Shadow Kill (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (28 page)

Teffinger put his face to the crack and said, “Anyone home?”

No one responded.

He pushed the door all the way open and walked in.

He wasn’t prepared for what he saw.

82

Day Nine

July 16

Wednesday Afternoon

Someone had gotten
there first. The kitchen cabinets were open, as were the drawers. Furniture was overturned. Everything cloth was cut open.

“They were looking for the painting,” Teffinger said.

Del Rey pointed to a ripped-up chair.

“It wouldn’t fit in there.”

“It would if you took it out of the frame and rolled it up,” he said. “I don’t think they found it. I don’t see a stopping point. They kept going until they got through the whole place. Hunt around for an address book or anything personal like letters or photographs.”

They searched.

Five minutes into it Del Rey said, “I found something.”

She was holding a file, rifling through papers.

Teffinger came over.

“What is it?”

What it was, he couldn’t believe. There were five or six black-and-white printouts of a woman having sex with a group of men. They weren’t being gentle. They were taking her hard. Teffinger looked closer at the woman to be sure he wasn’t seeing things.

He wasn’t.

The woman was Kelly Nine.

Teffinger put his back to the wall, slumped to the floor and let the papers fall from his fingers.

“That’s porn,” Del Rey said. “She was doing porn, hardcore porn. Did you know she was into that?”

Teffinger closed his eyes.

“No.”

“This is really weird,” Del Rey said. “What’s just is weird is,
Why does Dandan have pictures of it?”

Teffinger groaned.

He didn’t know.

He didn’t care.

He couldn’t breathe.

He focused on the pictures again, hoping to find that the woman was just a trick of the eye and wasn’t really Kelly after all.

There were no tricks.

In fact, the opposite; the birthmark on her upper right thigh was visible in two of the shots. In another, the gold tooth in the upper back of her mouth showed.

Her face was Kelly’s face.

She was Kelly.

Teffinger felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Nick, are you okay?”

He squeezed her hand and stood up.

“Yeah, fine,” he said. “Let’s keep looking around.”

Del Rey found
a digital camera in the top drawer of a bedroom dresser, tried to power it up and said, “The battery’s dead.”

“Take it,” Teffinger said.

They also took phone bills, credit card bills and the framed photos that had someone other than Dandan in the picture.

They took a final look around.

Then they left.

In the 4Runner
Teffinger said, “I’m not so sure those photos of Kelly are porn. I think they’re rape.”

Del Rey looked doubtful.

“She’s not fighting.”

“How do you fight five or six or seven guys? I think this is what happened to her on that Tuesday night, or on the Wednesday when she missed work. Somehow this is the reason she ended up on the wrong end of a contract.”

Del Rey shook her head.

“If it was rape, why would they take pictures? And why in the world would Dandan have them?”

“I don’t know but I’m damn sure going to find out.”

They pulled into traffic and pointed the front end towards Chinatown.

Del Rey turned on the radio and worked the knobs until she found a Beatles station.

We’ve been friends for, oh, so long,

I let you share what’s mine.

When you mess with the girl I love,

It’s time to draw the line.

Keep your hands off my baby,

Ain’t a-gonna tell you, but a one more time—

So keep your hands off my baby

Boy, you get it through your head,

That girl is mine.

“I never heard that one,” she said.

“It never went onto one of their albums. We can’t sleep at the hotel tonight. That’s where our blue-car friend is picking us up from.”

“I agree.”

“We’ll find something cheap and pay cash.”

They went
to the Green Dragon where Teffinger handed his business card to the woman in the kimono and said, “Please tell Dandan to call me as soon as possible. It’s very important. Tell her all I want to do is talk.”

“I don’t know where she’s at.”

“Well, tell her if you see her.”

Next they went to Dandan’s ad agency, b.Box-Media, and had the same conversation with the receptionist.

En route
back to the 4Runner Teffinger checked his emails and found one from Sydney on the blue-car plates he asked her to run.

None were of interest.

All the owners turned out to be solid members of the community. None had the earmarks of a killer.

83

Day Nine

July 16

Wednesday Afternoon

Shortly after five o’clock
the support staff of Overton & Frey started to thin out. The exodus to the elevators brought a nervous drumming to Jori-Lee’s fingers. The end of the workday was here. She’d have to decide whether to stay after hours and snoop around or postpone it for a day or two when she had a better lay of the land.

Leland Everitt’s office, that’s what she needed to search.

The man was in a conspiracy with Nelson Robertson.

The conspiracy included, at a minimum, getting Jori-Lee away from the man. The question was, how much deeper did it go? Did Everitt know about Robertson’s fetish? Did he know that Robertson was being blackmailed by T’amara Alder? Did Everitt play a part in her murder?

Jori-Lee’s gut said yes, yes, yes to all of it.

What she needed though was proof.

If she could get that proof, she’d go to the FBI. It was true that she’d broken into Robertson’s house, which was a crime of no small proportion. But comparatively speaking she was a small fish.

She could cut a deal.

Getting into Leland Everitt’s office would be problematic. It was at the end of a corridor. There was no good way in or out. It might be ripe with nanny cameras. He might lock his door at the end of the day. His computer might be password protected. His desk and filing cabinets might be locked.

If someone saw her, she had no good excuse for being there.

Wait, that could be fixed.

She could buy him a thank-you card and say she was putting it on his desk.

She could buy it tonight and hit his office tomorrow. Or she could run out now and buy it and then come back.

Her fingers drummed harder.

What to do?

What to do?

Suddenly
Zahara Knox walked in and said, “Let’s go out and have a drink,” she said. “On me.”

The drumming in Jori-Lee’s fingers stopped.

She grabbed her purse.

“Sounds good.”

They ended up at a place called The Vault, a high-energy den of sin crowded shoulder-to-shoulder with pretty people in expensive suits and designer high-heels.

Perfume and sex permeated the air.

“This is where I come to get laid,” Zahara said.

Jori-Lee studied her to see if it was a joke.

It wasn’t.

“Not tonight though,” she added. “Tonight we get drunk and talk.”

Over screwdrivers,
Jori-Lee spilled it out, the whole mess; Robertson’s fetish, the fact he was being blackmailed by T’amara Alder who ended up dead, Leland Everitt’s involvement with Robertson to an extent not yet fully known, the fact that Jori-Lee had some concrete evidence in that she secretly kept a flash drive, but she needed a whole lot more, particularly as to Leland Everitt’s involvement.

Zahara exhaled.

“Let’s go get it,” she said.

“Get what?”

“The concrete, darling, the concrete.”

“You mean now?”

Zahara nodded.

“We’ll use my keycard to get in,” she said. “I’m working a couple of cases with Leland. If anyone catches us in his office, I’ll have a reason to be there. You’ll just be someone tagging along.”

Jori-Lee’s watch said 7:43.

“Do you think everyone’s gone?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

Zahara downed what was left of her screwdriver and stood up.

Jori-Lee tapped her fingers and said, “You’re serious—”

“Dead serious, darling. Let’s do it.”

84

Day Nine

July 16

Wednesday Evening

Five o’clock
silently came and went. Rail didn’t call to officially give Teffinger one last chance before the truce forever ended and he went after Dandan. Dandan didn’t call. The bird-ripper didn’t call. The pale-skinned detective didn’t call. No one called. The world uneventfully revolved on its axis as the streetlights kicked on and San Francisco slipped into darkness.

Teffinger toyed with the idea of calling Rail and pretending he had the Van Gogh. The more he played out the realities, though, the less he saw Rail falling for it, and the more he saw one of them or both of them with a bullet in the brain.

Their new hotel room wasn’t much.

It was basically a bed, a few cheap things to sit on, a fuzzy TV to stare at and enough basic plumbing to get the job done. If it rained, it would probably keep most of the water off their heads. It was on the second floor of a peeling two level structure. To get to it they walked up outside wooden stairs and down an outside wooden walkway past the other rooms all the way to the end. A smell of urine came from behind the stairs.

Next door a woman broke into a loud orgasm.

Two minutes later a man left.

Teffinger pulled the curtains to the side and watched him walk away, then turned to Del Rey and said, “The more I think about it the more you might be right in that Kelly wasn’t being raped and it’s nothing more than a porno.”

“Does it make a difference at this point?”

He cocked his head.

“If it was a porno then she did it for money,” he said. “She wouldn’t do something like that for money unless she really needed it in the worst way. So why did she need money so badly?”

“You’re speculating, and not very well.”

“How so?”

“I can’t image anything like that would pay much,” she said. “Porn isn’t exactly the go-to place for a non-porn woman who needs money. With Kelly’s looks she could land a sugar daddy in a week. That’s where I’d go if I was her and needed serious money. But even before that, I’d max out my credit cards first and try to borrow it from friends. Did she ever hit you up for a loan or anything?”

Teffinger grunted.

“No.”

“Would she have if her back was against the wall?”

“Possibly.”

“You mean probably. Did she mention anything about money problems when she was in Denver?”

“No.”

“And her sister never mentioned anything like that to you, after the fact?”

“No.”

“Well, given all that, it’s pretty clear this isn’t a money issue,” Del Rey said. “If it’s not rape—and I don’t think it is—then she did it for some other reason besides money. Maybe one of the guys in the film had something on her.”

“Like what?”

She shook her head in uncertainty.

“It would have to be something big. Maybe she did something she shouldn’t have and he knew about it.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe she got drunk and ran someone over and he got her license plate number. Or maybe she was anonymously blackmailing someone and someone found out about it and threatened to disclose her name unless she did what he wanted. Maybe any number of things.”

Teffinger didn’t disagree.

Anything was possible.

Suddenly
his phone rang and a man’s voice said, “Doug?”

Teffinger didn’t recognize the intonation.

It belonged to a stranger.

“Did you say Doug?”

“Yeah, Doug.”

“There’s no Doug here,” Teffinger said. “I think you got the wrong number.”

“Oops, sorry.”

The connection died.

“Who was it?” Del Rey asked.

Teffinger opened his mouth to say, “Wrong number,” but the words that came out were, “I think it was our friend from the blue car trying to track us down.”