Lawyer Trap (28 page)

He didn't know much yet about the missing Pueblo woman, Mia Avila, other than she was fairly young, ran a tattoo shop, and vanished without a trace eight days ago—Thursday of last week, to be precise.

The stripper—Chase—disappeared four days later.

On Monday.

The same day she received a telephone call from a payphone just north of Pueblo.

Then showed up later with a nail in her forehead.

The big question is whether Mia Avila got one of the other nails in the box.

Sydney woke up just as they passed Eagleridge Drive on the northern edge of the city.

She yawned, stretched, and said, “I'm starved.”

Twenty minutes later they were in a booth at the Grand Prix Restaurant, with smothered burritos and piping hot coffee, meeting with a young Hispanic woman by the name of Detective Julia Torres.

She had a good dose of hunt in her blood.

Whereas most relatively fresh detectives might get overly excited at the possibility of being connected to a case as big as the one in Denver, she stayed focused on the facts.

The way a seasoned hunter would.

“Everything in the tattoo shop was pretty much normal,” Torres said. “There was no indication of a struggle or abduction. Nothing was broken. There was no blood on the floor. Nothing was taken, even though there was lots of stuff that would have been, if it had been a burglary. The sign in the window was flipped to Closed and the front door was locked. Her car was still parked out front.”

“So she left with someone,” Sydney offered.

The woman sipped coffee and nodded.

“It appears that way, which of course suggests that she knew the person,” Torres said. “Maybe she shut down for lunch but never made it back for some reason. We just don't know.”

Teffinger frowned.

“Did she keep an appointment book?” he asked.

“We didn't find one.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“You think she'd have one to schedule tattoos,” he said.

Torres agreed and said, “That's one of the things so far that doesn't fit.”

“Maybe someone knew he wasn't going to bring her back, and also knew he was in her appointment book, so he took that too,” Teffinger suggested.

“Possibly, and maybe even likely,” Torres said. “But we haven't been able to come up with a brilliant plan to recreate it.”

Teffinger nodded.

And couldn't shine any bright ideas on the subject either.

“Can we have a look at the place, after breakfast?”

“Absolutely. I brought the key with me.”

Teffinger took a swallow of coffee.

“Good stuff.”

Sydney smiled. “As if you've ever seen a cup of coffee you didn't like.”

Inside the missing woman's tattoo shop, following a thorough walk around, Teffinger agreed that there was no indication of foul play.

In the back room he spotted a safe.

“Have you opened that yet?” he asked.

Torres shook her head. “Not yet.”

Teffinger cocked his head, wondered if there was any reason why the shop's appointment book would be inside, and decided that there wasn't.

“We lifted some prints off the front door and matched a few of them to names,” Torres added. “We interviewed those people but didn't find anything that got us excited. It's all in the file.”

Teffinger nodded.

He'd read every word of it later.

Okay.

Now what?

The scene at the railroad spur jumped into his thoughts—four women in two graves. Assuming that Chase and Mia Avila were somehow connected, that still only made two women.

“Have any other women in Pueblo shown up missing?” he asked.

The young detective retreated in thought.

“Not that I'm aware of,” she said.

They stepped outside and locked the door behind them. Three Harleys rumbled up the street and then disappeared in the other direction.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Torres said, “there is one other woman who has technically dropped off the radar screen, but we're pretty sure why.”

Teffinger spotted a twig on the ground, picked it up and snapped it.

“Who's that?”

“A local prostitute named Gretchen Smith.”

Teffinger looked her straight in the eyes, because Chase had been a prostitute in a way, and in fact disappeared the day she went to meet a client.

“Tell me about Gretchen Smith.”

“We're working another case involving a biker who got beat to death on his driveway,” Torres said. “First he got his face punched in, almost beyond recognition, and then got his head smashed in—we think with a rock, although we never found it. Anyway, it turns out that he had a fairly serious altercation with an Indian in a bar a couple of nights before that.”

“An Indian?”

“Well,” she said, “maybe I spoke too fast because we don't know that for sure. What we do know is dark skin and a long black ponytail, and half the people we talked to thought he was an Indian. Anyway, he's a person of interest.”

“Okay.”

“He's apparently big enough and strong enough to do what got done,” she added.

“Got it.”

“But there's a side issue,” she said. “The victim and a couple of his friends reportedly raped Gretchen Smith at some point in the past, although nothing ever came of it legally. It was pretty common knowledge that she'd take her revenge if she ever got a chance. So, some of the victim's biker friends were looking to ‘interview' her to find out if she was behind it somehow. When we found that out, we contacted her and told her she'd probably be safer if she got out of town until the whole thing blew over. As far as we can tell, she took our advice, because she checked out of the hotel she was staying at and no one's seen her since.”

“Maybe the bikers found her,” Teffinger suggested.

Torres shrugged.

“I doubt it,” she said. “There's no buzz around town to that effect.”

79

DAY TWELVE–SEPTEMBER 16

FRIDAY MORNING

O
n the way to work Friday morning, Aspen noticed that the Accord's gas gauge was on empty, below empty in fact. Luckily she had enough fumes left to get her to a station where she prepaid $20 cash and filled up while “Sweet Child of Mine” played on the radio. She was wearing dark green Dockers and a white cotton blouse, after learning last week that Fridays were casual dress at the firm. When she got to the parking lot twenty minutes later she discovered she was a dollar short. So she drove over to the side streets on the far side of Broadway until she found a 2-hour parking spot and then hoofed it double-time to the firm.

When she got there, she didn't go up to the office.

Instead, she went to Parking Level 3, where the firm had several reserved spots, and hid behind a van in the corner. She stayed there for over an hour.

Feeling a lot more like a thief than a lawyer.

But she eventually got what she wanted.

Namely, a look at the faces of the people who drove the law firm's silver BMWs.

When she finally arrived at her office, an envelope was on her chair. Inside, as before, she found a computer-printed piece of paper warning her that Christina Tam was a spy. This time, however, instead of shredding it she marched into Christina's office, shut the door, and handed it to her.

“This is the second one of these that someone left on my chair,” she said.

Christina had no idea what the letter meant. She did know, however, that she wasn't a spy and that the whole thing was a lie.

A vicious lie.

Totally preposterous.

Obviously spread by someone with an agenda—Derek Bennett, no doubt, since he was the one with something to gain by driving a wedge between Aspen and Christina.

“That means he knows what we're up to,” Aspen said.

“Agreed. But how much? And how does he know?”

Aspen had no idea.

Unless he had a camera in his office, or something like that.

Then she changed subjects.

She told Christina about her meeting yesterday with Sarah Ringer at CU, who reported that her sister Rachel had been sexually attacked in her office.

“I know in my heart that Derek Bennett was the one who did it,” Aspen said. “My guess is that he threatened her life to keep her quiet.”

Christina frowned.

“Agreed,” she said. “But it will be impossible to prove it, now that Rachel's dead and we no longer have her testimony.”

“Fine. We get him for her murder, then.”

Later that morning, Aspen shut her office door, dialed Teffinger, and told him everything she knew, including her theory that Derek Bennett sexually assaulted Rachel one night in her office. And then later cut her head off when she started to leave the firm, just to be absolutely sure that she didn't change her mind about going to the police.

Teffinger asked her a lot of questions.

He was all over the board as if struggling with a way to fit it into a bigger picture.

He was almost about to hang up when he said, “What about the BMWs?”

“Oh, right, I almost forgot. Derek Bennett definitely has one of them, the one with Colorado plate number BMW 4.”

“Hold on, I'm writing it down …”

“By the way,” she added. “You can't tell anybody about any of this.”

80

DAY TWELVE–SEPTEMBER 16

FRIDAY MORNING

D
raven slowly muscled his way out of bed, the victim of too much alcohol last night. At first he couldn't get his bearings, then recognized the farmhouse. Gretchen was already awake and making noise in the kitchen.

He couldn't remember his mouth ever being this dry. He drank a full glass of water, then another.

It tasted like crap.

But already his tongue didn't feel quite so much like sandpaper.

He took a hot shower and then Gretchen filled his stomach with pancakes and coffee, after which he started to feel like a human being again.

To top it off, she led him into the bedroom and gave him a really deep blowjob.

Yesterday had been a bitch, but someone must like him because everything turned out okay in the end. He managed to catch the woman, Mia Avila, before she made it down to Highway 119. Then he dragged her ass back to the cabin, beat the shit out of her and tied her to the bed.

With some effort, he finally managed to pry the hood of the car up and got the radiator filled with water. Then he put the bitch in the trunk, drove her to the farmhouse, pumped her full of drugs, and chained her securely in the cab of the tow truck in the barn.

He limped the Nissan back to Avis, explained what had happened, and learned that the damage was covered under rental insurance that they'd tacked on without him knowing it. He rented another car, this time a green VW Jetta, and picked Gretchen up downtown as if nothing had happened.

He'd celebrated by getting drunk with Gretchen last night.

She didn't know they were celebrating.

She thought they were just having a good time.

That was yesterday. Now, today, he had all that behind him and was the owner of a happy gut and an even happier dick.

“So what's the plan?” Gretchen asked.

He smiled and slapped her ass.

“Get in the car and you'll find out.”

She wrestled him to the floor and pinned his arms above his head. “Why? Where we going?”

“Nowhere, if you don't get off.”

“Not till you tell me.”

“Someplace you're going to like.”

She rubbed her crotch on his chin.

“I'm already someplace I like.”

They took Highway 93 south into downtown Golden, where the air smelled like hops and barley. Draven found a liquor store—one with a sign in the window that said No Fresher Coors Sold Anywhere—and bought enough Jack to get them through the next few days. Then they took Old Golden Road east and ended up at a Lexus dealership across the street from the Colorado Mills Mall.

“What's going on?” Gretchen asked as they pulled in.

Draven put a confused look on his face.

“I don't know, but as long as we're here why don't we have a look around?”

He wore tattered jeans and a black muscle shirt that showed off his tattoo. Throw in the ponytail and the scar and he looked like the last person on the face of the earth who would want, or could afford, a Lexus. He chatted it up with the salesman and the manager, took a long test drive, and waited for a derogatory insinuation that he couldn't afford it.

When he didn't get it, he closed the deal, titled the car in Gretchen's name, had funds wired in from one of his California bank accounts, and then strolled outside with his woman to drink coffee and wait while the dealership detailed the vehicle and gave it a final prep.

Gretchen's face made it all worthwhile.

No one had ever done anything like this for her before.

Not once in her whole life.

Not even close.

“God are you going to get some sex tonight,” she said. “Be warned.” Then she hugged him tight and cried. He ran his fingers through her hair.

“I love you,” she said. “And not just because of the car.”

She kept her eyes down, as if afraid she might see a reaction on his face that she didn't want to see.

He looked into her eyes.

“Me too,” he said.

“Really?”

He nodded. “I think I have from the start, to tell you the truth.”

She buried her head in his chest.

“Of course, I did have a second thought when you bashed that guy's head in with a rock. But that was only for a moment.”

She punched him on the arm and said, “Not funny.” Then she looked into his eyes and said, “Till death do us part?”

He squeezed her.

“Sounds good to me.”

81

DAY TWELVE–SEPTEMBER 16