Shadow Kill (Nick Teffinger Thriller) (18 page)

“Because that’s how you get the deal.”

Benderfield took a calculated sip of the OJ.

“Explain this so-called deal.”

“It’s simple,” Teffinger said. “I’m going to give you a 48-hour head start.”

“To do what?”

“To get to the bank, transfer your money to the Caymans, sneak across a border, slither under a rock, whatever it is your going to do to keep the needle out of your arm. You get 48-hours of totally uninterrupted and untracked time.”

“Then what?”

“Then I hunt you to the ends of the earth,” Teffinger said.

“You? Hunt me?”

Teffinger nodded.

“Forty-eight hours is a good deal,” he said. “To get it though you need to talk, you need to talk now and you need to talk fast. Everything you say is off the record. I’m not reading you your rights, I’m not recording this, I’m not trying to pulling anything funny.”

“So what are you trying to do?”

“Save Susan Smith’s life.”

52

Day Six

July 13

Sunday Night

“Seventy-two hours.”
That was Benderfield’s demand. Teffinger could care less whether it was 48, 72 or 59.7. He checked his watch and said, “Deal, starting now. So talk. Tell me who has Susan Smith.”

Benderfield took a long swallow of the orange juice.

“Ordinarily I don’t talk about my associates,” he said. “But putting a cap in my buddy’s head, that was over the line.”

“Your P.I. buddy.”

“Right, Fisher. He called me the other night and said he had a client who wanted someone dead. The client was a lawyer. The money was solid.”

“Who was the lawyer?”

“Someone named Colder.”

Colder.

The answer was the one Teffinger expected but, still, it forced a feeling into his gut, the same feeling he had when he first spotted the man in the club, before he killed him.

“Go on.”

“Fisher and me go back,” Benderfield said. “He knows I have connections. That’s why he called me. He doesn’t have those types of connections. He’s never been involved in anything like this before. To put it politely, he’s small-time.”

“So you hired someone for him?”

Benderfield shook his head.

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

“I already had too many things going on,” he said. “I gave him a very good piece of advice and told him to back off and shut the deal down. I told him to just walk away.” A beat then, “He was weak, though. He couldn’t let go of the money. That was his mistake. That’s always been his mistake.”

Teffinger’s throat was sandpaper.

“Do you have any more of that orange juice?”

Benderfield did.

He got a glass, poured and then continued.

“Like I said, I already had too many things going on, but even more to the point, I didn’t want to get involved. Fisher’s okay as far as small things go but he’s not really someone you want to be around if things get turbulent. He’s not built for rough seas. He’s built to leak. Anyway, after I got him convinced that I wasn’t going to hire anyone, he said that was fine, he’d do it himself. All he wanted from me was a number to call. Ordinarily in a situation like that, I’d turn the person on to Portia. That wasn’t exactly an option any longer.”

True.

“There’s only one other guy I know in that business. He goes by the name of Rail. I only used him once and that was enough. He did the job and did it well and did it on time, but there was something about him that made me feel as if a spider was crawling up my back.”

“Rail—”

“Right, Rail.”

“Does he have a first name?”

“That’s all I know him by, Rail, and I’m sure that’s an alias. Whatever his real name is, I don’t know it and I don’t want to know it. I told Fisher I had a number but didn’t want to give it to him; the guy was too intense. He pressed me and I finally caved him. I told him to be careful. I told him to be positive that he didn’t do anything to ignite the guy. If money was due at a certain time and place, he better be damn sure that money was there at that time and at the place.”

“So you gave him a number?”

“I did.”

“Give it to me.”

“It’s at my office,” Benderfield said. “I have it written on a piece of paper stuffed in a book.” He frowned. “It won’t do you any good. Someone obviously pays the phone bill every month but I can guarantee you that Rail has more than enough safeguards in place so that it could never be traced to him, or if it could, it would be so complicated that he’d know it was going on and be a million miles away before you ever reached him.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Benderfield shrugged.

“Maybe I would. Should we go to my office?”

Teffinger stood up.

“Let’s go. What does he look like?”

“Rail?”

“Right.”

“Unknown,” Benderfield said. “I’ve never met him. All my contact has been by phone. I never knew he had a ponytail until you just now told me. All I have is a name and a number.”

“That’s not true,” Teffinger said. “You also have a prior kill with him. You know the name of one of his victims.”

“Yeah, I suppose I do.”

“Who was that victim?”

“Are we still off the record?”

“Trust me.”

Benderfield hesitated and then said, “A woman named Kelly Nine.”

The words were a bullet to Teffinger’s brain.

“Kelly Nine? From San Francisco?”

“Yes. Do you know her?”

He nodded

“Yes.”

“Small world.”

Teffinger hardened his face.

“Who hired you to get Kelly Nine killed?”

Benderfield got a distant look.

“That’s a big question,” he said.

“Then give me a big answer.”

Benderfield
swallowed what was left of the juice, turned to the sink, got the fancy brushed-nickel faucet flowing and rinsed the glass, taking his time, getting every last drop of orange juice out of it. He opened the dishwasher door, put the glass inside and closed the door.

For a heartbeat he stood there, frozen in time, with his back to Teffinger.

Teffinger’s chest tightened.

He wanted an answer and wanted it now, not in ten seconds, not in five, not it two, not in one.

“I said, who hired you to get Kelly Nine killed?”

Suddenly the man twisted with a cat-quick lunge and swung a knife at Teffinger’s face.

53

Day Six

July 13

Sunday Night

It took ten minutes
to kill Benderfield, ten terrible minutes, ten minutes that left Teffinger drained of every ounce of strength and left him limp on the floor, too beaten to even raise a hand to his face to feel the damage. He didn’t want to kill the man, not at first. He gave him every opportunity to back off.

Then the tipping point came.

It came as the man landed furious fists to Teffinger’s face with the power of a pit full of wild banshees.

It came as the man’s eyes burned insane with murder.

It came and didn’t leave until the man’s head whiplashed back from a horrible blow to his face, a blow that resonated from Teffinger’s knuckles all the way to his spine. Benderfield teetered for a heartbeat, drunken in time, and then dropped unceremoniously to the floor.

His head bounced once off the tile.

No more movement came from any part of his body.

He was dead.

Teffinger didn’t need to check.

He recognized the silence all too well.

What happened next
was a blur. He remembered staggering to his feet, making his way to the man’s bathroom, getting the shower going and then stepping in and letting the water wash blood down his face and his chest and stomach and legs. He remembered watching it pool briefly at his feet before it twisted down the drain. He remembered staying there until the water became clear.

He dressed in fresh clothes, Benderfield’s.

Then he left.

Every bit of it was wrong.

He should have called 911.

He should have stayed put until the cops arrived.

He should have been there to give a statement.

Doing right though wasn’t an option.

Doing right would slow him down.

So instead he did wrong and drove to Benderfield’s office, broke in and went through every book he could find, looking for a piece of paper with a phone number on it, Rail’s number—the number of the person who snatched Susan Smith, the number of the person who killed Kelly Nine.

Kelly Nine.

Even to this day Teffinger’s chest pounded when he thought about her out on the grass behind the bleachers on a warm summer night with her skirt hiked up and the beauty of her body glowing in the moonlight and her easy laughter filling every molecule of Teffinger’s being.

Kelly Nine.

He didn’t intend to love her, or anybody for that matter. He was just a high school boy looking for what every high school boy was looking for. By the time different college lives pulled them in separate directions, though, she was the only girl in the world and always would be.

Kelly Nine.

Time passed and she faded but never completely. They stayed in touch, flirty and sometimes intimate touch, even to the point of occasional booty-calls and sin-filled drunken nights in LoDo clubs. Then she moved to San Francisco.

Last year she was back for her niece’s graduation from C.U.

Teffinger took her out drinking.

It was dark.

A wicked storm beat its wicked way down.

They ended up back at his place.

She kissed like high school.

In the morning, she was gone. Teffinger’s lock had been jimmied from the outside.

No one heard from her the next day or the day after that or the day after that. She was gone from the face of the earth.

The longer
Teffinger was away from Benderfield’s house the clearer it became just how wrong it was to leave the scene. He should at a minimum call his counterpart, Randy Johnson, and explain what happened. He didn’t have the man’s number but called Miami homicide, told them he was a Denver detective with an emergency situation and asked to get patched through to Johnson at home.

The man answered with sleep in his voice.

“Randy, it’s me, Teffinger. I’m in town. I went over to Oscar Benderfield’s house tonight to have a little chat with him. He ended up attacking me with a knife and I ended up defending myself. He’s dead. I should have stayed there and called 911. Instead I did something stupid and left the scene.”

“Where are you right now?”

“I can’t say.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“No, I know, I just can’t tell you.”

The man exhaled.

“Meet me back at Benderfield’s but don’t go in, just wait for me at the curb.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll call you later and explain everything better. Right now I have to run.”

Teffinger hung up
and called the FBI profiler, Leigh Sandt, pulling her out of a deep sleep.

“Have you ever heard of a guy named Rail?”

“Teffinger?”

“Yeah, me. Rail’s a hitman. Have you ever heard of him?”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I know.”

“What’s going on?”

“I need to know who Rail is.”

“Well you’re asking the wrong person.”

“You never heard of him?”

“No.”

“Can you check your system?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Can it wait until the morning?”

“I don’t know and I don’t want to find out.”

Silence, then, “Tell me what’s going on.”

He told her.

Her told her about how he knew that Rail was the person who killed Kelly Nine. He told her that Rail currently had his hands around the throat of another woman, Susan Smith. “He likes to play with his prey before he kills them. That means she might actually still be alive.”

So far
no book with a phone number inside had shown up. Maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe Benderfield had been playing him on.

He kept checking.

He needed to get it done before Randy Johnson figured out where he was and pulled him downtown for questioning.