second one until Tuesday. The seller trusted him, gave him the keys and a bill of sale, and said, “Remember. None of us really ever owns a car like this. We just save it for the next guy.”
Teffinger drove it back to Davica’s, parked it in the driveway and drooled on it for over an hour while Davica washed her Lotus. Then she said, “Why don’t you pull it in the garage? We’ll get in the back and you can feel me up.”
Later that afternoon, Teffinger left the Corvette in Davica’s garage and took the Tundra home to get a jump on all the dreaded, time-wasting tasks that came with being alive-clothes washing, house cleaning, food shopping, bill paying, checkbook balancing, and a thousand other little things that were already long overdue.
He was halfway through food shopping at the King Soopers in Green Mountain, trying to not buy too much junk food, when his cell phone rang. A female’s voice came through. “This is Aspen Wilde, the attorney. You said I should call you if anything happened.”
She sounded panicked.
He listened patiently, hung up, and then walked over to a young lady stocking the shelves with cans of corn. “See that cart over there?” he said, pointing. “That’s mine but I have to leave. There’s some frozen stuff in there that someone’s going to need to put back. I’m really sorry about this.”
He kicked himself in the ass all the way over to Aspen’s apartment.
He was to blame.
He should have never put her face on the news.
He had turned her into a target.
35
DAY SIX-SEPTEMBER 10
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
Aspen sat behind the wheel of her parked car, still trying to determine who or why anyone would trash her apartment, when Nick Teffinger raced into the parking lot and slammed his pickup to a stop.
Even from this distance he looked tense.
By the time she walked over and got his attention, he couldn’t apologize fast enough. “This is all my fault,” he said.
She disagreed.
“I turned you into a target,” he added.
She grabbed his hand. “I’ve been thinking about this,” she said. “If it’s somehow connected to Rachel Ringer or the other dead women, then we have fresh clues inside my apartment. Right?”
He agreed and wondered why he hadn’t thought of that himself.
Before she could say another word, he bounded up the stairs two at a time and got all the local cops out of the apartment before they contaminated the scene to death.
Then he shut the door and walked back down, already punching numbers on his cell phone. As he waited for an answer, he told Aspen, “The Lakewood PD gave me permission to bring the Denver Crime Unit down to process the scene.”
Fifteen minutes later the Crime Unit showed up, with a beer-belly man behind the wheel.
“That’s Paul Kwak,” Teffinger told Aspen.
“I find you a primo 1967 Corvette,” Kwak said getting out, “and this is how you repay me? Making me work on a Saturday?”
Teffinger smiled.
“I was going to call you,” he said. “I bought it.”
Kwak looked flabbergasted.
“You did?”
“Just picked it up a couple of hours ago,” Teffinger added.
Kwak shook his head in wonder.
“I’ll be damned. I didn’t think you’d do it.”
“I shouldn’t have. It took all my money and then some,” Teffinger said.
“Do what I do,” Kwak said. “Get a cardboard sign-Need Money, Did Something Stupid. Just stay off my corner.”
Then they turned their attention to the job at hand. Teffinger wanted it processed as if it was a homicide scene, not a B amp;E. If someone left a fingerprint, a hair, or dropped his wallet by mistake, Teffinger wanted Kwak to find it.
Aspen watched from a distance, talking to the renters who had wandered over to see what all the commotion was about. All the fuss made her knees weak.
She didn’t know where she’d sleep tonight.
Not here, though.
She went over to her car, sat behind the wheel and called Blake Gray to let him know that she’d be showing up on the news again. She didn’t want him to get blindsided by it.
“I’m coming over,” he said.
“Blake, really, you don’t have to. I’m fine.”
“I’ll see you in about twenty minutes.”
When he arrived, he had a proposition for her. “This is somehow tied to the four dead women, especially if you’re correct that nothing was taken. Here’s what I think we should do. We should send you to the firm’s D.C. office until all this blows over. The firm will pick up all the expenses-air, lodging, meals, the whole thing. You need to get acquainted with the people out there sooner or later anyway, so it might as well be now. Then, when this blows over, we’ll bring you back to Denver.”
She thought about it.
“What if it doesn’t blow over?”
He cocked his head.
“Everything blows over sooner or later. The main thing is your safety. Tonight, tomorrow, and the next day.”
She almost agreed, but then shocked herself.
“Thanks, but no,” she said. “I’m not going to give in to intimidation.”
36
DAY SIX-SEPTEMBER 10
SATURDAY
With the tattoo woman Mia Avila hogtied on the bed, terribly and disgustingly alive, Draven took a hit from the flask and watched his copy of the DVD-the secret copy no one ever knew about, the one transmitted to a second recorder located in the garage. It convinced him that the client fully intended to kill the woman and thought he had.
Draven felt better knowing that.
If the asshole had chickened out, and intentionally left him with a live mess to dispose of, Draven wouldn’t have had much of a sense of humor about the whole thing.
He didn’t mind abducting the women.
He didn’t mind that they died.
He didn’t even mind how they died.
Quick.
