Lawyer Trap

78





DAY TWELVE–SEPTEMBER 16

FRIDAY MORNING


Teffinger was already up and driving south on I-25, heading toward Pueblo, when the sun broke over the eastern plains and washed the Front Range with a soft golden hue. He saw about fifteen different places where he would like nothing more than to pull over and set up an easel. There was something about the light in the fall, particularly the early morning light, that brought out the color of things.

Sydney slept in the passenger seat.

His thoughts turned to the hot tub incident last night, the one he didn’t participate in but did watch. The sex show with Davica and the black-haired beauty had been erotic and intense, and should have aroused him, but didn’t. All he could think of the entire time was that he wished she didn’t need things like that in her life.

Maybe she was too wild for him.

Maybe no one person could satisfy her.

He raked his hair back with his fingers and decided to just take things one day at a time.

When he passed the Air Force Academy, lots of small single-engine planes buzzed the sky. Shortly thereafter he got bogged down in the Colorado Springs rush hour, but finally broke out the other side and entered that arid stretch of undeveloped land that escorted weary travelers into Pueblo.

He didn’t know much yet about the missing Pueblo woman, Mia Avila, other than she was fairly young, ran a tattoo shop, and vanished without a trace eight days ago—Thursday of last week, to be precise.

The stripper—Chase—disappeared four days later.

On Monday.

The same day she received a telephone call from a payphone just north of Pueblo.

Then showed up later with a nail in her forehead.

The big question is whether Mia Avila got one of the other nails in the box.

Sydney woke up just as they passed Eagleridge Drive on the northern edge of the city.

She yawned, stretched, and said, “I’m starved.”

Twenty minutes later they were in a booth at the Grand Prix Restaurant, with smothered burritos and piping hot coffee, meeting with a young Hispanic woman by the name of Detective Julia Torres.

She had a good dose of hunt in her blood.

Whereas most relatively fresh detectives might get overly excited at the possibility of being connected to a case as big as the one in Denver, she stayed focused on the facts.

The way a seasoned hunter would.

“Everything in the tattoo shop was pretty much normal,” Torres said. “There was no indication of a struggle or abduction. Nothing was broken. There was no blood on the floor. Nothing was taken, even though there was lots 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.”