller said, “Megan Bennett was tied up in the bed upstairs, and was there for quite a long time, given the amount of urine on the sheets.”

Teffinger frowned, picturing it.

“Probably some kind of psychological torture,” Miller added. “I can just picture the little prick pretending to abandon her and then sitting back and watching the show.”

A dog barked.

Miller must have noticed Teffinger’s expression, because he volunteered, “That’s the same dog that we found wandering around at the other farmhouse. He lives here.”

“So what was he doing over at the other place?” Heatherwood questioned.

Miller shrugged.

“Wandered off, I guess, maybe after Bickerson got himself killed.”

For some reason that explanation seemed insufficient to Teffinger. He knew he had to think about that more when he got the chance. Right now he could hardly think at all. He was sick at the fact that the asshole had been right next door to them when they were processing the scene at the other farmhouse and they didn’t even know it. They had him pinned and let him get away. All they had to do was drive over here and check. It would have taken five minutes.

“This guy’s starting to give me a headache,” Teffinger said.

Miller nodded. “The only good thing out of this so far is that Megan Bennett is still alive, bless her little heart. The locals are going to double-check the area one more time to be sure he didn’t dump her around here somewhere, but it seems like he took her with him.”

“She has to be getting weak, though,” Heatherwood observed. “How much longer can she possibly last?”

Good question indeed.

SHORTLY BEFORE ELEVEN TEFFINGER GOT A CALL
from Kelly, who said she needed to talk to him immediately and offered to drive out to where he was if that’s what it took. He said okay, but only if she agreed to swing by a Wendy’s and pick up a combo meal on the way, hold the mayonnaise and onions please. He’d pay her back of course.

She showed up about an hour later and called to say she was down at the end of the driveway and no one would let her in.

Teffinger drove down to meet her and they ended up strolling down the gravel road, he with the burger in one hand and a diet Coke in the other, and she carrying his fries for him. She wore an expensive gray suit, nylons and soft leather shoes with a one-inch heel. A Gucci purse draped over her right shoulder and she smelled like a field of flowers.

She told him the story that the client told her this morning on the 16th Street Mall. Teffinger, as usual, made her repeat it over and over, and kept looking for holes or inconsistencies. In the end, however, it held together perfectly.

He didn’t see a reason not to believe it and told her so.

“So you’ll back off Michael Northway, then?” she questioned.

“Is that what you want?” he asked, a rhetorical question to give him time to think.

“Yes,” she said. “But not just for Michael’s sake, for the whole firm. It’s a lot more fragile than you’d probably think. I don’t want to see it get tarnished.”

Teffinger considered it, chewing on a fry.

Actually, he’d already searched Northway’s house, and hadn’t found much, other than the photos in his bedroom, which were now perfectly explained. Clay Pitcher, Esq., had counseled against trying to get a search warrant for Northway’s law office, which he viewed as not only too politically charged, but also on extremely shaky legal grounds given the fact that the place was a refuge of sensitive information that was truly protected by the attorney-client privilege. Heatherwood was right, Clay was loosing his edge.

But, that said, there wasn’t much more to do anyway. They could try to question Northway, try to make him reveal the name of the client and then talk to the client directly, but Northway could take the 5th and so could the client, for that matter. Also, if the client wouldn’t show his face to Kelly Ravenfield, there was no way he’d talk to Teffinger.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t have any plans right at the moment to do anything that would create a public embarrassment to either Northway or the law firm. This client needs to be held accountable at some point for assaulting those women, and I will follow-up on that, mark my words, but that’s something for another day and another place.”

He had one more thought, on a related subject.

“If the story that the client told you is true, that means that the person who killed D’endra Vaughn and tried to kill you is the same person who killed the women in the pictures that he sent to the client. Right?”

Kelly obviously agreed with him, “Correct.”

“You mean right.”

“That’s what I said, correct.”

Teffinger shook his head.

“If someone says, right?—and it is right—then you say right. And if someone says, correct?—and it is correct—then you say correct. But you can’t mix right and correct.”

“Sure you can,” she said, defending herself.

“No,” he said, “because that upsets the balance of the universe. Right?”

She laughed. “Correct.”

He shook his head, beaten.

“So,” he said, thinking out loud, “maybe that gives me a foothold. Maybe I can find out who the dead woman is in the photos that I got out of Northway’s bedroom and find out who killed her. That’s who killed D’endra Vaughn and tried to kill you.”

Kelly looked skeptical.

“That seems like a long shot,” she said. “It’s a whole separate investigation.”

That was true, actually.

“But one that may already be done,” Teffinger said. A pause, then, “We also have that other file, too, the one with the hair and everything that Northway’s secretary saw in his office. That’s another victim of this same guy. Tell Northway that I want that file. If there really is a driver’s license and newspaper articles in there, then we’ll have the name of the victim and the location of the crime. That’ll get me in touch with the police department who did the investigation. There’s no telling what they have. Hell, they might even have a name and a picture for all we know.”

She nodded.

“So, there you have it,” he said. “I’m going to be nice to Northway if he gets that file in my hands.”

“I’ll call him,” she said.

“Do it right now,” Teffinger told her. “I want to know what his position is.”

He sat down on a rock and picked the last of the fries from the bottom of the box while she wandered down the road to talk to Northway in private. When she came back she was smiling.

“Michael gave the file back to the client,” she said, “but he’s going to call and see if he still has it and would be willing to turn it over to you. In the meantime, he said he remembered the name on the driver’s license. Melinda Russell. And he remembered that the newspaper article was from Memphis, Tennessee.”

Teffinger was satisfied.

“That’s all I need, really.”

Ten seconds later he was on the phone to Katie Baxter.

Chapter Forty-Three

Day Eleven - April 26

Thursday Morning

____________

IN AN EINSTEIN BROS COFFEE SHOP
on Sherman Street, Ganjon strategically positioned his magnificent frame at a table next to the windows where he could see the shelter, and sipped coffee while he read this week’s Westword.

He had mixed emotions about hunting down the biker bitch and still didn’t know which way the scales would eventually tip. On the one hand, no one gets to screw with him the way she did, period, end of sentence. On the other hand, you don’t want to let your emotions get the better of you and pull you into a trap.

What he needed to know is whether the cops had set her up as bait. He needed to know that now because once she drifted away from Denver he’d never see her again. She was one of those slimy little invisible people who live in rat holes and hug the dark.

It felt good to be out among people.

He realized now how much he missed the buzz and activity of crowds and how incredibly long he’d been cooped up with Megan Bennett.

Megan Bennett.

She was getting weak, familiar and uninteresting.

The initial excitement was waning fast.

Even her little pain-dance yesterday didn’t help much.

Plus she was drawing an incredible amount of heat. If she was dead, the cops would still be looking for him but not with anywhere near the sense of urgency they were now.

The end was coming with her.

He could feel it; the inevitable transition was in motion.

It might even happen tonight.

He refilled his coffee cup and refocused on the Westword, an alternative, edgy newspaper, but also one with articles that he found to be surprisingly well researched and well written. It clearly made its money on advertising to the fringe element, being jammed packed with come-ons for clubs, dining, tattoo parlors and, most noticeably, the escort and sex industry.

HE WATCHED BODIES FILE OUT
of the shelter one after another and then, bingo, there she was, finally. The biker bitch was out of the building and walking down Sherman Street in his direction.

He adjusted his sunglasses. They were dark, oversized and cheap, something he picked up earlier this morning from a street vendor for ten bucks. He also pulled the brim of the baseball cap down so that it sat even lower on his face.

The biker bitch was on his side of the street now and would be passing by any minute. She wore oversized jeans, tennis shoes, and a black T-shirt, with those overly tattooed arms of hers hanging out. Her left arm, between the elbow and the wrist, was wrapped in gauze. Her hair was short, the length Ganjon cut it just a few evenings before. It was a little choppy, too, not overly so, but enough to suggest to a stranger that the woman had probably cut it herself. She obviously hadn’t sprung the ten or twenty bucks it would cost to get it smoothed out.

When she walked by down the sidewalk he held the Westword in front of his face. He actually felt the coolness of her shadow as she passed between him and the sun.

He turned, stood up, ready to follow her—then, shit!

She was opening the door and coming inside.

Damn it!

He was back down in his chair in a heartbeat, his face stuffed back into the newspaper.

She stepped to the back of a line that was four deep, half facing him, not more than ten feet away.

His first thought was to turn his head directly away from her, get up, and head calmly for the door, just one more average Joe-Blow who had finished his coffee and was heading to work. But the movement would draw her attention; that was certain. Then she’d recognize his size, at the least, and maybe his posture. Maybe she’d be stupid enough to run over and try to get in front of his face to see if it was him or not.