I t was dark outside and Teffinger was alone in homicide, feeling the weight of the day, when the phone company finally faxed over Chase’s cell phone records. On Monday she’d received about fifteen calls.
Monday was the day she disappeared.
Teffinger dialed the people who had called the woman and got their stories as to why they called, what they talked about, and whether Chase mentioned anything about meeting a man for sex.
He took notes but none of substance.
One of the calls came from a payphone north of Pueblo.
Teffinger dialed the number.
No one answered.
The oversized industrial clock on the wall, the one with the twitchy second hand, said 9:10 p.m. Overhead, a fluorescent bulb hummed. He stood up, dumped a cup of cold coffee into the snake plant, and turned the lights out as he left.
Then he headed south on I-25.
He was passing through the tech center, trying to stay out of the way of maniac drivers, when Sydney called for an update. He filled her in and was almost about to hang up when a stray thought entered his head.
“Hey,” he said, “before you go, help me out on something. One of the calls to Chase on Monday came from a public phone north of Pueblo. For some reason, that’s been nagging me. It means something but I don’t know what.”
“Pueblo?”
“Right.”
“We have a missing person down there,” she said.
Teffinger knew he should have remembered that as soon as she said it. Early in the case he’d asked Sydney to keep track of anyone who turned up missing in Colorado. She subsequently told him about a Pueblo woman. He’d dismissed it as not much more than a curiosity at the time because the location was too far away and all of the bodies found at the railroad spur had been white.
“I remember,” he said. “What’s her status? Did she ever show back up?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’d be interesting, if she hasn’t.”
Fifteen minutes later, when he arrived at Davica’s, a strange car was in the driveway-a white Jaguar. When he knocked on the door, no one answered. He tried the doorknob, found it unlocked, and stepped inside.
He called for her.
No answer.
He grabbed a Bud Light out of the fridge, took off his weapon and put it on the kitchen counter, and finally found Davica out back in the hot tub, naked, in the company of another equally naked and well-endowed young woman with long, wet, jet-black hair.
“Hey, stranger,” Davica said. “We’ve been waiting for you. This is Monica.”
The woman stood up, displaying a totally shaved body, and leaned over to shake his hand. When she did, she suddenly grabbed his arm with both hands and yanked him into the water.
When his head came to the surface both of the women were laughing.
“Be careful of her,” Davica warned. “She has a bit of a wild side.”
Teffinger shook water out of his ear.
“So I see.”
“Now get out of those clothes,” she said.
He hesitated.
“You said I could have another woman,” Davica said. “This is her. But we haven’t done anything yet, because I’m not going to do anything unless you’re with me.” She squeezed Monica’s breast and then looked back at Teffinger. “And now you are.”
The two women kissed.
Long and deep and passionately.
Then Davica looked back at Teffinger.
“You can join in or you can watch. Your choice.”
W hen Aspen arrived back at the law firm after meeting with Sarah Ringer at CU, she called Blake Gray and asked if his office door was still open.
He laughed.
“Yeah, but not until tonight,” he said. “I’m totally slammed all day.”
“Tonight’s fine. That way if you fire me, at least I can sleep in.”
“Let me tell you where I’ll be.”
That evening, after supper, she headed to Chatfield State Park, paid an expensive entry fee, and then drove all the way around the lake to the marina. The Accord ran sluggish, as if twenty horses had been pulled from under the hood and were now being dragged behind instead.
“If you break, I’m leaving your ass here,” she said.
The car sputtered.
“I’m serious,” she added.
The marina turned out to be a lot bigger than she expected. There must have been three or four hundred slips. Tons of geese walked around, not showing a bit of fear. A gentle but steady wind blew out of the northwest, surprisingly warm. Blake Gray met her at the gate, escorted her to a thirty-foot sailboat moored at the end of D-Dock, and helped her aboard.
“When I want to forget everything, this is where I come,” he said. “This isn’t mine, by the way. It belongs to Doug Willoughby, the CEO of Omega.”
Aspen recognized the name-Omega.
That was the client that had the big antitrust judgment against Tomorrow, Inc. The one Derek Bennett represented. The one that Robert Yates was going to take over, before he and his daughter got killed while playing Frisbee in Central Park.
Aspen couldn’t believe the vessel and headed for the cabin.
“Can I go inside?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
Fifteen minutes later they had the boat on the lake, tilted fifteen degrees to starboard, with the mainsail and jib taut with wind.