The woman didn’t seem satisfied.
“I can’t have a passenger in a car under tow,” she said. “It’s against the law.”
Draven pulled a hundred dollar bill out of his pocket and held it out towards her.
“For your inconvenience,” he said. “We’re almost there anyway.”
She looked at the bill but didn’t take it.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “If I get busted I lose my license.”
“We won’t get busted. We’ll be at my place in five minutes. If we get stopped I’ll just say you knew nothing about it.”
She looked in the rearview mirror again and started to slow down.
“We need to move her up here in the cab,” she said.
Draven shook his head with disapproval.
“She’s been throwing up for two hours. You sure you want that in here?”
She grimaced.
“Unfortunately we got no choice. I’m down to the last few points on my license.”
They continued to decelerate.
Then pulled onto the shoulder and stopped.
Draven surveyed the traffic and found it moderate, flying by at sixty or more. Even if someone did think they needed assistance, no one would want to slow down from that speed and stop.
He knew what he had to do but tried to think of another way out.
Nothing good came to mind.
He opened the door and stepped out. “She’s pretty heavy,” he said. “I’m going to need your help.”
She hopped out and met him at the passenger door of the Granada, on the side of the vehicle facing away from the traffic. He opened the door and said, “Can you pull her out? I strained my back a couple of days ago.”
The woman bent inside and said, “It looks like her hands are tied.”
That’s when Draven drove the knife into her spine.
59
DAY TEN-SEPTEMBER 14
WEDNESDAY MORNING
Wednesday morning, instead of heading to the office, Tef-finger drove straight to the railroad spur where the four bodies had been dumped. By the time he got there, the first thermos of coffee started to run through him and he made a quick detour behind the 55-gallon drum.
This time, though, he didn’t uncover a body.
Under a warm cerulean sky, he pulled down the tailgate of the truck and set a map of Denver on it, looking for an industrial area that had passed its prime.
Sydney called and asked where he was.
He told her, and she said to wait there.
Ten minutes later, she showed up.
“Here’s my theory,” he said. “No one drives too far with four bodies in the car, meaning the building’s around here somewhere. So I’m going to drive around until I find it.”
She shook her head in disbelief.
“You’re just going to drive around aimlessly and try to bump into it?”
He nodded.
“That’s my plan.”
“I’m glad I didn’t come up with it,” she said. “You’d fire me.”
He agreed but added, “Sometimes you just have to turn yourself into a monkey and peck at the keypad. Then hope you get lucky enough to spell a word.”
“I better come with you,” she said. “Otherwise you’re going to get yourself into trouble today. I can already tell.”
As they poked and prodded the never-ending industrial areas north of the railroad spur, occasionally stopping to piss behind a dumpster-Teffinger, not Sydney-he got a call from Katie Baxter.
“I have a list of all the BMW owners,” she said. “By the end of the day I should have background checks on all of them. But get this. Eight of them are registered to Hogan, Slate amp; Dover, where Rachel Ringer worked.”
“Interesting.”
“I thought you’d say that.”
He hung up and told Sydney.
“That law firm’s involved in all this up to its ass,” Teffinger said. “I just don’t know how.” He studied the buildings as he drove and tried to pay enough attention to the road to keep from running into anyone. “Aspen Wilde’s been snooping around,” he said. “She overheard two of the lawyers talking about a death.”
“Which lawyers?”
Teffinger tried to remember.
“I have it written down,” he said. “Anyway, one of them, the guy lawyer, is turning out to be seriously strange. According to Aspen Wilde, he frequents an S amp;M place called Tops amp; Bottoms where he sticks pins into the girls.”
“That’s goddamn sick.”
Teffinger agreed.
“I mean, how does a guy get to be like that?”
“I don’t know, but a mind that thinks that’s okay probably wouldn’t flinch at cutting someone’s head off.”
“So you think he killed Rachel Ringer?”
“He’s got my attention,” Teffinger said. “Especially now that we know the firm has lots of BMWs. We need to find that building and confirm that’s where the killings took place. Then squeeze it for evidence.”
Three blocks later they came to an abandoned building enclosed in a chain-link fence.
Teffinger held the picture up and compared it to the structure in front of them.
“Bingo,” he said. “The monkey spells a word.”
60
DAY TEN-SEPTEMBER 14
WEDNESDAY MORNING
All morning, Aspen expected someone to walk into her office and ask what she’d been doing in Derek Bennett’s office last night. When no one came, she started to feel better. That changed when Blake Gray called shortly after ten and asked if she was available for lunch today.
“Of course. What’s the occasion?”
“Nothing special. Why don’t you swing by my office at 11:30 and we’ll try to beat the crowd.”
As soon as she hung up, she ducked into Christina Tam’s office, closed the door, and told her.
“Somehow he knows,” she said. “I can feel it.”
Christina didn’t seem concerned.
“How could he?”
“They could have this place bugged a million different ways and we’d never know it.”
Christina rolled a pencil in her hand.
“Now you’re getting paranoid,” she said. “Just calm down, go to lunch, and see what he has to say. It’s probably nothing.”
She looked amused.
“What?” Aspen asked, curious.
“Here’s a list of things to not bring up,” she said. “Tops amp; Bottoms, Rebecca Yates, Robert Yates, flashlights, coat closets, and guns in drawers.”
“And Derek Bennett,” Aspen added.
“Right. And me too, for that matter.”
Aspen kept her nose to the grindstone all morning and then inconspicuously went to the billing room and pulled the time sheets for Jacqueline Moore and Derek Bennett, to see if either of them had been in New York on July 22nd when Robert Yates got murdered.
Both had been right here in Denver.
Billing clients like there was no tomorrow.
For the week before and the week after as well.
Just for grins, she checked on Blake Gray too.
Same thing.
In a corner booth at the Paramount Cafe, over the lunch special-salmon and salad-Blake Gray gave Aspen the inside track on how to survive life in a big law firm. Then he got to the point of the meeting.
She shouldn’t let her guard down.
He still firmly believed her life was in danger.
She should go to the firm’s D.C. office until everything blew over.
She listened carefully, thanked him overwhelmingly for his concern, and then politely rejected the offer. Then she changed the subject.
“Christina was telling me about this huge antitrust case that the firm won, over a hundred million,” she said. “I can’t even imagine what that must feel like.”
“Ask Derek Bennett,” Blake said. “He spearheaded the whole thing.”
She bit her lower lip, trying to not visibly react.
“Talk about your nasty kick-’em-in-the-balls fight, this was the granddaddy of them all. It was the legal equivalent of two packs of junkyard dogs ripping each other wide open. Lucky for us Derek Bennett was the biggest dog in the bunch.”