Client On The Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller) Read online

  “Aspen Asher—”

  “—Right, Aspen Asher.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “Where you going?” Sydney asked.

  “On a voodoo hunt.”

  A half hour later, Teffinger hiked up the stairway to Radcliffe & Snow, finding the climb longer than he remembered. The receptionist said, “Hello again,” and stood up. “Shaken, not stirred, right?”

  Teffinger chuckled.

  “Actually, I wouldn’t know the difference. And I doubt that Bond would either.”

  She smiled, disappeared, and returned twenty seconds later with a cup of creamed coffee.

  “It’s stirred,” she said.

  He took a sip and said, “It tastes shaken.”

  “No, it’s stirred.”

  Teffinger made a concerned face.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Did you shake the cream before you poured it in?”

  “It probably shook a little when I picked it up.”

  “That’s probably what I’m tasting,” he said.

  She grinned and said, “Are you here just for the coffee or something else?”

  “Just the coffee,” Teffinger said. “But as long as I’m here, let’s see if Jeff Salter will talk to me for a moment.”

  In Jeff Salter’s office, Teffinger got right to the point. “What I want from you, on a strictly confidential basis, is a list of every person you can think of who would be happy if Ripley was dead.”

  “Why me?”

  “Who would know better than you?”

  “I guess no one, at least from a law firm perspective,” Salter said. “But Ripley and I were strictly law partners. We didn’t socialize outside the firm. So just appreciate that my list will be within those parameters.”

  A half hour later, Teffinger had a piece of paper with fifteen names on it and quick handwritten notes that he wouldn’t be able to read an hour from now.

  Salter looked serious.

  “Remember, you wanted a list of the people who would be happy to see him dead, and so that’s what I gave you. If you want my opinion as to whether any of those people could or would actually kill him, the answer is no. Not in a million years.”

  “Got it.”

  “My understanding is that this is strictly off the record,” Salter added.

  “That’s correct,” Teffinger said. “I was never here.”

  “It’s not in my interest to make any more enemies than necessary,” he added.

  Teffinger understood and appreciated the cooperation.

  “If you think of anyone else, call me.”

  He took the stairwell down.

  In the lobby, he walked over to the information desk. A bored middle-aged security guard looked up at him. Teffinger handed him the coffee cup and said, “I took this out of Radcliffe & Snow by mistake. Can you see that it gets back up to them?”

  “Sure.”

  On the way out, Teffinger saw the guy drop the cup in the trash.

  Back at headquarters, Sydney told Teffinger what she’d found out about Aspen Asher so far: 27, architect, no priors, clean credit history, homeowner.

  Teffinger sipped coffee as he listened.

  “Little-goody-two-shoes,” he said. “So why would someone like her be investing all kinds of time and money and brain damage to find out who the pirate is?”

  He wadded a piece of paper and tried to toss it into the middle of the snake plant. It hit an edge and fell to the carpet.

  Then he had a thought.

  A wild thought.

  Sydney must have seen it because she asked, “Now what?”

  “Okay, this is just a wild-ass theory but it goes like this,” he said. “Aspen Asher was victimized by the pirate at some point in the past. Then, one day by a miracle, she sees his picture in the newspaper. Now she wants to find out who he is so she can kill him.”

  Sydney chuckled.

  “I want whatever it is that you’re smoking,” she said.

  “I’m serious,” Teffinger said. “So how can she find out who he is and keep it absolutely confidential? She can’t call us, obviously. So what she does is hire an attorney. That way she gets the attorney-client privilege, which she wouldn’t get if she hired a P.I. The attorney would never be able to tell anyone that Aspen was even a client, much less what she was hired to do.”

  Sydney chewed on it.

  “I see holes,” she said.

  “Shoot.”

  “First, there’s no evidence that Aspen Asher was ever victimized by anyone, much less the pirate,” she said. “Second, she’s not the kind to kill; she has too many good things going on in her life to risk it all on revenge.”

  “I got plugs for your holes,” Teffinger said.

  “Shoot.”

  “First, maybe Aspen Asher never reported the incident, or maybe it happened to someone else, like a sister or a friend,” Teffinger said. “Second, she doesn’t see herself as risking anything because she thinks she’ll never be caught.”

  38

  Y ardley spent the morning going through the CD of Lindsay Vail’s computer and making an alphabetical spreadsheet of every name she could find, together with addresses and phone numbers when available. She called the ones she could find phone numbers for, explained she was trying to locate the man implicated by the police in Lindsay Vail’s disappearance, and asked if they would give her their email address so she could send them a photo and see if they recognized the guy.

  Surprisingly most of the people cooperated.

  She scanned the pirate’s photo from the newspaper and pasted it into the body of her emails.

  Mid-morning she called the Ink Spot—the tattoo shop where Aspen worked while going to college—and spoke to a man named Joe Cotter. “You don’t need to send me an email,” he said. “I saw the guy’s photo in the paper. I’m pretty sure he got a tattoo here at one point.”

  Yardley’s pulse raced.

  “From Lindsay Vail?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Cotter said. “This was a while back.”

  She pressed for details but Cotter’s memory was vague.

  Then she asked if she could drive down and talk to him.

  Sure.

  If she wanted.

  The Ink Spot turned out to be a seedy hole-in-the-wall shop in a decayed section of northern downtown, too far from both LoDo and the 16th Street Mall to get the trendier foot traffic. The building looked like it hadn’t had a code inspection in twenty years. Two raggedy Harleys squatted outside.

  The wooden door was wide open.

  Meaning no air conditioning.

  Yardley stepped in.

  Three men were talking.

  All were heavily tattooed.

  Two of them wore biker vests. The third man, no doubt Cotter, was about fifty. He had thinning gray hair braided into a ponytail and wore a white wife-beater shirt. They stopped talking and looked at her. The man in the white shirt said, “Are you the one I talked to before?”

  Yardley walked over and shook his hand.

  “Yes, I’m Yardley Sage.”

  “Give me ten minutes,” he said. “There’s coffee over there if you want.”

  Actually she did.

  She drank it outside and took a walk around the block. The two Harleys rumbled down the street and pulled up next to her. The bigger guy said, “Cotter’s free now. You want a ride back?”

  She didn’t, but she didn’t want to piss him off, either. She needed Cotter’s cooperation and couldn’t afford a bad report.

  “Sure.”

  She hopped on and he twisted the throttle; not hard enough to throw her off the back, but hard enough that she grabbed on to him.

  Joe Cotter was alone when she got back to the shop.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” she said.

  “No problem.” His eyes ran up and down her body. “I don’t see any ink.”

  “That’s because I don’t have any.”

  “That
’s what we call a clean canvas,” he said. “I could put a big red skull on your forehead if you want. Only fifty bucks.” She pictured it and must have had an expression on her face because he chuckled and said, “Relax, I’m just messing with you.” A pause, then, “It’s actually seventy-five bucks.”

  She grinned.

  “You’re too much.”

  “I try to be.” Then he got serious. “Like I was telling you, I saw the article in the paper about Lindsay. It’s a shame. If you ever find this guy, let me know because I’m going to personally rip his head off and pee in the hole.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.

  “I’m serious,” Cotter added.

  She had no doubts.

  “So you think he got a tattoo here at one point?” Yardley asked.

  Cotter nodded.

  “That much I’m pretty sure of,” he said. “If I recall right, it was his own design, something in the nature of a woman hanging upside down from her feet with snakes and spiders crawling all over her body and biting her to death.”

  Yardley pictured it.

  “But you didn’t call the cops when you saw his picture in the paper,” Yardley added.

  True.

  “We’re not exactly on what you would call the best of terms.”

  “Understood. So how did Lindsay end up here?”

  Cotter scratched his beer gut and said, “She had a biker friend named Ninety-Nine who used to bring her in for a piece now and then. She didn’t have much money so I let her work the desk and sweep up for payment. She started hanging around and I ended up showing her how to put the ink on. She was an absolute, one hundred percent natural. Within two years she was as good as me and a whole lot better looking. Guys would ride two hundred miles to get a tattoo from me and then switch over to her once they laid eyes on her and saw pictures of the work she did.”

  Yardley asked if she could have another cup of coffee.

  Then poured one.

  “So what do you have in the way of paperwork that might help me put a name to this guy?” she asked.

  Cotter groaned.

  “Follow me.”

  In the back storage room, stacks of boxes were labeled by year. “These are our carbon copies of receipts.” He took the top off the closest box and showed her. They were thrown in, unorganized. Some had complete information—name, address, phone number, tattoo title, tattoo artist, amount charged, etc. Most had only half that, or less.

  “These are the people who got a receipt,” Cotter said. “Lots of people didn’t want to mess with them, so we don’t have any records, unless they paid by credit card.”

  Cotter let her take the boxes for the four years that Lindsay worked there; and even carried them out to the 4Runner.

  “Call me if you find him,” he reminded her.

  She was a block away when she had a thought and went back. Cotter was walking out of the restroom zipping his fly. “You said Lindsay had a biker friend named Ninety-Nine,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “Any chance he would know who the guy is?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Ninety-Nine is now Minus Six.”

  Yardley’s confusion must have showed because Cotter added, “He’s dead.”

  39

  A fter leaving Refuge-7, Dalton was too nervous to go home. He didn’t know where Lindsay Vail was and didn’t know if she spotted his wallet under the bench and went through it while he was out buying McDonald’s.

  She might know his name.

  She might tell the cops.

  They might show up at his loft.

  Game over.

  Even if the woman hadn’t spotted his wallet, she would know about Refuge-7. The cops could trace ownership to Dalton with about three strokes of a keyboard.

  Either way he was screwed.

  What he needed to know now, more than anything, is whether the cops were on to him. If they were, he needed to drop off the face of the earth, immediately and forever.

  Get out of Denver.

  Cut his hair.

  Disappear.

  So, at two in the morning, he parked in the deepest shadows he could find and watched his loft.

  All night.

  The cops never showed.

  His name never got mentioned on the radio.

  When dawn broke, he went home, showered, and filled a suitcase with cash, credit cards, check books, computer discs and the like. The suitcase went into the back of the BMW.

  He stopped at a 7-Eleven, bought a large coffee and three bruised bananas, and drove to the playroom to clean deeper. No cops were there. He hadn’t been inside for more than two minutes when the noise of a car engine filtered through the front door.

  He ran to a window and looked out.

  It was a black Lexus.

  Malcolm.

  All six-foot-five of him.

  The man stepped out with a weapon in his right hand and trotted towards the front door. Three seconds later, he stuck the gun in Dalton’s face.

  “Where the hell is he?”

  He referred to G-Drop.

  Dalton put on his most confused face. “I have no idea,” he said.

  “That’s bullshit!”

  “He’s gone and the woman’s gone,” Dalton said. “If he killed her, I’m going to personally hunt him down and stop his heart. And if you helped dump her body, you’re going to get the same thing.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “You have no idea.”

  Dalton pushed the man’s arm down so that the gun pointed towards the floor. Then he stepped closer, narrowed his eyes and said, “Was he jacked up?”

  “Aw, man—”

  “I said, was he jacked up?”

  “I don’t know,” Malcolm said. “Maybe a little—”

  “A little my ass,” Dalton said. “I’ll bet dollars to pennies that he was jacked up; he went too far; she ended up dead; and then you and him dumped her somewhere. Now you show up pretending to not know anything, to see if I’m stupid enough to fall for it. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “I didn’t help nobody do nothing,” Malcolm said.

  “Well something sure as hell happened.”

  Malcolm looked confused.

  “I don’t know, man,” he said. “Maybe they called a cab and went to a hotel.”

  Malcolm gave him a weird look and said, “I found a woman in the dumpster out back.”

  An image suddenly sprang into Dalton’s brain.

  An image of Malcolm showing up sometime last night to look for G-Drop; an image of him circling around the outside of the building, calling out; an image of Lindsay Vail hearing his voice and shouting for him to save her; an image of Malcolm pulling her out and sticking her in his car; an image of Malcolm interrogating her somewhere and getting the story.

  Dalton should have gagged her.

  “Where is she?”

  “I’m not telling you nothing until you tell me what you’re doing with her.”

  “Don’t get in the middle of it,” Dalton said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the middle is a dangerous place.”

  40

  E levators almost always closed in on Teffinger; rooms usually didn’t. But every once in a while, even a good-sized room was too small—the ceiling was too low; the walls were too close; the interior was too cluttered; there weren’t enough windows.

  The space was suddenly a cell.

  Teffinger never knew what brought it on.

  He suspected stress.

  But he didn’t really care to delve into the psychobabble since there was nothing he could do about it anyway, except get the hell out when it happened. That’s what he was doing late Wednesday morning—getting out of homicide, taking a quick stroll down Cherokee, able to breathe again under a wide Colorado sky, hoping that whatever it was that forced him out here would self-regulate and let him get back to work.

  Stress.

  He
had to admit that Jessie-Rae was right in that he hadn’t reacted enough to the fact that someone tried to kill him. Maybe the stress was there, running silent and deep, compressing the walls. Maybe he was affected more than he realized. Maybe he was just as mortal and frail as everybody else.

  He chuckled.

  No, that couldn’t be it.

  But the question remained—Who tried to kill him?

  And why?

  He looped over to Speer Boulevard and walked on the pathway next to the river. The water was slow and only waist deep, thanks to too many days in the upper-90s. Homeless guys slept wherever they could find shade, with their precious shopping carts at their sides.

  They looked dead.

  Even to Teffinger’s trained eyes.

  But they weren’t.

  They could jump up as if they’d been stuck with a cattle prod if someone tried to make off with their cart. Once or twice a year a teenager tried to do that, just for kicks, and found out the hard way.

  Someone had tried to kill Teffinger and missed.

  But did kill the windshield of the ’67. The replacement would need to have the original 1967 insignia in the corner, which would be pricey. Plus it would be tricky to install on account of the aluminum trim, which would end up bent unless someone really knew what they were doing.

  He took a glance over his shoulder and saw something he didn’t expect, namely an exotic black woman walking thirty steps behind. Her skin was dark; her hair was long; her clothes were expensive and so was her walk. She looked to be about twenty-five and important; a diplomat’s daughter or something.

  He knew her from somewhere.

  Where?

  He searched his memory and got nothing.

  Come on, think.

  More nothing.

  Then it came to him.

  She was the same woman from the Chatfield beach, the one who looked so out of place. He stopped, turned and waited for her. She looked directly into his eyes. Then turned and walked briskly in the opposite direction.