Night Lawyers (Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) (4 page)

There was still a chance to take Zero down at trial.

The process would take Teffinger down as well but there was no getting around it. Either they’d both walk or both go down. Right now, Teffinger was leaning more towards the latter.

He parked a hundred yards short of the gap building and closed the distance on foot.

Noises came from inside the building, deep in the darkness. The closer Teffinger got, the more they sounded like animals feeding on something.

He got on the ground at the gap and pointed the flashlight inside.

Three good-sized dogs or coyotes were ripping a body apart.

They growled.

Their mouths pulled back.

Their fangs showed.

They were bloody.

The closest one let out a loud vicious bark and turned his body directly towards the light. The paws were firmly planted. The posture was low and tense. The eyes were yellow slits.

Teffinger slowly backed out.

Then he got the hell out of there.

9

Day Three

June 6

Tuesday Morning

Silke Jopp, Esq. practiced law out of a three-story brick structure that started life at the turn of the century as a shoe factory. It sat at the edge of lower downtown Denver, LoDo, where the texture of the city was woven in shades of not-so-good art galleries, mom-and-pop restaurants and professional offices, mostly occupied by lawyers and architects and engineers who were more interested in parking and atmosphere than they were in a fancy financial district address.

The sign on the front door was small—Silke Jopp, P.C., Attorney-At-Law.

It belied the status of her reputation.

At a mere thirty-five years of age she was already the undisputed Queen of Defense, the attorney of choice for the affluent and powerful and the high-profile when the stakes were everything and the going was nasty.

She wasn’t cheap.

Right now she was sitting on the building’s back steps with a Camel dangling from her lips, dressed in her usual attire; jeans, Nike’s and a plain blouse. Her hair was in a ponytail. A hop and jump down the alley, two magpies were scavenging through a dumpster.

Next week was the Decker Zero trial.

She was lucky to have the case.

Zero had first met with Bale Colton, Esq., out of New York, one of the only defense attorneys even more pronounced than her. After two short meetings a personality conflict developed.

Zero sought other counsel.

He landed in Silke’s office.

The man had money enough to engage her services. Right now, she had an unlimited defense budget, with over a million dollars sitting in the retainer account.

Silke didn’t know where Zero got his money.

She didn’t care.

She knew it was green and that his checks cleared.

It was 10:10, meaning that in twenty minutes Neverly Cage would be coming by with her latest report. Inside, Silke’s personal phone rang. She hesitated, deciding, then flicked the butt into the dirt and took the call.

A man’s voice came through, one she didn’t recognize.

“You don’t know me,” he said. “My name’s Preston. I have some serious dirt on your star witness next week, Nick Teffinger.”

Silke’s heart pounded.

“What’s your last name, Preston?”

“That’s not important,” he said. “What’s important is that I have documentation of Teffinger doing something that you’ll find very interesting.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as killing a woman,” Preston said. “Now let me cut to the chase. I’m looking for $500,000. That’s the price and it’s not negotiable.”

Silke lit a cigarette.

“Let’s meet,” she said.

10

Day Three

June 6

Tuesday Morning

Neverly Cage pushed through the front door of Silke’s law office, still not sure whether she would be true to her employer and tell her about the dirt she got Saturday night on Teffinger or whether she’d be true to her promise to give him 48 hours.

Silke was out back in the alley, pacing with a Camel in her hand.

“Huge break,” she said.

“Why, what happened?”

“I got a call from a mystery guy named Preston,” Silke said. “He claims to have a cell phone video of Nick Teffinger killing a woman Saturday night.”

The words hit Neverly with the force of a fist.

“How can that be?”

“He was making out with a girlfriend down in the old warehouse district,” she said. “Teffinger and some woman showed up. Teffinger tied her to a pole and then started to beat the shit out of her. The guy tried to get Teffinger to back off but Teffinger attacked him with a broken beer bottle.”

“No way.”

Silke smiled.

“The whole thing’s on tape,” she said. “A fight ensued and the guy got chased off. Teffinger thought he left but he didn’t. The guy was still there and saw what happened next.”

“Which is what?”

“Teffinger went back to the tied-up woman and slit her throat open with the beer bottle.”

“Are you serious?”

Silke nodded.

“He wants five-hundred k for the tape. I already talked to Zero about it. He says to pay it and pay it fast.”

Neverly tilted her head.

“Can you get it into evidence?”

Silke frowned.

“That’s where it gets a little muddy,” she said. “The guy tried to blackmail Teffinger but he didn’t have any money. Then he read the paper this morning about the trial coming up next week and the fact that Teffinger was a key witness. He decided to forget about getting money out of Teffinger and getting it out of me instead.” She took a long drag, held it in and then blew out. “He says he’ll come to court and authenticate the tape. Either him or his girlfriend or both of them.”

“But he tried to blackmail Teffinger.”

“Right, I know,” Silke said. “He’s not going to bring it up though, not on direct examination. The only way it will come up is if Teffinger brings it up. By that time, the tape will already be in evidence. Even if it’s not in evidence yet, it will still come in. The blackmail part of the equation doesn’t go to the authenticity of the tape. It only goes to the credibility of the man as to what he saw afterwards that didn’t get on the tape.” She smiled. “Actually, when you think about it, the blackmail part actually helps us as much as it hurts. It shows that the guy really did see the murder. Otherwise, he’d have nothing to blackmail Teffinger about.”

Neverly nodded.

It made sense.

“Have you seen it yet?”

“No, but I will tonight,” Silke said. “The guy says Teffinger’s face is clearly visible and so is his truck, including the license plae. I can get an expert to testify that it hasn’t been tampered with, assuming it hasn’t.” She sat down on the step and flicked the butt. Then she looked at Neverly and said, “So what have you turned up on your end? Anything?”

Neverly’s blood pounded.

Teffinger murdered a woman.

Screw him.

“He was with a woman Saturday night at a club downtown called the D-Drop,” she said. “I got pictures of them.”

“Show me.”

She did.

She showed her pictures of Teffinger getting sloppy drunk with a raven-haired beauty, letting his hands roam under the woman’s short little sundress, then driving away drunk with her, and even sideswiping a car en route.

Silke smiled.

“These are golden,” she said. “If the woman Teffinger tied up and killed is the same woman you have him documented with earlier in the evening, he’s toast. We’ll have his ass so nailed to the wall he won’t be able to squirm an inch.”

“There’s more,” Neverly said. “I followed him this morning. He went to a warehouse district and took a rope off a pole. Here’s a picture of him doing it.”

She pulled it up on her phone.

“Nice,” Silke said.

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but in hindsight he was obviously covering his tracks.”

“What a little shit,” Silke said. “It’s going to be a lot of fun taking him down.”

Neverly nodded.

“One more thing,” she said. “He went into a building a couple of blocks from the pole. When I showed up, he scrambled me out of there as fast as he could.”

“Why was he in the building?”

“I don’t know but I could guess.”

Silke lit a cigarette.

“Nice day,” she said. “Let’s take a ride and see if there’s a body in that building.”

“You think?”

She nodded.

“Preston says Teffinger left with the woman in the bed of his pickup truck,” she said. “He had to dump her somewhere. It would make sense that he wouldn’t go far.”

11

Day Three

June 6

Tuesday Morning

Silke and Neverly got to the warehouse district thirty minutes later and parked a hundred yards away so as to not leave any tire prints or other of scraps of evidence too close to the scene. Silke took one last drag on a Camel, mashed the butt in the ashtray and grabbed a flashlight from the back seat. Outside the beemer’s air-conditioned oasis, a hot wasteland greeted them.

“This is it,” she said.

“Yeah.”

The roll-up delivery door had a two-foot gap at the bottom, exactly like it should.

Silke got her head down to ground level and shined the light in.

“Brace yourself. The smell isn’t pretty.”

She got flat on her stomach and edged her way inside.

Neverly followed.

Fifteen steps inside they found the horrific remnants of a body that was now little more than bones and scraps of flesh. Gruesome bits and pieces were scattered in all directions as if they’d been ripped off by powerful jaws and dragged to where they could be devoured in peace.

The head was little more than a skull and gooey clumps of hair.

The face was totally eaten off.

The ears were gone.

Flies were everywhere, hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands. As soon as Silke brushed one off her face, two more landed.

Neverly took twenty or thirty photos.

Then Silke said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Outside Silke studied the buildings across the street, particularly the upper levels. Then she headed for one, not the one directly across, the one just south of it and said, “Follow me.”

“Why?”

“To find a place where you can videotape Teffinger responding to his own murder.”

They entered through a broken rear window, using a rusty 55-gallon drum as a ladder. Enough light weaved in through cracks and holes to let them find an open stairway. They took it up four floors and made their way to the front of the building.

A pane of window glass was partially broken out, leaving a gap the size of a football.

“We’ll position you right here,” Silke said. “This side of the building is in the shade. From the outside, no one will see anything but darkness if they look up.”

Neverly agreed.

“I’m starved,” Silke said. “Let’s get a bite. Then you can come back and set up. I’ll make an anonymous call to the police regarding a body. Then we’ll sit back and let them respond.” She smiled. “God this is fun.”

12

Day Three

June 6

Tuesday Afternoon

Tuesday afternoon Teffinger got a call from Barb Winters in dispatch to the effect that a body had been found down in the old warehouse district.

“Who found it?”

“From what I understand, some lady overheard two homeless guys talking about it. She didn’t know if it was true or not but decided to make a call anyway and phoned it in to Precinct 9. They sent a patrol car over to sniff around and sure enough, there was a body. They said it’s a mess. It looks like dogs got to it.”

“Okay, I’m on it.”

He swung by Sydney’s desk.

“Field trip.”

“A body?”

“Yeah,” he said. “A messy one.”

At the crime scene, Teffinger’s palms sweated at the sheer horror of the human carnage randomly disbursed on the concrete floor. He wiped them on his pants and told Sydney, “I don’t know what killed her, but we’ll treat it as a homicide if for no other reason than she shouldn’t be here.”

“You think someone dumped her?”

“Either that or forced her here,” he said. “I want you take the lead.”

The surprise on her face was palpable.

“Really?”

“That Decker Zero trial is going to be screwing me up next week,” he said. “It’s time you took a lead, anyway. You’re ready.”

“I take back half that stuff I said about you,” she said.

“Only half?”

“That’s more than fair.”

He pointed the flashlight at the stairs and headed up.

“Where you going?”

“Just to scout around.”

That wasn’t true.

He needed to clear his head. The woman’s blood was in the bed of his truck. Sure, he’d wiped it down, but forensics could find it if they looked. The broken beer bottle with the woman’s blood was in a plastic bag hidden deep in the guts of the furnace room.

So was the rope.

So was the bloody button.

He got to the top floor. The windows were boarded with plywood. He peered out through a gap. Down below was the crime unit van, cop cars with lights flashing, crime scene tape, the coroner’s van, people with serious faces, all there because of him.

Suddenly he saw something he didn’t expect.

Across the street, a building down, someone in the upper level was behind a busted window pointing a camera at the scene. Teffinger looked harder and definitely detected movement. Who was it? A reporter? No car sat at the base of the building.

Teffinger headed down the stairs, out the back of the building and then down a full block until he was out of sight.

There he crossed the street.

Behind the buildings on that side was a weed-invested string of rusty tracks. He walked down the rails until he got to the building at issue.

On cat feet, he entered through a rear window and headed up.

On the top floor at the front of the building was a woman.

“Hi there,” Teffinger said.

The head turned.

It belonged to Neverly Cage.

Her face was etched with stress. She took a step back and said, “Don’t hurt me.”