Attorney's Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) (18 page)

Venta’s voice came through.

“We got a hit!” she said.

“You’re kidding me.”

“Does it sound like I’m kidding you?”

No it didn’t.

Not at all.

“Who?”

“A guy named Mark Remington.”

“You actually saw this guy in Bangkok?”

“Yes.”

“Are you positive it’s him?”

Venta got serious.

“I’m so positive that you can’t even believe it. I’ll never forget him,” she said. “He was a mean little freak.”

“You’re absolutely positive?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Venta said. “His dick’s five inches long, circumcised, and bends slightly to the right. He also has a tattoo down there, on his right thigh, of three or four foreign letters or symbols. Something Asian, maybe Thai.”

London couldn’t help but smile.

“You can’t get any more positive than that,” she said.

“No you can’t,” Venta said. “So get your pretty little face back here so we can start planning on how to wipe this law firm off the face of the earth.”

54

Day Seven—June 17

Sunday Afternoon

CLAY PITCHER, THE ASSISTANT D.A., FROWNED when he handed Teffinger the search warrant for Mark Remington’s house. “We just barely skated by on this one, buddy boy,” he said. “If anyone besides you was doing the investigation, I don’t think the judge would have been too interested in signing it.”

“Which judge?” Teffinger asked.

“Anderson.”

Teffinger put a puzzled look on his face. “I haven’t even been in his courtroom for more than two years.”

“Well you must have made an impression,” Clay said.

Leanne Sanders chuckled. “He always makes an impression.”

Clay grinned. “I know. But this time it must have been a good one.”

“What are the odds?”

“Slim to none,” Clay said. “And Slim just left town.”

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Teffinger and the FBI profiler arrived at Mark Remington’s house. “Remember that spot?” Teffinger said, pointing to where Leanne had been attacked on Thursday night.

She scratched her stitches and grunted.

When they knocked on Remington’s door no one answered. Teffinger didn’t feel like making a mess, especially since the search was on thin ice to begin with, so he phoned a locksmith and waited on the front steps.

“So how are you and your new squeeze coming along?” Leanne asked.

“Venta?”

“Right.”

“I like her,” Teffinger said.

Leanne shook her head as if that didn’t matter.

“You always like them,” she said. “What does Sydney think of her?”

He raked his hair back with his fingers.

It stayed up for a second before falling back.

“Sydney?” he asked. “You know Sydney, she never likes any of them. As usual, she’s snooping around and finding all kinds of red flags and conspiracy theories.”

“Maybe that’s because she likes you,” Leanne said.

“She’s too smart for that.”

“Have you ever slept with her?”

He looked at her as if she was crazy.

“Of course not, she’s my partner.”

“She’s an attractive woman,” Leanne said.

“Agreed but not relevant. Even I have a couple of boundaries.”

THE THERMOS WAS ALMOST EMPTY when the locksmith arrived. Inside, they found a spotless, uncluttered interior, with an extremely open floor plan. A large oil painting caught Teffinger’s eye—a scene looking down from the hills onto a coastal town, portrayed with an impressionistic brush and realistic colors. Soft lavender clouds hung over the ocean, thirty miles away.

“I thought so,” he told Leanne as he looked at the signature. “Gregory Hull.”

“Is he someone?”

“He’s a plein-air painter out of California,” Teffinger said. “One of my heroes, actually.”

“That looks like Laguna Beach.”

“Could be.”

He turned and scouted the interior.

Where to start?

They did a non-destructive search, putting everything back as they found it, room after room.

The house didn’t cough up any obvious evidence, which wasn’t a big surprise. Remington had somehow gotten himself on the radar screen of Jean-Paul Boudiette. That wouldn’t happen without something deep and dark going on. That’s not the kind of thing that gets written down on a piece of paper and left sitting on the kitchen countertop, especially by someone as smart as Remington.

Deep and dark things get well hidden.

Nothing with the name Jean-Paul Boudiette showed up.

No evidence that Remington had hired someone to kill Boudiette showed up.

No evidence of anything that would warrant Remington being marked for death showed up.

And most importantly, there was no evidence of a connection to Tessa Blake.

“This is a big dud so far,” Leanne said.

True.

But that’s what they suspected.

The secrets, if anywhere, would be in Remington’s computers, telephone records and bank statements, so they took all of those.

Then they left.

ON THE DRIVE BACK TO HEADQUARTERS Leanne said, “It’d be nice to know who killed Boudiette, but I can’t justify throwing any more time at it unless INTERPOL puts a serious squeeze on us,” she said. “The main thing is that he’s dead.”

“So you’re heading back?”

She nodded.

“I’m going to have to leave you in charge.”

“That’s a scary thought.”

She smiled.

“The equivalent of Freddy Krueger,” Teffinger added.

“I was thinking more along the lines of King Kong.”

Teffinger nodded.

Yeah.

King Kong.

EXCEPT HE DIDN’T FEEL LIKE KING KONG. He felt more like the guy that King Kong picks up and throws at the T-Rex.

He needed to find Tessa Blake.

The afternoon had been a bust.

Somehow Tessa Blake had gotten her picture taken, the kind of picture that gets handed to a hit man.

Boudiette was a hit man.

Boudiette had been after Remington, meaning Remington was somehow connected to Boudiette, meaning he might be connected to Tessa Blake—maybe directly, maybe indirectly, which is the main reason Teffinger wanted to search Remington’s house.

But the search had turned up nothing. Teffinger would press forensics to get into Remington’s computers first thing tomorrow morning but was already bracing himself for the fact that it would probably be a bust.

In the meantime he was back to square one, with another day slipping away.

55

Day Seven—June 17

Sunday Afternoon

JEKKER HAD SO MUCH TO DO in such a short period of time that he hardly knew where to start. He needed to kill the blackmailer and get the photographs back. He needed to kill some stranger named Porter Potter. He needed to kill Tessa Blake. He needed to have a heart-to-heart with Bethany’s stalker. Somewhere down the road, he needed to figure out why the Frenchman had been after him, and deal with the root source of that problem to be sure it didn’t happen again. And he had to do it all without making any further messes.

How did everything get so complicated all of a sudden?

The most pressing problem was the blackmailer.

He needed to address that first.

He stuffed Tessa Blake back in the boxcar, to her dismay, and waited for the call, which didn’t come until early afternoon. Jekker explained that he couldn’t get the money until tomorrow when the banks opened. The blackmailer said, “Tomorrow’s your last chance,” and hung up.

PORTER POTTER, a 45-year-old who rode a desk for a living and wore a spare tire around his gut to prove it, lived alone in a nice house on the 11th hole of the Denver Country Club.

Jekker, wearing one of his many disguises, drove past the house several times in the afternoon and then took a leisurely walk behind it on the cart path.

The plan solidified, the perfect plan.

That evening after dark, shortly before ten, Jekker snuck through the fairway under a moonless Colorado night. He wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, an even blacker sweatshirt and latex gloves. His persuader—the .357 SIG—was holstered under the sweatshirt.

The pudgy man was still awake.

The colored lights of a TV flickered in the upstairs bedroom.

Good.

Jekker muscled up the redwood deck to the upper level and snuck towards the target on cat feet. The sliding glass door was ajar and sitcom sounds squeezed through the opening. The screen portion of the door was closed. Jekker tested it, ever so slightly, to see if it was locked.

It wasn’t.

The fat man was in a chair with his back to the door watching a Cheers rerun.

With the gun in hand, Jekker slid the screen door open with a quick motion and stepped inside.

HIS TARGET TURNED, more curious than frightened, as if to confirm that he really hadn’t heard anything. Jekker closed the gap with three quick steps and had the gun jammed against the back of the man’s head before the jerk even got twisted all the way around.

He had a half-drained glass of whiskey in his hand and smelled like a bar.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Jekker said.

A pause.

“Okay.”

Jekker surveyed the room.

It had no ceiling lights.

The floor had carpeting.

“Don’t move,” Jekker said.

“Okay.”

Jekker stepped into the master bathroom and flicked on the lights. The space looked like something out of a magazine, with double sinks nestled in a granite countertop, an enclosed steam shower, a Jacuzzi tub, tile flooring and rich textured towels. What grabbed his attention, though, were the two light fixtures above the sinks, particularly the left one, the one with one of the four bulbs burned out.

“Where are your replacement bulbs for this thing?” Jekker asked.

“What thing?”

“Get your ass in here!”

The fat man obeyed.

“That,” Jekker said. “Where are your replacement bulbs?”

Confusion filled the man’s face.

“I think I have some spares in the linen closet. I don’t understand—”

“Shut up and show me!”

FIVE MINUTES LATER THE FAT MAN had a tragic accident while changing the light bulb in the bathroom before going to bed. It seems he had been standing on the sink and slipped off, probably because of the whiskey.

The poor man hit his head on the tile floor and cracked his skull wide open.

56

Day Eight—June 18

Monday Morning

LONDON AND HER CLIENT Venta Devenelle arrived at Vesper & Bennett at 9:15 a.m. without an appointment, and requested a meeting with Thomas Fog. Now, a full hour later, they still waited in the reception area.

Venta kept her face stuffed in one magazine after another, not talking, with her legs crossed, rocking her right foot up and down, obviously stressed.

London was equally frazzled but also equally determined to not let it show. For the most part, she kept her focus on the upcoming meeting, trying to anticipate Fog’s reactions and possible moves. But something more sinister tugged at her; namely the fact that the meeting would take the case from the chest-beating level to the full-combat level. There might well be an attempt on either her life, or Venta’s, or both.

One other thing crept into her thoughts.

The money.

She had the case on a one-third contingency fee.

If the case was as big as they believed it to be, it could mean millions. She could be on the verge of putting her one-bedroom apartment—and her one-bedroom life—in the rearview mirror forever.

She shook the thought out of her head.

Stay focused.

Don’t count the chickens.

A half hour later, Fog’s personal assistant walked into the reception area and said, “Mr. Fog is sorry you’ve had to wait so long, but he’s had clients. He can see you now.”

They stood up and looked at each other, then followed Fog’s assistant into the same conference room as before.

THOMAS FOG SHOWED UP TWO MINUTES LATER wearing gray pinstriped pants, a crisp white shirt and a blue silk tie pulled loose around the neck. “I am so sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “This has been the day from hell.” He took a deep breath as if to calm himself. “So what’s on your mind?”

London had prepared for this moment twenty times and now went blank.

Venta, who had been looking at Fog, turned her head, then nudged London.

“You’re up,” she said.

“Right,” she said. Then to Fog, “You remember what we talked about before, about how Ms. Devenelle had been hired by a law firm to follow a man to Bangkok.”

He nodded.

“You thought the firm could be ours,” he said. “Even though I checked and found no evidence of any such thing.”

London swallowed.

“Right,” she said. “What we didn’t tell you about the last time we were here is what happened to Ms. Devenelle after she arrived in Bangkok.”

He looked puzzled and held his hands out in confusion.

“Okay,” he said. “So what happened?”

“We’ll tell you,” London said. “I’m treating this meeting as a Rule 408 settlement negotiation. I assume you’re doing the same.”

That meant that neither party could use anything said by the other party as evidence in court. It’s as if the meeting never happened.

He shrugged.

“Sure. I have no problem with that.”

London looked at Venta and asked, “Do you want to tell him the story or do you want me to?”

Venta looked calmer now; in fact, defiant.

“I’ll tell him,” she said.

WITH THAT, THEY TOLD HIM EVERYTHING. How Venta had followed the target, Bob Copeland, into a BJ bar where her drink got spiked. She ended up in sexual slavery where inhumane acts were perpetrated upon her on a daily basis. She was eventually purchased for a snuff but gained her freedom following a freak traffic accident.

“When did this happen?” Fog asked.

Venta searched her memory. “I got there on April 11th and escaped about a month later.”

“When exactly?”

Venta went deep and then said, “May 10th.”

OTHER FEMALE PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS were also lured to Bangkok where they disappeared.