Aspen pondered it.
And sipped the drink.
Then she asked, “Do you think Blake fed all that information to Derek Bennett?”
Christina shrugged.
“I’d have to believe so. They’re pretty close.”
Aspen twisted the glass in her hand.
“So who put the note on my chair warning me that you were a spy?”
Christina didn’t know but said, “It wasn’t Blake, that’s for sure. The more I think about it, it might have been Jacqueline Moore. She was close to both Blake and Bennett and would have known that I was working as a spy. If Bennett was getting the information from Blake, he might have been thinking that you were getting too close for comfort and needed to be taken out. So maybe Jacqueline warned you that I was a spy so you won’t give me any more information. That way I couldn’t feed it to Blake, who in turn couldn’t feed it to Bennett. That way it would be less likely that Bennett would perceive you as a threat and would be less inclined to do something drastic.” She frowned. “That’s just a wild theory, though. I don’t have any proof one way or the other.”
A man and a woman climbed out of a booth and headed for the door. The man-who looked like an Indian-grabbed Christina’s arm as he passed and asked, “Where do I know you from?”
She looked at him.
A scar ran down the side of his face.
His hair was long and thick and black, pulled into a ponytail.
She’d never seen him before.
She would have remembered.
“I don’t know.”
“You look familiar,” he insisted.
“Sorry. I really don’t think I know you.”
He studied her, as if deciding whether she was lying, and then he looked at Aspen.
Longer than he should have.
And then walked away.
90
DAY TWELVE-SEPTEMBER 16
FRIDAY NIGHT
When Gretchen passed out back at the farmhouse, too drunk to even have sex, Draven’s thoughts turned to Davica Holland. He got dressed in all things black, parked on the other side of the open space, and then crept toward her house through a pitch-black night.
Before he knew it, he was in her back yard.
Then in the window well.
Prying open the window.
Listening for an alarm.
Hearing none.
Waiting there, nevertheless, for more than five minutes, just in case she had a silent alarm directly piped to a security company. When no cops came, he crept into the house.
He found her upstairs in the master bedroom.
Lying naked on top of the sheets.
Sound asleep.
He injected drugs into her ass and then held his hand over her mouth until she lost consciousness. Then he carried her naked body through the open space to the car, put her in the trunk, and headed for the cabin.
When they arrived, she was still unconscious. He tied her hands to the headboard and put a breathable gag in her mouth.
Then he pulled her legs up and stuck his dick in.
He pounded her hard.
He pounded her like the stud that he was.
He pounded her until he came like a madman.
He then tied her feet to the bed and wandered into the great room where he fell asleep on the couch.
An hour later he woke up and did it again.
Exactly the same, except this time she was awake, which made it a lot more fun.
91
DAY THIRTEEN-SEPTEMBER 17
SATURDAY-2:00 A.M.
Teffinger didn’t find a single thing belonging to Jacqueline Moore in Derek Bennett’s BMW, even though he searched it meticulously three times.
No bloody knife.
No jewelry.
No nothing.
Maybe some of the bills in Bennett’s wallet had come from Moore, and had her fingerprints on them, but at this point it seemed like a long shot.
“Looks like he was smart enough to dump everything,” he told Sydney.
“He’s a slippery little bastard all right.”
“Which means we got nothing,” he added. “Except maybe a lawsuit for smashing his car. We’re going to have to cut him loose.”
“What about assaulting a police officer?”
Teffinger frowned. “Hell, I’m the one who rammed him and chased him down. I’d have hit me too in his shoes.”
So they cut him loose.
Then something weird happened.
Instead of leaving, Bennett wanted to talk and suggested that the three of them go to Denny’s for a bite.
Teffinger hated the thought of actually breaking bread with the guy. But hated the thought of not getting valuable information even more. So the three of them ended up in a red vinyl booth eating a 2:00 a.m. breakfast and drinking hot decaf coffee while it rained outside.
“Sloop John B” dropped from ceiling speakers. “We’re not here because I’m trying to save my own ass,” Bennett said. “We’re here because Blake Gray is out of control. He’s been my law partner for more than twenty years. So trust me, this hurts. But it has to be done.”
Teffinger shoved a forkful of pancakes in his mouth.
“Go on,” he said.
“It all started when we got a big judgment for one of our clients called Omega,” he said. “It was against a competitor of Omega’s called Tomorrow, Inc. After we got that judgment, the CEO of Tomorrow, a guy by the name of Robert Yates, started buying up Omega’s stock. His plan was to get control of Omega and then bring it under the umbrella of Tomorrow. He’d be able to make the judgment go away, in effect, plus the two companies would be stronger together than either one was on its own.”
Teffinger nodded.
“All right.”
“This was big trouble for the law firm,” Bennett said. “If Yates succeeded, we’d lose Omega as a client. Omega would be a part of Tomorrow, and all of Tomorrow’s legal work is done by a big Wall Street firm. So me and Blake Gray and Jacqueline Moore got together to see if we could figure out a way to prevent the takeover from happening.”
“Makes sense,” Teffinger said.
“We had the name of a guy who might be able to help,” Bennett said. “A psychologist by the name of Beverly Twenhofel, who also teaches at the University of Denver, was speaking to a group of students at an off-campus session at an Einstein Bros. They were talking about serial killers. After that meeting, a man who had been sitting at a nearby table approached her in the parking lot and asked her all kinds of weird questions. She got the distinct impression that he had killed and would kill again. She followed him and wrote down his license plate number. Then she came to our law firm and met with Jacqueline Moore to get a legal opinion as to whether the discussion with this man was within the physician-patient privilege. Jacqueline gave the case to Rachel Ringer, who handed the legal research down to Aspen Wilde, a summer law clerk at the time. The firm ended up providing a legal opinion that the communication was indeed privileged, which is the correct answer by the way. However, we also had the license plate number of someone who might be a killer.”
“Sloop John B” faded off and “Love Me Do” took its place.
“Blake Gray ran the plates, got the guy’s name-Jack Draven-and actually met with him,” Bennett said. “Then we hired him to go to New York and scare Robert Yates into abandoning the Omega takeover, under a threat that otherwise his daughter and wife would be killed.”
Bennett looked at his food, lost in thought.
Then looked back at Teffinger.
“I’m not proud of that,” he said. “Nothing was supposed to happen other than a threat. But things went wrong and Yates and his daughter, a little girl named Amanda, ended up stabbed to death in Central Park. We all felt like shit, especially Jacqueline Moore, who was having a hard time coping with the guilt.”
He took a sip of coffee.
Interesting.
“Another series of events happened too,” Bennett said. “Blake Gray got the hots for Rachel Ringer. He came on strong one night and almost raped her in her office. She came and told me about it and was going to go to the police. I actually encouraged her to, but somehow Blake talked her out of it and she didn’t. But she was too uncomfortable to stay in the firm any more and started floating her resume around town. Then she turned up dead. Blake Gray never confessed to me that he did it, but the conclusion is inescapable. He was worried about losing his power over her after she got away from the firm. He was scared she’d change her mind and go to the police.”