Body of Shadows (25 page)

This was it.

It was time to meet the enemy.

With adjusted eyes she spotted Renn-Jaa in a dim corner booth sitting across from a blond.

As she walked over things got bad.

She hoped the blond wouldn’t be as attractive as her law firm bio photo.

In fact it was the opposite.

She slid in next to her, gave her a peck on the cheek and said, “We finally meet. I’m Pantage Phair.”

Kelly studied her.

“Kelly Ravenfield,” she said. “I was hoping you’d be ugly.”

“Back at you.”

“Black hair, blond hair,” Kelly said. “Drift has a real yin-yang thing going on, doesn’t he?”

“So it seems.” Pantage spotted a penny sitting on the edge of the table and picked it up. “You want to flip for him?”

Kelly smiled.

“I can see what he sees in you,” she said. “So what’s this mysterious meeting about? Why am I here? Are you going to drag me out into the alley to settle things with a good old fashioned cat fight?”

“Nothing that dramatic.”

They ordered salads, got informed by a ponytailed waitress with a full-sleeve tattoo that they “might want to avoid the produce today,” and changed to soup.

“That comes from a can, right?” Renn-Jaa said. “It’s not mixed up in a 55-gallon drum in the back or anything, is it?”

No.

It wasn’t.

“Okay then, the soup.”

Pantage explained
why they were here, namely she got picked up by a gladiator at the Tequila Rose on Friday night, the club’s videotapes showed he had been stalking her, so she and Renn-Jaa had broken into his loft to see if they could find anything.

“That was a risky move,” Kelly said.

“Stupid is more like it,” Pantage said. “Anyway, we downloaded his laptop onto a flash drive last night. It turns out he’s taken a hundred or more pictures of me all over town, dating back to at least two weeks prior to Friday night.”

Kelly put a serious expression on her face.

“That’s Van Gogh’s MO.”

“Precisely,” Pantage said. “I need to get the flash drive to Drift without being implicated in any type of criminal activity. Me and Renn-Jaa are hiring you as our attorney.”

“There needs to be a reason,” Kelly said.

Pantage nodded.

“We know that,” she said. “The reason is this. We’re going to give the flash drive to you and it comes with the request for a legal opinion which is, Was it okay to break into the gladiator’s loft and download the information contained on that flash drive, or did we commit an illegal act?”

Kelly smiled.

“I think I could probably answer that for you, given enough time to do the research.”

“I thought you could,” Pantage said. “Now, if it turns out that Drift somehow ends up with the flash drive off the record, then that’s what happens. Our hope is that after he knows what he can find, he’ll think of a way to get a legitimate search warrant and then inadvertently stumble on the laptop. Don’t mention our names to Drift though.”

“He’ll know.”

“We don’t care if he figures it out,” she said. “What we care about is the fact that legally we have a confidential communication taking place here, by which I mean it’s fully within the attorney-client privilege, by which I mean no one loses their license.”

Kelly nodded.

“Devious,” she said. “Beauty and brains. I think I may be in trouble.”

“You’ll take the case?”

“Of course. Did you bring the flash drive with you?”

“Yes; and a retainer. Is ten dollars enough?”

“That sounds fair.”

Pantage looked around for her purse.

It wasn’t on the table.

It wasn’t on the seat next to her.

Then she remembered.

She set it on the back of the toilet when she was in there ten minutes ago.

She headed
for the restroom with a terrible feeling in her gut. When she got there the feeling exploded into something much worse.

The purse wasn’t there.

It was gone.

80

Day Five

July 22

Friday Morning

The Ink Box
was sandwiched between a gay video arcade and a medical-marijuana joint in a seedy stretch of Broadway of the south edge of the city. Drift parked on a side street, made double sure the doors were locked and headed over.

Inside with her feet propped up on a desk was an attractive woman in her early twenties, heavily pierced and inked, with raven punk hair, wearing a short white tank and low-riding jeans, reading a magazine.

“You’re Angel,” Drift said.

She nodded and said, “You’re not what I expected.”

“No?”

“No.”

“What’d you expect?”

“I don’t know but not you,” she said.

Residual pot hung in the air. Hip-hop spilled out of a black Bose radio on the desk. “I have that same exact radio in my bedroom, except mine’s white,” Drift said.

“Small world.”

“Mine doesn’t get that station though.”

“Next time you come bring it with you and I’ll fix it for you.”

“That’d be nice.”

She ran her eyes up and down his frame.

“You’re what we call a clean canvas,” she said. “We should dirty you up before you leave.”

“You think?”

She nodded.

“Can I show you something?”

“Sure.”

She stood up,
pulled the tank over her head with a sexy slither, and tossed it on the desk. Perky attributes emerged, as good as Drift had ever seen. The woman shook them.

“See this right here?”

She pointed to a tattoo on her left breast.

It was a scorpion.

The tail looked exactly like the tail on the man who was stalking Pantage yesterday.

She took Drift’s hand and put it on her breast. “Go ahead and touch it,” she said. “It doesn’t bite.”

He squeezed.

“Nice.”

She sat on the desk and dangled her feet.

“I dance down at B.T.s,” she said. “A guy came in one night, saw this bad boy right here and asked me where I got it. He wanted one just like it on his arm. Two days later he showed up and I inked it on him.”

“Did you find the records on him yet?”

She shook her head.

“I’m still looking,” she said. “This was two years ago. We don’t do paper anymore, everything’s on the computer. We back up onto flash drives but to be honest we’re not very good at labeling them.” She pulled the top drawer of the desk out and pointed to eight or ten sticks. “I’ve gone through three of them so far with no luck. You want me to keep going?”

Yes.

He did.

“I’m going to lock the front door,” she said. “Otherwise there will be a hundred potheads from next door barging in here looking for a lap dance.”

“You give lap dances here?”

“Yeah but don’t spread it around,” she said. “Twenty dollars. I’m going to give you a free one after we find the information you want.”

It took twenty minutes, twenty topless minutes, but the time was worth it.

The guy’s name was Jack Plant.

His address was over near Washington Park.

Drift folded a printout of the invoice and shoved it in his back pocket.

Angel put her arms around his neck and rubbed her chest against him.

“Time for that lap dance, cowboy.”

“I’d like to but—”

She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards a door that led into a back room.

He stopped, pulled out his wallet and gave her two fifties. “That’s for the work you missed while you were taking care of me. I’ll get that lap dance from you down at B.T.s some night.”

“You go there?”

“Yes.”

“I work Friday and Saturday nights.”

“I’ll hunt you down.”

“I’ll bet you will.”

81

Day Five

July 22

Friday Morning

Yardley screamed
for help as the drone of the approaching car got louder. No voices responded, no faces magically appeared, nothing sane happened. Her initial thought was to stay outside and make Cave kill her there, in hopes that someone was off on a distant ridge with a pair of binoculars. Then she pictured Cave dragging her in through the window over the jagged glass and tearing her flesh to shreds. She climbed in, left the bed where it was and cowered under it.

The front door opened.

Footsteps approached.

The bedroom door opened.

“Stand up.”

The words took her by surprise because they didn’t belong to Cave. They belonged to someone else. She stood up to find a large man, six three or more. He looked like an Indian with a mean face and long braided hair.

He cast his eyes on the broken window and said, “You’ve been a busy girl.”

She suddenly realized where she knew the voice from.

He was the one she talked to on the phone, the man who was brought in to take care of Cave.

“Why am I chained up?”

“For your own good,” he said. “I was hoping that our little trap last night would draw Cave in and that I could kill him and that would be the end of everything. When he didn’t show, I had to go to plan B, which is to keep you secluded until I get Cave.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s simple,” he said. “Marabella wants to be absolutely sure Cave doesn’t get his hands on you and find a way to make you talk.”

“I don’t need to be chained for that.”

He exhaled.

“It’s important that you stay here and that I’m absolutely sure you’re here at all times,” he said. “I can’t have you be a distraction.”

“I won’t be,” she said. “I’ll stay here but at least give me the run of the house.”

He studied her.

“I’ll unchain you while I’m here,” he said. “It’s going back on though when I leave.”

Yardley said, “Fine.”

She’d worry about it later.

All she wanted right now was the steel off her wrist.

He turned out
to be an Apache named Ghost Wolf who whipped up pancakes and coffee on a propane stove, which they ate on the front steps. The world in front of the house was as abandoned and empty as behind. A rutted, weed-invested drive snaked off into the distance, a feeble umbilical cord to civilization.

“What is this place?”

“It’s Apache.”

“We’re on a reservation?”

“No, it’s Apache owned but not part of a reservation,” he said. “Three thousand acres. We’re on the eastern plains, fifty miles east of Denver.”

“What’s it used for?”

“Lots of things,” he said. “In this case, Cave’s body will end up buried out there.”

Yardley took a sip of coffee.

“How many other Caves are already here?”

He grunted.

“By my hand, eleven,” he said. “By others, more.”

“So you’ve been at this a while.”

“Three years.”

“That’s all?”

He nodded.

“That’s when someone I knew got stumbled on one night by a shit-faced pack of cowboys who thought she’d be a good little ride,” he said. “Afterwards, they figured she’d be a good witness too, so they took care of that little problem.”

“They killed her?”

He nodded.

“Strangled her to death. Five of them are out there in the field now. One is yet to come.”

“Was she your wife?”

“No, someone else’s wife,” he said. “My lover.”

“What’d the husband do?”

“That broke-dick dog? Nothing. He got drunk and forgot about it.”

He pulled a pack of smokes out of his back pocket, tapped one out and held it out to see if Yardley was interested, which she was. He lit them up from a book of matches and blew smoke.

“So where’s Cave?”

“I don’t know,” Yardley said. “I do know one thing though. You’re not going to get him without me. Let me help you.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“There’s nothing to think about.” She took a long drag and stood up. “We’re wasting time. Let’s get going.”

82

Day Five

July 22

Friday Afternoon

Losing the flash drive
to a bathroom opportunist was a blow but not a fatal one. The importance of the JPEGs wasn’t the images themselves so much as the fact they spanned back more than two weeks. That information could still be communicated from Kelly to Drift irrespective of the lack of proof. It wasn’t until Pantage was walking back to the law firm that she realized the more important aspect of the loss, namely that she never checked the other files to see if they related to any of the Van Gogh victims.