Lawyer Trap (15 page)

Draven stood up, his heart pounding.

She was right.

“Then they'll ask around town, or get a composite sketch on the TV,” she added. “Someone will end up calling in with your real name.”

Shit!

She was right again.

The guy at the hotel might pick up the phone.

Or someone from a gas station.

Damn it.

A surveillance camera might have even picked him up somewhere.

He slammed his hand on the table—so hard that her cereal bounced up and fell in her lap. Then he grabbed her hair and yanked her out of the chair.

“You goddamn bitch!”

40

DAY SEVEN–SEPTEMBER 11

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

B
rad Ripley's shot face stayed in Teffinger's mind on the drive back to the office, but soon faded as he drank coffee and delved into the reports that Sydney had put together on the four victims.

The central theme appeared to be that there was no theme.

If there was any connection between the four women—other than the fact they all disappeared at about the same time and ended up buried in the same place—it wasn't popping out in neon lights.

Other than those two facts, the women had no obvious overlap.

He took a sip of coffee, found he had let it cool too much, and swallowed what was in his mouth but dumped the rest in the snake plant.

Then he walked over to the pot for a refill.

Come on.

Think.

But instead of coming up with some brilliant theory, he stared out the window aimlessly, across the street to the houses that had been turned into cartoon-colored bail bond dens. A couple of small boys raced down the sidewalk on bicycles, pedaling as fast as they could, a reminder of how innocent we all start out. How does someone go from that to sawing someone's head off?

The oversized industrial clock on the wall said 3:52.

It was probably time to head home since his brain had pretty much turned to mush at this point anyway. Or, to be more precise, head to Davica's house and take her for a ride in the '67.

Then his cell phone rang.

Katie Baxter.

She sounded as if she had just stepped out of a plane crash. “Nick! I need you over here, right away.”

“Here, where?”

“Oh, sorry. I'm still at the crime scene. Brad Ripley's. The guy who got shot in the face.”

“Why? What's going on?”

“Just come over,” she said. “You have to see this for yourself.”

When he arrived at the victim's house, he put on his gloves, registered with the scribe, and found Katie Baxter in the media room.

She seemed to be equal parts excitement and stress.

“Sit down and watch,” she said. “I have to warn you, though, this is graphic.”

He sat down on a leather couch and faced a flat-panel television while Katie got a DVD playing. Within ten seconds he moved to the edge of the seat, leaned forward and watched, with his elbows resting on his knees and his fingers laced together. For some reason the day's coffee suddenly kicked in and twitched his nervous system.

“It's almost two hours long,” she said.

He stared at the screen, already committed to watching every single goddamn second.

The film was obviously homemade, but of very high quality. In it, a man wearing jeans, a black sweatshirt and a black mask toyed with a tightly bound woman.

He cut her clothes off with a knife until she was totally naked.

Then he played with her.

Teffinger recognized the woman.

Tonya Obenchain.

The real estate agent.

Body No. 2 at the railroad spur, the one who got suffocated.

He looked at Katie.

“Does this go all the way to the end?”

“I'm afraid so.”

He fast-forwarded through the whole thing and called Dr. Leigh Sandt, the FBI profiler. “Leigh,” he said. “It's me, your favorite pain in the ass.”

“Nick? Is that you?”

“Afraid so,” he said.

“It's Sunday, man. Don't you ever give it a rest?”

She had a point.

He hadn't even painted a landscape in over three months.

Not even a little two-hour piece.

“Never mind that,” he said. “I have a snuff film I need you to take a look at. The perpetrator's wearing a mask but we're pretty sure it's a guy named Brad Ripley, who coincidentally just got his face shot in. The main thing I need right now is a confirmation that Ripley's the guy in the film.”

“Are you telling me you have an honest-to-God snuff film?”

“That's what I'm telling you.”

“Lucky you, the whole thing on film.”

“This is part of the four-body case,” he said. “The one CNN's been chatting up.”

“Interesting,” she said. “Okay, here's what we're going to need on our end. The guy's wearing clothes in the film, I assume. Look around the house, find 'em and bag 'em. If the film's good enough quality …”

“… It is …”

“… we'll be able to match them to the ones in the film based on stitching and dye markings and stuff like that. Also, see if you can find other film with him in it so we can compare body posture and movements. We'll need the guy's exact height and weight too. Any idea when the film was made?”

“Early April is my guess,” Teffinger said.

“That's five months ago. Ask around with neighbors etcetera just to see if the guy's body has changed significantly in that time period, you know, if he went on a diet or pigged out or anything like that.”

“Done,” Teffinger said. “By the way, did I say thanks?”

She laughed.

“No.”

“Well, remind me to.”

She smiled. “I'll add it to the list.”

41

DAY SEVEN–SEPTEMBER 11

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

T
echnically they weren't breaking into the law firm, since they worked there, but Aspen felt like a criminal nonetheless. She and Christina Tam entered on the 44th floor, since that's where their offices were, and then walked up to the 45th floor where the dead-files room was located.

No one seemed to be around.

Still, they walked down the hall cautiously, watching for office lights, listening for even the slightest whisper of a sound.

They made it all the way to dead-files room, closed the door quietly, and turned the lights on. Thousands of neatly labeled legal boxes sat on metal racks.

“The mother lode,” Christina said.

It didn't take them long to find the box containing Rachel's law firm items. Using a ladder, they pulled it off a shelf near the ceiling and muscled it down to the floor.

“Heavy sucker,” Aspen said.

Inside, among other things, they found Rachel's Weekly Planners going all the way back to her first year with the firm. They pulled out the one from this year. On the exterior they found a yellow post-it: “Copy given to investigators 4/6—JAM.”

“JAM means Jacqueline A. Moore,” Christina said.

They opened it to early April, when Rachel had disappeared, and worked their way back in time. It turned out that Rachel kept a hodgepodge of handwritten information in the book, including appointments, phone numbers, client-billing start and stop times, things to-do, and whatever else that needed to be jotted down for whatever reason.

Christina laughed.

“What?” Aspen asked, curious.

“I'll look for the entry that says, Screwed Blake Gray silly this afternoon, and you look for the one that says, Christina Tam is the best associate attorney I've ever seen. That girl should get a raise.”

Aspen smiled.

“Deal,” she said. “I'll also look for the one that says, If I ever turn up dead, Jacqueline Moore did it.”

Unfortunately, they found nothing of use.

Then they got to February 18. “This is weird,” Aspen said. “It's a Monday and Rachel has no billing recorded for a period of three hours.”

Christina studied it.

“It's over the lunch hour,” she said. “And look, she drove to Grand Junction later that afternoon, for a trial starting Tuesday. So she was probably packing or doing errands or something.”

“Or,” Aspen said, “she knows she's not going to see Blake Gray that evening, since she'll be out of town, and they decide to grab a quickie at the no-tell motel.”

Christina laughed.

Then suddenly grew quiet.

Voices came down the hallway.

They froze, perfectly still. As the voices grew louder Aspen recognized them. The female voice belonged to Jacqueline Moore. The other one belonged to Derek Bennett, the senior attorney who was in the meeting with Blake Gray and Jacqueline Moore on Thursday night, when they summoned Aspen to the firm in a limo and interrogated her about why she was on the news.

She pulled up a mental picture of him.

Forty-something.

Slightly pot-marked.

Eyes too far apart.

Thinning hair.

Tall and muscular.

As the voices approached, Aspen began to make out strings of words.

“A person's dead and we're in it up to our asses, is what I'm saying,” the female said.

“And like I keep saying, there's nothing we can do about it now, so let's just move on,” the male said.

Then the voices disappeared down the hall.

42

DAY EIGHT–SEPTEMBER 12

MONDAY

O
n the car seat next to Draven sat the keys to Mia Avila's tattoo shop, Draven's knife, and a half-empty flask of Jack. Normally the Colorado topography on the drive to Pueblo excited him. This afternoon, however, he could only think about getting the two thousand dollars and the note out of the bitch's safe and then getting the hell out of that damn town once and for all.

Getting the keys to the shop was easy. They were in the woman's purse. Getting her to tell him the combination to the safe, however, required more than a little persuasion.

But he was a good persuader when he needed to be.

A very good persuader.

Right now the little bitch was drugged and tightly secured to the bed. He had almost killed her as soon as she gave him the combination, but at the last second he stopped himself, just in case she was screwing with him and had given him the wrong numbers.

He'd need her alive, if that happened.

Swinging by the farmhouse to tell Gretchen he'd be tied up with work today had been a good idea. She'd started to get lonely—horny, too. He took care of both those needs in style and promised he'd be back this evening. In the meantime, he gave her some more money to buy more things that she'd thought of for the house.

He could still smell her on his skin.

He pulled into Pueblo mid-afternoon. In a perfect world he'd wait until dark. But he needed to get this done fast so he had enough day left to get the stripper, Chase, up to the cabin for tomorrow's client.

Not to mention having to kill Mia Avila.

He swung past the tattoo shop and found everything exactly as it had been before. He expected yellow crime-scene tape on the front door but found none. Good. He parked the beat-up Chevy two blocks down the street and doubled back on foot, wearing a dark blue sweatshirt with the hood over his head.

He slipped on latex gloves, entered through the back door and locked it behind him.

Not a sound came from anywhere.

The only break to the silence came from the movement of air in and out of his lungs.

Perfect.

He found the safe exactly where the bitch said it would be, in the corner of the back room under a white sheet. It turned out to be a freestanding unit, not bolted to the floor, about four feet high and big enough to hold a good-sized dog. It looked to be at least fifty years old. He pictured it starting life in an old western saloon.

Now to open it and then get the hell out of Dodge.

He pulled the combination out of his wallet and set it on top of the safe.

27-42-61.

He dialed it, being careful to land exactly on the numbers.

It didn't work.

Shit.

He tried it again.

It didn't work again.

What the hell?

Sweat beaded on his forehead and he wiped it off with the back of his sleeve.

This time he tried going to the left first, LRL instead of RLR.

Again nothing.

“Bitch!”

He tried it a dozen more times, varying the number of passes, but couldn't get the little asshole to open.

Goddamn it!

It had taken him over three hours to get here.

For nothing.

The little bitch would pay for this.

Big time.

She wants to play games?

Well, he could play games too.

He picked it up to get a feel for the weight. Using a bear hug, he got it off the ground, but barely. It had to be every bit of two hundred pounds, which would have been manageable if the damn thing wasn't so bulky and awkward. Even if he waited until dark and pulled the Chevy up to the back door, he wasn't sure if he'd be able to muscle it into the trunk.

Or whether it would fit.

He kicked it.

So hard that a tingle shot all the way up his leg.

“You little bitch!”

He covered it back up with the sheet, opened the rear door a slit, peeked outside, saw nothing, stepped outside, and then locked up.

The sun beat down and he knew he looked suspicious with the hood over his head, but he left it there anyway. He got to the street without encountering anyone and then walked toward the Chevy.

Then he saw something.

A Harley sat in front of the car.

A biker with greasy black hair stood behind the vehicle, by the license plate, talking into a cell phone and making animated gestures.

Shit!

Draven backed up and hid behind a pickup truck.

Almost immediately a deep-throated rumble came from a distant street. Several bikes were coming this way.