“Positive,” she said. “This is definitely the phone used for the call, and the time on the security camera tape exactly matches the time of the call, from start to end. Plus she looks stressed.”
Teffinger was impressed.
“Good work,” he said. “I suppose now you think I owe you lunch or something.”
She punched him in the arm.
“Lunch? Dinner at a minimum,” she said. “Got some more news for you too. The head definitely belongs to Rachel Ringer, like our caller-friend said.”
“Any word yet who the other one is? The one without the eyes?”
“Nada.”
Teffinger studied the caller’s face again.
“Let’s get a press conference set up ASAP,” he said. “I want her photo on the five o’clock news. She’s up to her eyeballs in this and I want to know how.”
Sydney shook her head.
“If all I’m getting out of this is a lunch…”
“You’re also being paid, don’t forget.”
“Right, but I would be extra motivated if there was a dinner involved.”
Teffinger held his hands up in surrender.
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. But this is blackmail, for the record.”
She smiled. “Black female, actually. I choose the restaurant.”
Ouch.
“Just be sure they have a two-for-one special.” He looked at his watch for the first time in hours: 3:25. Shit. “I got to run,” he said over his shoulder. “Be back in an hour.”
He headed over to see how Marilyn Black was coming along. It was turning out that she was more alone in the world than he first thought. Her father skipped out when she was just a baby. Marilyn ran away from home when she was fifteen and had been on the streets ever since.
When he walked into her room she was asleep.
He held her hand for a half hour and then told the orderly, “Be sure she knows I was here.”
On his way back to the railroad spur, Teffinger called Leigh Sandt, Ph. D., the FBI profiler who had proved to be so invaluable on both the David Hallenbeck and Nathan Wickersham cases. She was a Supervisory Special Agent assigned to the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) at Quantico, Virginia. Luckily, he actually got her on the line. As usual, she listened patiently as he explained the situation.
“The thing that puzzles me the most is the four different methods of murder,” he said, referring to stabbing, beheading, suffocation, and slitting of the throat. “Oh,” he added, “I almost forgot to tell you, the last one we found-the one with the slit throat-had her eyes gouged out too. We haven’t found them yet. The guy ate them for all we know.”
She asked a number of questions.
The ages of the victims.
Physical descriptions.
Similarities.
“This is a tough one,” she said. “Given the widely divergent causes of death, I’m leaning towards multiple murderers, maybe a cult of some kind, or a gang initiation. But I’m also not inclined yet to totally rule out one murderer-maybe someone with multiple personalities, or one personality but multiple fantasies.” She cleared her throat and added, “Looks like you’re going to be all over the news again.”
Unfortunately, that was true.
“It’s already getting big,” he said. “And they don’t even know yet that a head was cut off and that eyes were gouged out.”
“That’ll leak out,” she said.
“Probably,” he agreed.
“I haven’t seen an agency yet that can keep that level of noise under wraps, including my own,” she said.
As soon as he hung up, Sydney called.
“Where are you?” She sounded panicked. “You said you’d be back in an hour.”
“En route.”
“Well, hurry up, the press is here.”
23
DAY FOUR-SEPTEMBER 8
THURSDAY EVENING
A spen was already in her pajamas when someone knocked at the door. Through the peephole she saw a stranger, a man about fifty wearing glasses. With hesitation, she opened the door as far as the chain would allow.
“The firm needs you at a meeting, right now,” the man said. “I have a limousine waiting.”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Hold on.”
She checked outside and saw a limousine in the parking lot.
“Give me ten minutes,” she said.
“I’ll be in the car.”
She dressed and threw on a face while a feeling of nausea grew in her stomach. The two glasses of wine might be on her breath, so she gargled as long as she could with mouthwash.
Thirty minutes later she was at the firm, sitting in one of the conference rooms with Blake Gray, Jacqueline Moore, and another attorney she hadn’t met before named Derek Bennett.
Jacqueline Moore took the lead in what appeared to be more of an interrogation than a meeting. “You’re all over the news; you know that, right?”
The words shocked her.
“No. What are you talking about?”
They powered up the flat-panel TV on the wall and played a videotape of the evening news for her. A detective by the name of Nick Teffinger wanted to talk to the woman in the photograph in connection with the case involving the four bodies found at the railroad spur. If anyone knew who the woman was, they should call the number at the bottom of the screen.
Shit.
She looked at everyone.
“I had no idea,” she said.
The looks on their faces indicated they didn’t care.
“So what’s going on?” the woman asked.
Aspen put a confused look on her face. “I don’t know.”
The woman slammed her hand on the table. “We don’t have time for bullshit!”
A pencil bounced, rolled, and fell to the floor.
“You’re dragging the law firm into something negative and we’ve struggled too hard and too long to get blindsided by something like this. So you can either tell us what this is all about or you can march down to your office right now and clean it out.”
In spite of herself, Aspen stood up. “Who in the hell do you think you’re talking to?” She walked to the door and then turned around. “As far as the job goes, shove it up your ass. No one talks to me like that.”
“Aspen! Wait a minute!”
The words came from Blake Gray, chasing her down the hall.
She was in no mood.
She opened the door to the stairwell and bounded down, taking two steps at a time, while he called for her to come back.
24
DAY FOUR-SEPTEMBER 8
THURSDAY
When Draven got back to Denver, he parked a couple of blocks away from the apartment and then walked back through the field behind the building to see if any bikers were hanging around. Good thing, too. A few of the scumbags were milling in the parking lot and several more buzzed the neighborhood.
They better be careful.
The assholes.
They think they’re all macho when they’re in a pack. Get them alone, though, and they were nothing. In fact, he had half a mind to pick one of them off from the herd right now, just to show them who they were messing with.
Instead, he drove over to Avis, rented a van, and spent the next two hours driving back to Pueblo. When he got in town, it took all his strength to not knock on Gretchen’s door and screw her silly.
She couldn’t know he was in town, though.
It would be better that way.
Against his better judgment, he drove by the dead biker’s house, just to see what was going on, if anything. The body was gone and the place was deserted. Whatever investigation had taken place was already over.
Then he swung by the tattoo shop.
Good.
The woman-Mia Avila-seemed to be alone.
He parked in front of the building, killed the engine, and walked in.
She looked just as good as he remembered, with those big eyes and that thick brown hair pulled into a ponytail. Ample breasts filled a flimsy white tank top, seriously sexy. When she smiled, he just about melted. She would definitely do.