“It looks abandoned. As far as the vehicle goes, we don’t have much of an angle on the license plate number,” he observed. “It’s definitely a BMW, though.”
Teffinger agreed. “I need the model, year, and color.”
Sydney showed up mid-afternoon and plopped down in the chair in front of Teffinger’s desk. “The phone’s a dead end,” she said, referring to the public phone that someone used on March 15th to place a four-minute call to Brad Ripley.
“You drove out there?”
“I did. The phone itself is located at a gas station on County Line Road. The security cameras don’t shine on it. And even if they did, the tapes have already been recycled about two thousand times.”
Teffinger frowned.
“Thanks for trying,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to sleep without running it to ground.”
Then she smiled like the Cheshire Cat.
“What?” he asked.
“Well, just because your idea is a dead end doesn’t mean that mine is.”
He thought about it.
He couldn’t remember what her idea was.
There were too many ideas floating around to keep track of.
That was the problem with this whole case.
“It turned out that Brad Ripley’s credit card statements show a March 15th purchase at the Cheesecake Factory,” she said.
Now Teffinger remembered.
Brad Ripley’s connection to someone on March 15th might have been live, over lunch, rather than by phone.
He nodded, impressed.
“Okay,” he said. “Run with it.”
She beamed and stood up.
“Whoa,” he said. “Sit back down. First I need to fill you in on Brad Ripley’s safe.”
Later, up on the sixth floor, Paul Kwak beamed as he handed Teffinger printouts of the photos in an enhanced state. Teffinger shook his head in disbelief.
“It almost looks like day,” he said.
“You got to love technology,” Kwak said.
Teffinger had never seen this particular building-old, boarded up, long and low with several doors. It reminded him of a small manufacturing facility.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I can’t find any markings or signage on it,” Kwak said. “It was used to make something or store something, is my best guess.”
“What about the BMW?”
“That was easy,” Kwak said. “Last year’s model, a 5-Series. The color has some fancy name but it’s basically silver.”
Teffinger shuffled through the printouts again.
“Can you bring the building up on the monitor?”
He could and pulled it up on a 30” flat-panel screen.
Electronically it was brighter and clearer but still didn’t give up any secrets.
“So how do I find this place?” Teffinger asked.
Kwak cocked his head.
“Find the BMW,” he said. “Then do something to make it go back there. And follow it when it does.”
Teffinger laughed.
“Do you have any simpler ideas?”
He didn’t.
“I’m a complicated man,” he said.
Aspen and Christina sat at the bar in a half-filled tavern near Larimer Square, drinking white wine too fast and bowing to the luck gods for letting them get out of the law firm alive and undetected. The crowd seemed like young professionals, dressed for success, taking a mid-week breath of life on their way to the weekend.
Christina seemed even more rattled than Aspen.
“So I still don’t get it,” Aspen said. “Some woman in New York goes into a suicide-by-bus routine. Derek Bennett calls her a dumb bitch and agrees with whoever it was on the other end of the phone that things are reaching critical mass-his words, critical mass.”
Christina took a sip of wine.
No, not a sip, a drink.
“Bennett’s turning out to be one strange piece of work,” she said. “And that gun. Why does a lawyer need a gun in his office? It gives me the creeps just knowing it’s in the building, much less that he’s the one who has it.”
She shuddered.
“That was a stroke of genius, by the way. That whole battery thing.”
Christina frowned.
“Sorry I didn’t think of it sooner,” she said. “I was a heartbeat away from pulling the fire alarm when I thought of it.”
“That would have been subtle.”
Two men came over, wearing suits, very polite, and wanted to buy them drinks.
They let them.
Then they headed back to Christina’s.
While Christina went to shower the day off, Aspen fired up her laptop and plugged into the Internet to do a little research. The suicide-by-bus woman, Rebecca Yates, turned out to be a still-gorgeous ex-model who had landed a full-time job as a trophy wife ten years ago. Other than giving her husband’s money away to charities, and parading her face in every high-society function this side of the moon, she really didn’t have many other dimensions.
Her husband-Robert Yates-on the other hand, turned out to be quite the story. A self-made man who worked his way up to Harvard and later said it was the most boring four years of his life. It did, however, springboard him onto a path that eventually landed him as the president, CEO, and majority shareholder of Tomorrow, Inc., a satellite communications company.
He and eight-year-old daughter Amanda Yates were playing Frisbee in Central Park on a nice July afternoon earlier this summer, a common ritual. Except this time they died.
Both had been ripped open with a jagged knife.