The Stranger You Seek - By Amanda Kyle Williams Page 0,48
made famous on his commercials. “And, well, being in the legal biz and all, I’ve got a few friends in law enforcement. You all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it. I hadn’t even had time to think about it beyond trying to work out why William LaBrecque had been lying on the floor naked and beaten to death. The very last thing I wanted was for someone to try to comfort me. Just pushing through it was usually a better choice for me. Whatever was left, I’d give to Dr. Shetty during our next hundred-and-eighty-dollar hour. “I wanted to talk about the laser center case, the med tech.”
“Okey-dokey,” Quinn said.
“He supplements his income by selling pot and I have reason to believe he smokes a good amount of it too.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Quinn said. “That’s why he didn’t show for the pee test. Said he had the flu or something. We had to reschedule the deposition too.”
“He looks healthy to me,” I told Quinn, and made sure the time and date stamp were active on my camera. Then I snapped a few pictures of Vincent Feldon standing in his yard talking on his phone, pacing back and forth, then folding his big body into a tiny Chrysler Crossfire and driving away. I waited a few seconds, then pulled out behind him.
We followed Feldon down Moreland, took the turn for Reynoldstown, curved into a residential section, and watched him pull up to a small white frame house, get out, and knock. When the door opened and Feldon disappeared inside, I grabbed my camera and got out. Neil sank down low in the seat.
“Hey, look on the bright side,” I told him. “Feldon loses his job at the treatment center, he’s going to have to keep dealing pot.”
Through one of the windows, I saw Feldon talking to a woman, then sitting down on the couch and tossing a sandwich bag with a zipper top onto the table. It looked like pot in the bag. I’d seen a lot of it since Neil and I had been friends. The series of shots I took showed Feldon opening the bag, filling a bowl, lighting it, blowing out a huge cloud of smoke, passing the bag over, and receiving cash. Less than that had gotten Michael Phelps into a world of trouble. I didn’t think Quinn would need anything else.
I called Rauser to check in. They were still at the LaBrecque scene. I told him I had to leave for a day, fly to Denver for a client. He didn’t want me to go. He never wanted me to go. Unfortunately, what APD was paying me as a case consultant wouldn’t even buy my groceries.
Denver had always seemed to me a surprisingly ordinary city. One can spend days here and almost forget entirely that the city happens to be surrounded by extraordinary scenery. From the streets of downtown, the pedestrian’s view is of corporate office buildings and unending development, with lots of coffeehouses tossed in for atmosphere.
When I leave Atlanta, where downtown real estate ran short years ago and buildings had to grow tall in order to grow at all, everything looks as if a giant weed whacker had sheared the tops right off the buildings. Here, a mile high, Denver seemed a bit stoop-shouldered as I drove from the airport to the hotel at Logan and Eighteenth.
I was standing on my balcony soaking it in when the sun began to set and light switches and streetlamps all over the city seemed to flick on at once. The thin, dry air rushed my lungs like a football team, and I saw the Rockies in silhouette against Colorado’s broad night sky. Nothing at all like my last assignment here, when my view had been the laundry room on the back side of a Best Western and room service meant picking up something from the greasy spoon across the street and bringing it back in an oily paper sack. By Bureau standards, that was first-class treatment of an agent on assignment.
I showered, settled into the soft terry-cloth robe I found hanging in the bath. My room was one of several corporate suites leased year-round by my client; my assignment was to strike up a deal with an accountant named Roy Echeverria, who, I had recently been made aware, had not only run off with a huge amount of cash, he’d also stolen audiotapes, a dozen of them, of private executive meetings. I’d