of stuff that would have been, if it had been a burglary. The sign in the window was flipped to Closed and the front door was locked. Her car was still parked out front.”
“So she left with someone,” Sydney offered.
The woman sipped coffee and nodded.
“It appears that way, which of course suggests that she knew the person,” Torres said. “Maybe she shut down for lunch but never made it back for some reason. We just don’t know.”
Teffinger frowned.
“Did she keep an appointment book?” he asked.
“We didn’t find one.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“You think she’d have one to schedule tattoos,” he said.
Torres agreed and said, “That’s one of the things so far that doesn’t fit.”
“Maybe someone knew he wasn’t going to bring her back, and also knew he was in her appointment book, so he took that too,” Teffinger suggested.
“Possibly, and maybe even likely,” Torres said. “But we haven’t been able to come up with a brilliant plan to recreate it.”
Teffinger nodded.
And couldn’t shine any bright ideas on the subject either.
“Can we have a look at the place, after breakfast?”
“Absolutely. I brought the key with me.”
Teffinger took a swallow of coffee.
“Good stuff.”
Sydney smiled. “As if you’ve ever seen a cup of coffee you didn’t like.”
Inside the missing woman’s tattoo shop, following a thorough walk around, Teffinger agreed that there was no indication of foul play.
In the back room he spotted a safe.
“Have you opened that yet?” he asked.
Torres shook her head. “Not yet.”
Teffinger cocked his head, wondered if there was any reason why the shop’s appointment book would be inside, and decided that there wasn’t.
“We lifted some prints off the front door and matched a few of them to names,” Torres added. “We interviewed those people but didn’t find anything that got us excited. It’s all in the file.”
Teffinger nodded.
He’d read every word of it later.
Okay.
Now what?
The scene at the railroad spur jumped into his thoughts-four women in two graves. Assuming that Chase and Mia Avila were somehow connected, that still only made two women.
“Have any other women in Pueblo shown up missing?” he asked.
The young detective retreated in thought.
“Not that I’m aware of,” she said.
They stepped outside and locked the door behind them. Three Harleys rumbled up the street and then disappeared in the other direction.
“Oh, that reminds me,” Torres said, “there is one other woman who has technically dropped off the radar screen, but we’re pretty sure why.”
Teffinger spotted a twig on the ground, picked it up and snapped it.
“Who’s that?”
“A local prostitute named Gretchen Smith.”
Teffinger looked her straight in the eyes, because Chase had been a prostitute in a way, and in fact disappeared the day she went to meet a client.
“Tell me about Gretchen Smith.”
“We’re working another case involving a biker who got beat to death on his driveway,” Torres said. “First he got his face punched in, almost beyond recognition, and then got his head smashed in-we think with a rock, although we never found it. Anyway, it turns out that he had a fairly serious altercation with an Indian in a bar a couple of nights before that.”
“An Indian?”
“Well,” she said, “maybe I spoke too fast because we don’t know that for sure. What we do know is dark skin and a long black ponytail, and half the people we talked to thought he was an Indian. Anyway, he’s a person of interest.”
“Okay.”
“He’s apparently big enough and strong enough to do what got done,” she added.
“Got it.”
“But there’s a side issue,” she said. “The victim and a couple of his friends reportedly raped Gretchen Smith at some point in the past, although nothing ever came of it legally. It was pretty common knowledge that she’d take her revenge if she ever got a chance. So, some of the victim’s biker friends were looking to ‘interview’ her to find out if she was behind it somehow. When we found that out, we contacted her and told her she’d probably be safer if she got out of town until the whole thing blew over. As far as we can tell, she took our advice, because she checked out of the hotel she was staying at and no one’s seen her since.”
“Maybe the bikers found her,” Teffinger suggested.
Torres shrugged.
“I doubt it,” she said. “There’s no buzz around town to that effect.”
79
DAY TWELVE-SEPTEMBER 16
FRIDAY MORNING
On the way to work Friday morning, Aspen noticed that the Accord’s gas gauge was on empty, below empty in fact. Luckily she had enough fumes left to get her to a station where she prepaid $20 cash and filled up while “Sweet Child of Mine” played on the radio. She was wearing dark green Dockers and a white cotton blouse, after learning last week that Fridays were casual dress at the firm. When she got to the parking lot twenty minutes later she discovered she was a dollar short. So she drove over to the side streets on the far side of Broadway until she found a 2-hour parking spot and then hoofed it double-time to the firm.
When she got there, she didn’t go up to the office.
Instead, she went to Parking Level 3, where the firm had several reserved spots, and hid behind a van in the corner. She stayed there for over an hour.
Feeling a lot more like a thief than a lawyer.
But she eventually got what she wanted.
Namely, a look at the faces of the people who drove the law firm’s silver BMWs.
When she finally arrived at her office, an envelope was on her chair. Inside, as before, she found a computer-printed piece of paper warning her that Christina Tam was a spy. This time, however, instead of shredding it she marched into Christina’s office, shut the door, and handed it to her.
“This is the second one of these that someone left on my chair,” she said.
Christina had no idea what the letter meant. She did know, however, that she wasn’t a spy and that the whole thing was a lie.
A vicious lie.
Totally preposterous.
