Night Lawyers (Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) (2 page)

Neverly Cage had dirt on him.

She’d followed him to D-Drop and snapped picture after picture of him in a shadowy back booth with a woman, Rain, getting sloppy drunk and sinfully touchy. By the end of the evening the woman actually had her panties off. Teffinger’s hand was under her skirt, getting busy, getting very busy if the expression on the woman’s face was to be believed.

That wasn’t the worst of it though.

The worst of it was the two of them leaving the bar, staggering to Teffinger’s truck, then driving away crazy drunk and sideswiping a parked car en route.

That’s where the dirt stopped.

“I’d love to have known what happened after that, but my car was on the other side of the bar,” Neverly said. “By the time I got to it and gave chase, you were gone.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah, I know. So why don’t you fill in the blanks? What happened after the two or you left?”

“Use your imagination.”

She ran her fingers through his hair.

“Come on,” she said. “The jury is going to want to know.”

“None of this will get into evidence,” Teffinger said. “It has nothing to do with Zero killing someone.”

The woman smiled.

It was slightly crooked and hypnotically sexy.

“You don’t get it, do you?” she said. “Zero’s not the one on trial. You are.”

He opened his mouth to argue.

No words came out.

What she said was true. The trial would be all about whether Teffinger’s testimony was trustworthy. Now that he was a drunk, a womanizer and an intoxicated driver, maybe he wasn’t so much of an upstanding citizen who could point-blank be trusted.

“Zero killed the woman,” Teffinger said. “I saw it with my own two eyes.”

“You saw
someone
,” Neverly said. “Whether it was Zero or not is the question.”

“It was Zero.”

“That will be for the jury to decide.”

“Maybe,” Teffinger said. “But what you need to understand is that you succeed, all you’ll do is get a guilty man off the hook.”

“Spare me the boy scout talk,” Neverly said. “It was dark out, you had rain in your eyes, the man’s face was dripping wet and etched with fight, and you only saw it for a heartbeat, and even that was in the middle of an adrenalin rage. You weren’t exactly sitting back and drawing a nice quiet sketch at that point in time.”

“It was Zero.”

“Was it?”

“Yes.”

“What if it wasn’t?”

“It was.”

“So you say but what if you’re wrong? What if what I’m doing isn’t getting a guilty man off the hook? What if what I’m doing is keeping an innocent man out of prison? What if you’re the one on the wrong side of things and not me?”

That was yesterday.

Now, this morning, he was just passing Federal Boulevard when an email landed on his phone regarding “Exhibit A.” It was from Neverly Cage with a short message, “Happy viewing.”

Several photographs from Saturday night were attached.

Teffinger winced.

The woman had shown them to him yesterday, but having them land right here in his own phone gave them an eerie reality.

He’d have to show them to the chief and the D.A.

It wouldn’t be pretty.

More than that, he might have given the defense what it needed to make Zero a free man. If that happened, some other woman would end up dead down the road. The blood would be on Teffinger’s hands.

Suddenly a bad thought entered his mind.

What if Neverly was right and he was wrong? What if he was mistaken about Zero being the guy?

He shook it off.

“Don’t open that door.”

Mid-morning a padded envelope got hand-delivered to the front desk downstairs by a cabbie. On it was a label with typed words:

Detective Nick Teffinger

Personal & Confidential

Inside was a CD in a clear plastic case. Although the CD itself had no markings on it, an attached yellow post-it had the typed words:

Watch this in private

Teffinger twisted the case around in his hand.

Sydney Heatherwood walked into the room, poured a cup of caffeine and plopped her athletic African-American body into the worn vinyl chair in front of Teffinger’s desk. “Let me guess what your weekend was like,” she said. “Blond, blue eyes, tanned legs …”

He smiled.

“Something like that.”

“You never go for the black girls,” she said.

“I bounced a quarter off your ass once. If I recall right, it snapped up and almost broke the ceiling light.”

She punched his arm.

“You know what I mean. How come you never run down the black girls?”

“I have, three or four times.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And, how were they?”

“They were fine. I have no complaints, other than that quarter incident.” He shoved the CD in his coat pocket and said, “I got to run.”

Then he was gone.

4

Day Two

June 5

Monday Morning

Teffinger headed home in the ’67, picking up Neverly Cage’s beat-up Mustang in the rearview mirror halfway there, three cars back and holding.

He didn’t care.

Let her follow, he wasn’t doing anything wrong.

He parked in the driveway.

The sun beat down.

Ordinarily he would have at least put the top up.

This time he didn’t.

This time he headed straight for the front door and disappeared inside.

His heart raced.

He put the CD in the player.

What he saw he couldn’t believe.

It was dark out.

A woman in a short dress had her back against a telephone pole. Her arms were stretched up above her head as high as they could go. Her wrists were tied together. A man was in the process of wrapping the rope around the pole several times and then tying it off, binding her into position.

The woman was the raven-haired beauty from Saturday night, Rain.

The man was Teffinger.

Someone was across the way, over in the deeper shadows, filming the scene with a cell phone. They were in a pickup truck. The person doing the filming had the phone hanging out the window. The lens shook and the side of the vehicle occasionally bounced into view.

A woman’s voice said, “What’s he doing?”

A man replied, “He’s tying her up.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I think they’re just screwing around.”

“Forget them,” she said. “Get back over here and fuck me.”

“Hold on a minute.”

“Preston—”

“Just a minute.”

Over to the left of the frame, the back end of Teffinger’s pickup was parked in view.

The license plate was readable.

He paused the CD, stepped to the front window and peered out around the edge of the window covering. Neverly Cage was coming up the street. Teffinger watched as she headed to the end of the asphalt, turned around and then parked with the front end of the Mustang pointed at his house.

She wore the same sunglasses as yesterday.

He waited for a few heartbeats to see if she had plans to get out and walk over.

She didn’t.

She just sat there with her face pointed in his direction.

He let the blinds fall back into place and then pressed Play.

The CD sprang back to life.

Teffinger kissed the woman and ran his hands up and down her body.

She responded nicely.

Her feet stretched apart of her own volition

“He owns her,” the man said. “This is cool.”

“Let them be,” she woman said. “Turn that thing off and get back in here.”

“Just a minute. I want to see what he does next.”

Teffinger ripped the woman’s dress down the front, exposing a taut stomach and small white panties.

“There goes twenty bucks,” the man said.

Then he ripped her bra off.

“
Make it twenty five.”

Perky tits bounced out.

Teffinger sucked a nipple, then the other. His hand went between the woman’s legs, rubbing up and down and back and forth. Then he bent down and picked something off the ground.

It was an old beer bottle.

He broke the bottom end off on the ground and then cut the woman’s panties off with the jagged edge.

With the broken glass still in hand, he kissed her, long and deep and hard.

Then something happened he didn’t expect.

He slapped her face.

“Fuck! Did you see that?”

He walked around her, eyeing her with predator eyes, then slapped her face again.

“
Damn it!”

Then he did it again.

Suddenly the camera angle swept to the ground, as if the man was getting out of the truck. The camera got set on the hood. The jerky motion stopped.

“Preston! Get back in here!”

“This is fucked up,” he said.

The audio rolled and footsteps sounded.

Then the man shouted, “Hey, asshole, leave her alone!”

“Back off.”

“I said leave her alone!”

“Back off. This is none of your business.”

Suddenly the camera came off the hood.

The woman had it now, swinging it towards the scene.

Teffinger and the man were closing in on each other. Teffinger had the broken bottle in hand.

The woman screamed.

“Preston!”

The cell phone fell to the ground.

The screen went black.

Teffinger slumped onto the couch and buried his face in his hands. Even seeing it, he still didn’t affirmatively have any cognitive recollection of the events.

It was him though.

There was absolutely and without question not a scintilla of doubt about that part.

It was him, out of his mind.

A knock came at the front door. He opened up to find Neverly Cage standing there with her hands on her hip.

“You’re supposed to bring me coffee,” she said.

Teffinger knew he should smile but couldn’t.

“Sorry about that. Come on in.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, always.”

5

Day Two

June 5

Monday Morning

Teffinger’s house had a mountain where the backyard should be. Halfway up that mountain on his property was a redwood deck that sat slightly higher than the roofline of the house and offered an unobstructed view of Denver and the eastern flatlands. That’s where he ended up with Neverly, drinking coffee. As far as Teffinger could tell the woman was there for two reasons; one, to try to wedge dirt out of him; and two, to be around him just because she wanted to.

“Off the record,” she said, “watching you Saturday night got me a little worked up.”

“Next time come over and join us.”

“Next time I will.”

She wasn’t dressed up.

She had the look of someone who could step into a pickup game of baseball and wouldn’t be afraid to slide into second.

“Have you told Silke Jopp about Saturday night yet?”

No.

She hadn’t.

“I have a meeting with her this afternoon.”

“Why don’t you hold off?”

“Why?”

“Because there’s more to that night than what you saw.”

“Like what?”

“I’m still trying to figure it out,” he said. “I’ll make a deal with you. Hold off until I can figure it out. If you do that, I’ll fill you in on the balance.”

“You’re trying to figure it out?”

He nodded.

“So you don’t remember?”

“Correct.”

She shrugged.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “By my count you had seven beers and seven shots, plus the round that I sent over.”

“You sent over a round?”

She smiled.

“Had to.”

“Why?”

“It seemed like the right thing to do,” she said. “If I’d have known you were going to drive drunk and smash into someone’s car I wouldn’t have done it. So how are you going to figure out the rest of the night?”

“Detect,” he said. “That’s what detectives do.”

She studied him.

“My allegiance is with Silke Jopp,” she said. “She’s paying me to do a job and I’m going to do that job. On top of that, a man’s life is in the balance.”

“If you turn everything over right now, that might be all you ever get,” he said. “Maybe it will end up being enough, but maybe it won’t. If you take my way, you may end up with more. You probably will in fact.”

She chewed on it.

“Just hold off for 48 hours,” he added.

She sipped coffee and studied him over the edge of the cup.

“How do I know you’ll actually tell me anything?”

He raked his fingers back with his hair.

“Even if I don’t, in 48 hours you’ll still have everything you have now. What’s the harm?”

She looked out at the horizon line.

“Nice day.”

“Do we have a deal?”

She frowned.

“No.”

They headed down the mountain on red flagstone steps with Neverly in the lead.

Suddenly she froze.

Teffinger saw the problem.

The woman’s foot had come down next to a thick rattlesnake.

“Don’t move!” he said.

She said nothing.

Sweat ran down her face.

Teffinger walked around the snake, got a stick and waved it gently in front of the reptile’s head until it saw nothing else.

The body coiled.

The head came up.

The tail shook.

The eyes pointed at Teffinger and away from Neverly.

“Okay, talk a slow step back,” he said.

Neverly complied, getting three feet away and then running back up to the deck.

Teffinger tossed the stick down, backed up and said, “Go away. No one’s going to hurt you.”

The snake stayed coiled for a few heartbeats and then slithered into the brush.

“Okay,” Neverly said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, forty-eight hours.”

6

Day Two

June 5

Monday Afternoon

The call Teffinger knew would come sooner or later came mid-afternoon, after he had sufficient time to sweat. “Seen any good movies lately?” Teffinger recognized the voice as the same one as on the tape, “Preston’s.”