Body of Shadows (30 page)

“You’d be a good lawyer,” she said. “You know how to horse trade.”

“Yeah but I can’t lie good enough.”

“That’s true. You’d need to work on that. I could teach you.”

He smiled.

Then he put a serious expression on his face.

“I did some follow-up on your James Dean flash,” he said. “I got to thinking that maybe you were seeing someone who looks like James Dean. I mentioned it to Kelly Ravenfield who turned me on to something.”

“What?”

“There’s a private investigator in town by the name of Sanders Cave,” Drift said. “Kelly’s old law firm used to hire him for projects. He has a remarkable resemblance to James Dean.”

Pantage’s heart raced.

“Do you have a picture of him?”

Yes.

He did.

He pulled an image up of the man’s driver’s license on his cell phone and tilted it so Pantage could see.

“Is this the guy you saw?”

She couldn’t believe it.

“It could be.”

“What’s that mean? Maybe yes, maybe no?”

“I’d say 90 percent yes,” she said.

“Ninety percent,” Drift said. “Could you pick him out of a lineup?”

“No.”

“No? I don’t get it.”

“I can’t say he was the person I saw at Jackie’s,” she said. “He’s the person I saw in my flash. I can’t say that the flash was a memory, though. It was more like I was watching a movie. Maybe the movie came from a memory but I don’t have an actual memory. The more I think about it, the whole thing may have materialized in my head because I’d been looking at the cover of ‘Rebel Without a Cause.’ I have to be honest, Dent. If Abraham Lincoln’s face had been on the cover, it might have been him that I saw in my flash.”

Drift stared at the lights.

“Can you get a search warrant for his house?”

“Not based on what you’ve told me,” he said. “What you’re saying is that you saw him more in something like a dream than a memory.”

She nodded.

“Sorry. I wish I could say otherwise.”

Drift pulled her to him.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” he said. “Right now at this second I don’t care about anything except one thing.”

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Day Five

July 22

Friday Night

Drift swung past
the gladiator’s place, found the lights on and decided to hang out for a while and see if the man made a move. The chances were remote but remote was still more than zero. He parked a half block down the street, killed the engine and left the radio on.

The Zombies sang “Tell Her No.”

Drift could still smell Pantage in his clothes and taste her in his mouth. She might be a lawyer but she was built for sex and not afraid to prove it.

A shadow moved in the gladiator’s window.

Frankly, Drift wasn’t sure he was staking out the right man.

Cave was still a contender in his mind.

The gladiator, however, had more concrete evidence against him. He’d been staking out Pantage for at least two weeks. Admittedly there could be a non-lethal explanation. Maybe the gladiator saw her somewhere, got infatuated and decided to do a little recon before making a move. Guys have done stranger things. Still, the gladiator didn’t really need recon, not if the only goal was to impress a woman. He carried all the persuasion he needed right there in his smile and his muscles. He was more the kind of guy who could just look at a woman and suck her in.

Drift needed access to the man’s laptop.

He needed to find out if the guy had photo files on any of the other Van Gogh victims. What would really be nice is if Drift could find a bottle of ears. He had to resist the urge to break in. If the evidence was there and he tainted it through an illegal entry, that would be irreversible.

A light went out.

Then another.

Two minutes later the man walked out of the building to a car and pulled into the night.

Drift turned the radio off and followed.

“Head to Pantage’s house,” he said. “I dare you.”

If the gladiator
was going for Pantage, he was doing it by way of a fifty mile detour, heading east on 6
^th
Avenue all the way to Golden, then cutting to the left and winding up Lookout Mountain.

The road snaked up with an endless string of hairpin switchbacks, winding ever higher. The lights of Denver twinkled to the east, stretching farther and farther out as the road climbed.

Drift stayed back as far as he dared and, in fact, didn’t even have a visual of the gladiator most of the time.

He came around a switchback.

The gladiator was parked in a turnoff, standing in front of his headlights.

As Drift came around, the man waved him in.

The smart thing to do would be to keep going.

He pulled in, killed the engine and stepped out.

“Nice view, huh?”

“Yeah, real pretty,” Drift said.

“I killed a man here once,” the gladiator said. “I was seventeen. He was twenty-three. His girl liked me better than she liked him. He didn’t take too kindly to that and wanted to settle things man to man. I said sure but he’d have to throw the first punch. You know why?”

Drift said nothing.

“Self-defense,” the gladiator said. “Once that first punch is thrown, a man has a right to defend himself.”

He took his shirt off, slowly, one button at a time and then neatly placed it on the hood.

His chest was steel.

His arms were pythons.

“How about it Drift? Do you feel like taking that first punch?”

Drift took a step towards the man and squared off.

“Why don’t we both take it?” he said. “On the count of three. I’ll even let you do the counting.”

The gladiator hardened his face.

He raised his fists.

“Good enough,” he said.

Drift put his fists up and said, “This is for that little Asian girl.”

One …

Two …

Three!

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Day Five

July 22

Friday Night

Yardley ended up
in a throbbing club filled with nasty thoughts, hot bodies and a driving beat. She got three rum and cokes in her gut on top of the wine and wedged into the center of the dance floor. The music took control. She surrendered to it, her arms up, her hips grinding, her lips parted, her eyes unfocused.

A body ground into her from behind.

A hand reached around and cupped her stomach.

She didn’t turn around.

She went with the beat.

She went with the moment.

The hand moved up and went to her breast. Yardley pushed the hand in tighter. A nibble came at the back of her neck.

She turned and found herself face to face with a stunning woman.

A stranger.

A perfect stranger.

A perfect stranger with lagoon eyes, soft blond hair and pink lips.

They kissed.

The woman’s mouth was soft.

Her tongue was wet.

Her perfume was sex.

She put her mouth to Yardley’s ear and said, “I’ve been looking for you.”

Yardley pulled up
an image.

They were in bed.

She was on her back.

The woman was above her, naked from the waist down, straddling Yardley’s face, rocking her hips, grabbing a fistful of Yardley’s hair with hard tight fingers and pulling her face up tighter into her pussy.

She squeezed
the woman’s hand.

“I live close,” she said.

“Let’s go.”

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Day Six

July 23

Saturday Morning

Drift regained consciousness
to find he was outside in the dirt, in the middle of a black night, with a seriously damaged face and a body that may or may not be broken. He got to his knees and used the Tundra for support to get upright. The lights of Denver came in and out of focus to the east. He was still up on Lookout Mountain.

The gladiator had beaten the shit out of him.

It was one-sided from the get.

In fact, Drift couldn’t even remember if he got one solid punch to the man’s face.

The guy could have killed him.

The next time he would.

This was a warning.

He got into the truck and sat there until the dizziness in his head dissipated, then made it home alive. The bathroom mirror wasn’t kind. It showed a seriously swollen lip, a half-shut eye, ragged cuts, and a large number of nasty bruises on his arms, neck and torso. Under his hair was a lump the size of an egg. As far as he could tell, no bones were broken. He got in the shower, cleaned up as good as he could, left all the wounds uncovered and fell into bed.

When he woke up it was 10:16.

He got the coffee going and ate cereal from the left side of his mouth. Chewing was tough. There was a deep cut on the inside of his mouth where his cheek had been punched into his teeth.

Traffic on the drive in was thicker than usual.

Just as he passed Federal, his phone rang and Sydney came through.

“Bad news,” she said.

“Why? What happened?”

A beat then, “You sound weird.”

“My lip’s swollen.”

“From kissing?”

He grunted.

“Yeah, kissing fists. Give me the bad news first.”

“First? There’s only bad news, Drift. There’s no bad news followed by good news. There’s only bad news.”

“Okay, give me that first then.”

She smiled.

“I haven’t been able to get to the lawyer yet. She didn’t go home last night. I don’t know where she went. Worse though, I think we’ve been tricked,” she said, “and when I say we, I mean me.”

“How so?”

“That cell phone that she left on the table? I think it was a decoy,” she said. “I’ve run down every number in it. As far as I can tell, not one of them was to or from Northway. In hindsight, what I think happened is that the lawyer left it on the table pretending to help us but actually to obstruct us. My suspicion is that she called Northway as soon as she left the table. He’s probably in Bangkok by now.” A pause then, “The sad thing is there probably isn’t anything we can do about it. She never specifically said we’d find anything in there.”

“Maybe you missed something.”

She sighed.

“I’ve already double-checked,” she said. “Do you want me to triple-check?”

He considered it.

His brain hurt, right behind his eye.

It felt like someone was inside his skull trying to break out with a hammer.

“No,” he said. “Try to make contact with the lawyer again. Tell her we need his location and need it now. If we get it, it never came from her. Nothing about her ever goes into a file. If we don’t get it though and it turns out that she tipped him off, tell her we’re going to treat that as being an accessory after the fact.”

“Okay, but you still sound weird.”

When he got
to the office things got worse. It turned out that the chief wanted to see him. Tanker closed the door, wrinkled every crease in his 50-year-old face and said, “This is a conversation I hoped to never have.”

With that, he showed Drift a DVD.

It was the one of Drift breaking into September Tadge’s law office, copying confidential and privileged files and sneaking out.

Drift went to speak but Tanker cut him off with a wave of the hand.

“Don’t say anything,” he said. “September Tadge’s lawyer, who turns out to be none other than Grayson Condor, dropped this off this morning on behalf of his client. He says you not only stole files from Ms. Tadge but you’re also bedding Pantage Phair, who’s a prime witness in the case, and maybe even a suspect.”

Drift's mouth opened.

Tanker frowned.

“Don’t say anything,” he said. “I already knew about Pantage. The important thing here is that Condor knows about it and doesn’t take too kindly to it.” He diverted his eyes for a second then looked back. “We both knew your dick was going to get you in trouble sooner or later. It was just a matter of time.”

Drift exhaled.

“Now what?”

“I don’t have a choice Dent,” he said. “I love you like a son. You know that, but this time my hands are tied. I have no option but to suspend you pending an investigation. That’s the protocol and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

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