Body of Shadows (31 page)

Day Six

July 23

Saturday Morning

The tight little beauty
from the club last night turned out to be a New York model named ReVelle Sunn. Yardley woke up to the woman in bed with her Saturday morning and studied her curves as she headed for the shower.

Things were unraveling.

Cave was still drawing air in and out of his lungs, un-killable.

Death was everywhere.

It still wasn’t clear if Marabella was friend or foe. The specter of being held captive by Ghost Wolf wouldn’t leave Yardley alone.

Plus the whole operation had grown too big. Too many links were in the chain. It was only a matter of time before the weakest one snapped.

It was time to cut and run.

She’d made herself a promise at the very beginning that she wouldn’t get sucked in past the safety point. Today she was keeping that promise.

Nobody would know.

She wouldn’t tell Marabella.

She’d disappear without a trace, never to be seen or heard from again.

The shower door
opened and ReVelle slipped in, naked, still groggy but smiling. She got behind Yardley and rubbed her shoulders.

“Thanks for last night.”

Yardley turned and kissed her.

“Do you have a roommate?”

No.

She didn’t.

“Do you want one?” Yardley asked.

“You?”

She nodded.

“In New York?”

“Right. I’m going to move.”

“When?”

“Today.”

The woman ran her eyes down Yardley’s body as if seeing it for the first time, then did the same with her face. “We’ll make you a model,” she said. “I’ll hook it up.”

An hour later
she drove nonchalantly past the bookstore, saw no signs of Cave and parked behind in the alley next to the dumpster. With the gun ever within reach, she began the sanitizing process. Every single shred of her existence for years needed to be erased.

There could be no loose ends.

All physical and electronic footprints needed to be destroyed.

Documents got shredded.

All the cash went into a suitcase.

Fake driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates and credit cards went into her purse.

The desktop computer had carefully been used only for legitimate bookstore business purposes. Still, out of an abundance of caution, Yardley reset it to initial factory settings, removed the hard drive and stuck it in the suitcase.

The laptop went in there too, after resetting it. Later it would be smashed and hidden from the world where no one would stumble on it in a million years, the bottom of the ocean or something equivalent.

Most of the critical information was stored on five flash drives.

Yardley cut each one into thirds.

On the drive home, she tossed them out the window one at a time, aiming for gutters and shrubs and whatnot.

Outside
the clouds built up. The sunshine got spotty and then disappeared altogether. The temperature dropped into the low 80s and the humidity increased. A stronger wind blew.

A storm was coming.

With big kissing and a smiling face, ReVelle headed back to New York in a private jet late in the afternoon with Yardley’s suitcases in hand. There’d be no check-in or checkout of baggage. Since the flight started inside the United States, customs wouldn’t be involved.

The cash wasn’t an issue.

Even if ReVelle took it, which was unlikely, Yardley still had eight times that amount in offshore accounts.

She sanitized
her apartment.

Tonight she’d make Cave pay for killing Deven.

She’d spend the night in a sleazy hotel, paying cash.

Tomorrow she’d fly to New York irrespective of what happened tonight. If she had to come back for Cave two or three months down the road, so be it.

Late in the afternoon she bought a Kawasaki dirt bike, street legal with turn signals, plus a helmet, all for cash, under a fake name, Samantha Seagull. She wasn’t new to bikes. Her license had a motorcycle endorsement.

Cave would never expect her on a bike.

He’d be looking for a car.

102

Day Six

July 23

Saturday Morning

Things weren’t like
the old days when a guy could get a little dirty and bounce back. Now everything was politically correct, by the book, with checks and balances and fifty thousand people involved. Drift knew that. He’d screwed up this time past the point of no return. Driving back home after the fateful meeting with the chief, he called Kelly and told her the bad news.

“I’m thinking about resigning before I get officially fired,” he said.

“No, don’t,” she said. “Let me give it some thought.”

“There’s no thought to give it,” he said. “I broke into an attorney’s office and stole confidential files. The whole damn thing is on videotape. What’s the defense to that? That I had a few beers? That I did it in the name of catching the bad guy? That I won’t do it again?”

“Dent—”

“God, I can’t believe I did this to myself.”

“Calm down.”

“How can I? That job was my life. I don’t have anything else.”

“You have me.”

He exhaled.

“You know what I mean,” he said. “The pisser is that Tanker’s going to catch a lot of flak for this too. He’s stood up for me every time I got close to the edge. All that will come out.”

Silence.

“Like I said, let me think about it,” Kelly said. “Let’s meet later this afternoon, say 4:30. Not my office though. The rumors from your last visit are still flapping out of everyone’s gossipy little gums.”

Fine.

Whatever.

“Where?”

“How about in front of the Daniels & Fisher Tower?”

The Daniels & Fisher Tower.

That’s where he screwed Pantage last night.

“I’ll make it easy for you,” he said. “How about right outside your building. We’ll go somewhere and I’ll buy you a glass of wine.”

She laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“You just used the word I and the word buy in the same sentence,” she said.

He smiled.

“See what stress will do to you?”

“I guess.”

It was a long time
until 4:30. Drift was good at a lot of things but filling empty time wasn’t one of them. He didn’t even know what empty time looked like until this second.

Now he knew.

It wasn’t pretty.

He drove west through Golden and wound up Clear Creek Canyon with vertical rock on one side and the rapids on the other. Where the water was the wildest, he found a turnoff and climbed down to a boulder at the river’s edge.

The roar of the water filled his ears.

It was so weird being here.

It was a workday.

He got up to leave, once, then twice, then three times, each failing when he couldn’t think of where to go.

Pantage left a message.

She was okay, she was at work, she just wanted to thank him for last night, she still tingled between the legs, she wanted more.

He called Sydney.

She’d already heard the bad news and was en route back to Denver to take over the Jackie Lake case.

“I had a feeling this would happen some day,” she said. “I just pictured it at least a few years off.”

“I guess you were half wrong.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “Oh, by the way, the attorney refused to meet with me again. We have a total strikeout on Northway.”

“That’s because that’s the way my life works,” Drift said. “One good thing. The department’s going to save a lot of money on coffee with me gone.”

Sydney laughed.

“Millions,” she said. “You’re not gone yet though. Be on speed dial. As far as I’m concerned, you’re still running the Jackie Lake case.”

“If you want.”

“I want.”

He was downtown
in front of Kelly’s building at 4:20, sitting on the sidewalk with his knees up and his back against the stone.

Someone walked by and tossed a dollar at him.

He looked up.

It was a man swinging a leather briefcase.

“Thanks,” he said.

The man didn’t respond.

He just kept walking.

Drift wasn’t worth a look back.

The appointed time came and went.

Kelly didn’t come out.

She must be stuck on the phone.

At 4:45 she still wasn’t out.

Then 5:00 came and still no Kelly.

He called her cell.

She didn’t answer.

He called the law firm receptionist and asked for her.

“She’s been out all afternoon, then she had a 4:30 appointment out of the office. I don’t expect her back today.”

Okay.

Thanks.

He stood up and paced.

Half an hour went by. Now it was 5:30. Kelly was officially a full hour late.

He called her cell.

She didn’t answer.

103

Day Six

July 23

Saturday Night

Saturday night after dark
a mean thunderstorm fell out of an even meaner sky. Bolts of lightning ripped the blackness, one after another after another, igniting swirling clouds in their eerie wrath and slapping thunder across the front range. Dressed in all things black, Yardley took shelter from the weather in the rusty interior of a 1972 Camero, east of Cave’s house, in Honest Ed’s Junkyard.

She was locked in dark thoughts.

Tonight was made for killing.

It was built for it.

Cave would show up.

“This is for Deven.”

Those would be the last words his twisted little ears would hear on earth.

He lived in an uneventful two-story wooden structure at the end of a hundred-yard gravel drive that fed off South Golden Road in Golden. The area was a mismatch of development. Cave’s property was bounded on one side by the junkyard and on the other by the decaying infrastructure of what had once been a trailer park but was now a ghost town.

Yardley trained a pair of AutoFocus Bushnell binoculars on Cave’s windows. They were exactly the same as when she got here two hours ago, dark and lifeless.

He’d come.

She could feel it.

Tonight was the night.

She’d kill him.

She’d never regret it, not in fifty years. When she was old, she’d look back on this night and smile. She’d do it again, even then, if she had to.

Come on, Cave.

Come on home.

It’s safe.

Don’t be afraid.

104

Day Six

July 23

Saturday Night

In the midst
of a violent storm, Pantage parked her car a hundred feet down from Honest Ed’s Junkyard and headed for Cave’s house on foot. Ever since Drift showed her the man’s driver’s license, his James Dean face became clearer and clearer as the person she saw murder Jackie Lake.

She needed to get into his house.

She needed to see if Jackie Lake’s ear was in there.

Drift didn’t know what she was doing.

He’d try to prevent it.

If she insisted, he might even break in himself just so she wouldn’t put herself at risk. She didn’t want to force him into that position, particularly given the trouble he was already in.

The night was dark except for when the lightning jerked it apart.

She made her way one silent step at a time to the house.

The windows were dark.

No light came from inside.

There was no garage.

There was no vehicle in the driveway.

She tried the front doorknob to find it locked.

She knocked on the door, loudly, then ran thirty steps and ducked behind an old barrel. The front door didn’t open. No lights turned on inside.

Cave wasn’t home.

Either that or he was lying in wait.

She headed around to the back of the house, trying the windows as she did and finding them all locked. The rear door was also secured. She went to the other side of the house, busted a window and yelled in, “Anyone home?”

No one answered.