Sudden Guilt (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) Read online

  “Right. Be there when they screw up the next time. Then tell the cops.”

  Paige laughed.

  “You’re nuts.”

  “Yeah but that’s beside the point.”

  SUDDENLY PAIGE REMEMBERED SOMETHING and stopped breathing. One of the Evidence cases involved a man who had abducted a woman and had her tied up in the trunk of his car. The police pulled him over for a burned out taillight. During that stop the man acted nervous. The police asked if they could search his car. He said no but they searched it anyway and found the woman in the trunk.

  At an evidentiary hearing, the trial court ruled that the search had been in violation of the Fourth Amendment and that all evidence resulting from it was non-admissible.

  Without that evidence, the police had no case.

  So they had to let him go.

  The woman in the trunk had been bound.

  With blue rope.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Day Three—May 7

  Wednesday Morning

  ______________

  AS USUAL, TEFFINGER NEEDED TO DO ten things and had time for two, so he ended up letting Just Sam tag along in the Tundra as he drove back to the railroad tracks to check the crime scene by the light of day. Just Sam flicked the radio stations until she landed on Madonna’s “Burning Up,” then turned up the volume.

  They took 8th Avenue west to I-25 and then headed south. He had a thermos of coffee but only one cup, which they passed back and forth.

  “This is good,” she said.

  “It’s just cheap stuff,” Teffinger said. “I can afford quality or quantity but not both. So I go for quantity.”

  “You just rent it anyway.”

  He chuckled.

  “Exactly.”

  It turned out that Just Sam wasn’t just a law student. She was also a bartender at Shotgun Willies and lived in the apartment across the hall from Poppenberg. At least three or four nights a week they ate supper together, usually sending out for pizza or Chinese.

  They also did some clubbing together.

  “The only weird thing that I can think of is that she was doing some kind of surveillance every once in a while,” she said.

  Teffinger heard the comment but was more interested in not being killed by an 18-wheeler merging from the Alameda ramp and trying to squeeze in front of him.

  He tapped the brakes and let the guy in.

  “What kind of surveillance?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Just Sam said. “I always pictured it as something out of an old black-and-white TV show—stakeouts in the rain, following people around in the shadows, that kind of thing.”

  Teffinger raised an eyebrow.

  “Well that’s weird,” he said.

  She chuckled. “Actually, it’s not that weird if you know Marilyn. She pretty much did what she wanted.”

  Teffinger frowned.

  “Who was she following?”

  Just Sam didn’t know.

  Didn’t have a clue in fact, even when Teffinger pressed her.

  Marilyn really never talked about it much.

  “Was she moonlighting for a P.I. or something?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Would you know if she was?”

  She considered it. “I think so. We talked a lot about money since neither of us had any. If she had some coming in she would have mentioned it.”

  Teffinger cut off I-25 onto Santa Fe southbound.

  “So is that why she’s dead? Because of these people she was following?” Teffinger asked. “Are they the ones who killed her?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You got to have a gut feeling.”

  She did.

  And the feeling was negative.

  “If she was in danger, she would have known it and would have said something,” Just Sam said. “She had a sixth sense about people.”

  Teffinger turned left on a gravel road, stopped a couple of hundred yards down and killed the engine.

  “We found her over there,” he said, pointing. “I’m going to ask you to stay in the truck if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure.”

  Teffinger scouted the scene, found nothing new of interest except a cigarette butt that he put into an evidence bag, and came back to the Tundra.

  “Do you have the key to her apartment?”

  She did.

  “She allows you to go in?”

  She did.

  Meaning she could let him in without a search warrant.

  “Mind if we go take a look?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Day Three—May 7

  Wednesday Evening

  ______________

  THE MOUNTAIN VIEW TRAILER PARK, to its credit, technically did have a view of the mountains. But it had a better view of the junkyard to the right, and the thousands of cars rushing down I-70 about a quarter-mile to the left. Tarzan pulled Dick Zipp’s Wrangler into the gravel entryway just before dusk and decided the place was a dive even by trailer court standards.

  Unit 15, a thirty foot blue trailer, sat on cinder blocks in the back corner, surrounded by junk. It had a For Rent sign in the window. Aaron pulled in front of it, killed the engine and stepped out.

  He wore his Dick Zipp suit; jeans, flannel shirt, black glasses and wig.

  He even improvised a little and added a baseball cap, which disguised the wig better.

  When he knocked no one answered.

  He tried the doorknob.

  It was unlocked.

  “Hello?”

  No answer.

  He stepped inside, got greeted by a musty smell, and pictured the roof and walls leaking for the last ten years. Dark fake wood, tattered cushions and scratched vinyl made up the interior. The floor of the toilet sagged under his weight, no doubt the victim of rotting wood.

  Perfect.

  The person he was supposed to meet—John Frickey—pulled up ten minutes later in a rusty Oldsmobile with a missing front fender. A black lab sat in the passenger seat.

  “Stay here,” Frickey told the dog. He looked like another Zipp, except shrunken, and smelled like a forest fire. “You the guy I came here to meet?” Frickey asked.

  Aaron shook his hand.

  “That’s me,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

  Frickey chuckled. “Yeah. I had to cancel my speech to be here, but what the heck.”

  Aaron laughed and said, “I already took a look around. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Naw. She’s a beauty, huh?”

  “Actually, she’ll do,” he said.

  He explained that it was his brother who would be staying there. He was coming into town from Atlanta to look for work. Five minutes later he handed Frickey three hundred dollars in cash and got the key for a month.

  Frickey fired up a Camel, coughed, and drove off.

  He never even asked Aaron his name.

  DEL RAE PARIS OOZED SEX. Her five-feet-six-inch body was perfectly curved in all the right places, taut and smooth, with small pointy nipples that always showed no matter what she wore. There wasn’t a color in the rainbow that didn’t go with her flawless, golden skin. Her face was that of a woman, not the girl next door, seriously feminine and disturbingly hypnotic.

  She could meet a man for the first time and have him buy her a car ten minutes later.

  And had as a matter of fact.

  But that was before, back in the smalltime days, before Aaron Trane, a total stranger, cast his Tarzan eyes upon her in a crowded nightclub one Saturday night eight months ago, pulled her stomach to his and kissed her like he owned her.

  He kept her in heat for eight long days and nights before he took her.

  WHEN TRANE GOT BACK from the Mountain View Trailer Park, he took a shower, got a call from Del Rae Paris saying she’d be over in a half hour, and then headed down to the second floor to study the spider’s web and figure out how to do tomorrow’s shoot.

  The sun dresses weren’t working the way he wante
d.

  It was too hard to get them to blow up just the right height.

  And getting two of them to coordinate was impossible.

  The background wasn’t right either.

  It needed to be a soft blue to bring out the harshness of the web.

  When Del Rae showed up, Tarzan met her in the loft and told her what he’d gotten done today, namely buying Dick Zipp’s Wrangler and renting the trailer.

  “Dick Zipp?” she said. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Aaron chuckled.

  “He’s a pretty big guy,” he said. “I doubt that he got ribbed about it that much.”

  “Maybe not to his face,” she said.

  He grabbed her hand, walked her over to wardrobe and told her to strip out of her clothes.

  She did.

  He riffled through the hangers and finally came upon a pale green silk dress that might do the trick. He had her put it on, decided it was too long and cut it with a jagged line about six inches above her knees. Then he cut a slit up her left leg so it would open up when the wind blew.

  “This doesn’t come free,” she warned him.

  He laughed.

  Then he took her down to the second floor and had her get up on the web, as if caught in a spread-eagle position, while he adjusted the fan.

  Different speeds.

  Different angles.

  All good.

  The dress opened perfectly.

  She hadn’t put panties on so he had to imagine what it would look like with them.

  “Do you still want to go through with this?” he asked.

  “Are you talking about the lawyer?”

  “Right.”

  “You better believe it.”

  “Because once we start there’s no going back,” he said.

  “I know that.”

  “I know you know,” he said. “I just want to be sure you’re not having second thoughts. If you are, no big deal. You’re my woman either way.”

  “I haven’t been screwing him for three months for nothing,” she said. “Don’t even ask me again. By the way, does that bother you? That I’m screwing him?”

  “What do you think? Stay exactly where you are. Don’t move a muscle.”

  He walked over to the wall switch, killed the lights, and then climbed up the web like an animal and took her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Day Three—May 7

  Wednesday Afternoon

  ______________

  THE LAW SCHOOL BUZZED with energy—learning energy, stress energy, life energy. Ordinarily Paige fed off it but this afternoon, even in the Law Review room, she couldn’t shake the darkness. An image kept popping up. An image of her alone and forgotten in some dark corner of the world where nice people never went, collared, growing increasingly desperate with a razorblade as her only friend.

  She couldn’t let that happen no matter what.

  Maybe she should disappear, forget Denver, get in the car this minute and drive until either it broke down or she did.

  Get a job as a waitress.

  Change her name.

  She pushed the thought aside, filled her coffee cup and went to the library. There she found a copy of the textbook from her Evidence class last year. The chapter that covered the exclusionary rule summarized six cases in the text and listed another twenty-two in footnotes. It didn’t take her long to find the case involving the blue rope, which was a trial court decision out of California. Clearly the court understood that the defendant—Gordon J. Andrews—would be found guilty if the case was allowed to proceed to trial. The pain of letting him go was evident in the tenor of the decision. But the judge was “constrained to” exclude the evidence after finding that it had clearly been obtained in violation of the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights.

  Did Marilyn Poppenberg investigate Gordon J. Andrews to find out what he was up to after escaping justice?

  Was Andrews the one putting the women in collars?

  Did he find out about Poppenberg’s investigation?

  And then kill her?

  Paige had her doubts, primarily because the defendant was from California. Poppenberg would be more likely to investigate someone who lived in the Denver area.

  One of the references cited in the footnotes involved a man named Todd Underdown and a crime committed in Cheyenne, Wyoming—somewhat close to Denver, but not close enough that Poppenberg would have been investigating him.

  Then, bingo!

  One of the footnotes cited a Denver case. She pulled the full decision from the stacks. It involved a man named Ryan Tasker.

  A very bad man.

  When Paige finally closed the book her hands shook.

  She headed back to the Law Review room and Googled both defendants. Neither showed up so she refined her search and tapped into a variety of databases.

  What she found she could hardly believe.

  The blue rope defendant, Gordon J. Andrews, had changed his name to Aaron Trane, and now lived in Denver.

  Unbelievable.

  He was even listed in the local white pages.

  The other defendant, Ryan Tasker, also changed his name. Now he was Mitch Mitchell, also listed in the Denver white pages.

  Bingo.

  AT HER APARTMENT, JUST BEFORE DARK, Paige’s cell phone rang and an electronically scrambled voice came through. “Listen carefully because I’m only going to say this once. You are to never, ever talk to Ta’Veya White again. You are to never, ever see her again. If you do I’ll kill you both. And not in a pleasant way.”

  The line went dead before she could say a word.

  She almost threw the phone at the wall.

  Instead she remembered having a bottle of bourbon buried deep in the cabinet above the fridge. She muscled onto the counter, dug until she got it, then broke the seal and took a hit from the bottle.

  Her mouth burned and tried to reject it but she swallowed it before she could spit it out.

  Ta’Veya called ten minutes later and said she had just turned off I-25 onto I-70 west and should be arriving at Paige’s apartment in fifteen or twenty minutes.

  “No!” Paige said.

  And told her about the threat.

  No, not the threat, the promise.

  Ta’Veya stayed quiet for a few moments and then said, “He’s going to kill us anyway, so screw him. Our only chance is to get him before he gets us.”

  Paige paced, too rattled to get her thoughts in a straight line.

  “Pack up everything you can’t live without and be ready to leave by the time I get there,” Ta’Veya said.

  Lightning crackled outside.

  Rain pounded on the windows.

  THEY ENDED UP AT A CHEAP HOTEL near 6th and 40 in unincorporated Jefferson County, getting the last room, a single bed unit. Ta’Veya found a vending machine near the front office, out in the rain, and braved the weather long enough to buy a couple of cans of Coke to cut the bourbon.

  “Freaking hurricane out there,” she said.

  “I can’t get drunk,” Paige said. “I got classes in the morning.”

  Ta’Veya laughed.

  “Honey, you’re already drunk.”

  Paige fell back on the bed and watched the ceiling swirl. Then she leaned up on her elbows and said, “I did some research today.”

  “What on?”

  “Our hunt.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Do you know a guy named Mitch Mitchell, formerly known as Ryan Tasker?”

  No, she didn’t.

  Neither did she know Aaron Trane, formerly Gordon Andrews.

  “Too bad.”

  “Why?”

  “Because then we’d know which one of them to focus on.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Day Three—May 7

  Wednesday Afternoon

  ______________

  WHEN DR. LEIGH SANDT, THE FBI PROFILER, walked into headquarters mid-afternoon, she barely had time to set down a briefcase before Teffinger put he
r in a bear hug and spun her around full circle. She felt lighter and stronger than he remembered.

  She stepped back and looked him over.

  “You’re still jogging I see,” she said.

  “True but not as fast,” he said. “You lost weight.” As soon as the words came out of his mouth he wanted to suck them back and swallow them.

  There were two subjects that should never be broached with a woman.

  The first was age.

  The second was weight.

  Both were train wrecks waiting to happen.

  “Yeah, a couple of pounds,” she said.

  He exhaled.

  A near miss instead of an actual crash.

  “I want to see the boxcar,” she added.

  ON THE WAY TO THE CRIME SCENE they talked about the woman down by the railroad tracks, bound in blue rope, and Teffinger’s initial theory that she might have been the woman who got held in the boxcar. But now he was backing off that concept since none of the fingerprints found at the boxcar matched hers.

  “We’re still waiting on DNA,” he said.

  She nodded and said, “I want to see the razorblade when we get back to your office.”

  “What razorblade?”

  She looked at him as if trying to figure out if he was messing with her. His face must have said he wasn’t because she said, “You didn’t find a razorblade?”

  “No. Why? Should we?”

  Then she told him something he didn’t know. The woman always got a razorblade. In fact, that was the point of the whole thing, to slowly drive her to suicide.

  “Now do you see why this bastard’s high on my list?” she asked.

  He did.

  He did indeed.

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED AT THE BOXCAR, the door was shut and padlocked as they had left it. Teffinger had forgotten about the lock and couldn’t remember what he did with the key.

  “Wait here a minute,” he said.

  Then, back at the Tundra, he miraculously found the key sitting innocently in one of the cup holders. When he got back to Dr. Sandt he said, “Left the key in the truck.”

  Dark clouds pushed across the sky.

  “What’s with that?” Leigh asked. “I thought this was Denver.”