R Jagger - Lawyer Trap

She straightened up the apartment and went to bed.

The upstairs neighbors had their music on again. The bass pushed through the walls and straight into her brain. She pulled the pillow over her head and closed her eyes. It did no good, and the more she thought about how rude they were, the more awake she got.

So she drove down to 24-Hour Fitness to exhaust herself on the treadmill.

DAY TWO-SEPTEMBER 6

TUESDAY MORNING

Under a cloudless Colorado sky, Draven drove west through Clear Creek Canyon, one of his all-time favorite places in the world. Sheer rock walls rose straight up on both sides, leaving just enough room at the bottom for the twisty two-lane road and the river, which frothed with white foam as it pounded over boulders.

Seriously stunning.

He used to tube those icy waters back when he was a kid, almost drowning himself more times than he could count. That was back in the days when asshole landowners strung barbwire across the river to keep kayaks and tubes off.

Draven got tangled up in some of that barbwire once.

Got eight stitches in his face and almost lost an eye.

He paid a special little visit to the landowner two nights later.

Word got around.

Most of the barbwire on the river came down after that.

He passed through the first tunnel, then the second, where the road cut through the mountains. Now the tunnels were lighted, unlike years ago when all they had were signs that warned drivers to Turn Headlights On. When he came to Highway 119 he took it, deeper into the mountains, past Black Hawk for about five miles, where he turned onto a gravel road that followed a string of short telephone poles.

At the end of that road he came to a cabin.

A beat-up pickup sat out front.

A detached garage squatted to the left.

He stopped, killed the engine, walked to the door, and knocked.

A teenager answered, about seventeen, with brown spiked hair, dressed in total black. Draven expected someone older and a lot more normal.

“You the guy who wants to see the place?” the kid asked.

“That’s me.”

“My dad couldn’t make it,” the kid said.

“Fine,” Draven said. “No problem.”

“Go ahead and look around.”

The place had a large central room with a vaulted ceiling, really nice, actually, and two separate bedrooms. The water came from a well, but the electricity was public. The garage was empty and spacious with a dirt floor. You could spill a lot of blood in there, clean it up easily, and no one would ever be the wiser.

Best of all, there were no other structures in sight.

No one would hear screaming.

Just to be sure, he asked the kid. “No neighbors, huh?”

The kid shrugged. “I’ve never seen any houses anywhere around here.”

“How big is your property?”

The kid wrinkled his forehead. “I think it’s a hundred acres, or two hundred, something like that. My dad would know.”

Draven nodded.

Good enough.

He’d scout around later, just to be sure no one else was around. But at least for now the place seemed perfect. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll take it until the end of the month. Five hundred, right?”

The kid shrugged.

“Whatever my dad told you.”

“He told me five hundred plus a thousand security deposit.” He handed the kid fifteen hundred-dollar bills.

Done deal.

After the kid left, Draven got the stuff from the trunk of his car and brought it into the bedroom-cameras, tripods, monitors, sheets, cuffs, blindfolds, ropes, chains, locks, and all the rest of it, including the all-important DVD recorder.

He scouted the surrounding area.

There were no other houses around.

Very nice.

Pine trees perfumed the air. Green lichen covered boulders that jutted out of the earth, some as big as trucks. The aspen trees were just starting to get a yellow hue.

Just for grins, he jogged all the way down to Highway 119, and then walked back up, enjoying a perfect day.

He locked up, stopped at Black Hawk and played blackjack for a couple of hours, stuffed his face at the casino buffet, and headed back to his Denver apartment.

He’d almost pulled into the parking lot when he spotted four skuzzy bikers hanging around. They looked like they’d been there for a while. He drove past too fast to see their faces but knew they were the jerks from Pueblo, the three assholes who chased him down the street, plus someone else.

Probably the guy Draven stuffed in the toilet.

Shit.

How’d they track him?

They must have seen his license plate number.

The little bastards.

So, they want to play?

They want to play so bad that they came all the way up here to Denver?

Fine.

He can play too.

DAY TWO-SEPTEMBER 6

TUESDAY

The hand in the dirt turned out to be connected to a body, as Teffinger suspected; a woman’s body, to be precise. He watched as the Crime Unit unburied it scoop by scoop, careful to not overlook any foreign materials or evidence. The grave was shallow, not much more than six inches, just like Angela Pfeiffer’s. The state of decomposition of the two victims was also similar. The graves were no more than a hundred feet apart.

Finally, just like Angela Pfeiffer, this woman was naked.

But whereas Angela Pfeiffer had been stabbed repeatedly, there wasn’t a single mark on this woman.

“Whoever killed this one killed the other one,” Teffinger said. “They were obviously both buried the same night. That pretty much eliminates Davica as a suspect.”

“Unless this is another one of her past lovers,” Sydney added.

He smiled.

“Right, except for that,” he said.

“Or unless this is Angela’s new lover.”

“Right, that too.”

“Or unless this one was a witness.”

“Okay, that too.”

“Or unless this one is a decoy,” Sydney added.

He raised an eyebrow.

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know,” she said. “You kill the one you want, and then a stranger too, to make it look like someone else did it.”

Teffinger wasn’t persuaded.

“I’m sure there are situations where that’s happened,” he said. “But you’d have to be awfully cold-blooded. Davica doesn’t even come close to anything like that.”

“Yeah, well…”

“If I really stretch my imagination, I can maybe see her killing Angela,” Teffinger said, interrupting her. “I have to admit, I never put too much stock in the fact that she threatened the woman’s life. Those were nothing more than heat-of-passion words said during a fight. I say stuff like that two or three times a day but hardly ever actually kill anyone.”

Sydney kicked the dirt.

“I’d agree,” she said, “if there was nothing more. But we still have the repeated stabbing.”

Teffinger knew what she meant.

The stabbing was an act of passion.

The hallmark of someone close to the victim.

“It’s curious that this second woman was killed in a different manner,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to find out the cause of death. In any event, it sort of blows your decoy theory out of the water. If I was going to kill someone, and then a stranger too to make it look like someone else did it, I’d kill them both the same way.”

Sydney shrugged.

“Maybe,” she said. “But then again, maybe you do it different, so no one thinks it a decoy.”

Teffinger tilted his head.

“I’m never going to win an argument with you, am I?”

She put her arm around his shoulders.

“That doesn’t mean you should stop trying,” she said. Then she chuckled, as if she just heard a joke.

“What?” he asked, curious.