Attorney's Run (A Nick Teffinger Thriller / Read in Any Order) by R.J. Jagger, Jack Rain

the truck, Sydney flicked the radio to a hip-hop station, got Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love” and cranked it up.
    “Finally,” she said. “Real music.”
    Teffinger grunted.
    “There’s a Beach Boys song playing in there somewhere and you’re wasting it.”
     
    BACK AT THE CRIME SCENE Teffinger wrote down what he had forgotten before, namely the name and number of the realtor on the sign in the front yard. As they walked towards the back of the house, he called the man; a guy named Jim Hansen, a guy who wasn’t in, so Teffinger left him a message.
    Suddenly a woman emerged from around the corner of the house and joined them in the backyard. She appeared to be about fifty, an ex-cheerleader type, with bottle-blond hair and a few more pounds than she had in high school. She carried a book.
    “Are you the police?” she asked.
    Teffinger nodded.
    “We are.”
    “I’m Becky Moon,” she said. “I live across the street. When I got home I found a note on my door to call some officer named Adam Woods. When I saw you over here, I thought I’d just come over and talk in person.”
    Sydney said, “That’ll work,” and pulled out a pen and spiral notebook.
    Then she interviewed the woman, who had an interesting observation.
    “Yesterday, there was a car parked in front of this house,” she said. “About two o’clock. I just took it to be someone who was looking at the house.”
    “What kind of car?”
    “Foreign,” she said. “My brother works for Ford so we always buy American. I have this habit, whenever I see a car, of seeing if it’s American. The car I saw here yesterday wasn’t.”
    “Do you know what kind it was?” Sydney asked.
    The woman shook her head.
    “I don’t know anything about foreign cars and don’t want to,” she said. Then she turned to Teffinger. “I see you drive a Toyota.”
    “It’s made in the U.S.,” he said.
    “It is?”
    He nodded.
    “Indiana or Illinois, I can’t remember which,” he said.
    “I didn’t know that.”
    Teffinger raked his hair back with his fingers. It immediately flopped back down over his forehead.
    “Would you recognize the car if we showed you pictures?” he asked.
    “No.”
    “What color was it?”
    “Something medium.”
    “Medium?”
    “Right,” she said. “It wasn’t anything real light colored, like white or silver. And it wasn’t anything too dark either.”
    “Red?”
    “It could have been.”
    “Blue?”
    “It could have been.”
    “Brown?”
    “Same thing,” she said. “It wasn’t white and it wasn’t black. Sorry, that’s about the best I can do.”
    “Did you see the person driving it?”
    “No,” she said. “I didn’t see any people, only the car.”
     
    TEFFINGER’S PHONE RANG. It turned out to be the realtor, Jim Hansen, returning his call. The man hadn’t heard about the murder and when Teffinger told him he said, “Perfect. Now no one will buy that stupid place.”
    “Why not?”
    “Ghosts,” Hansen said. “People won’t buy a house if there’s been a suicide or a murder.”
    “That’s not rational,” Teffinger said.
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    In addition to the ghost information, Hansen had a few other interesting tidbits. The owners had moved to California more than two months ago. Hansen hadn’t shown the house in more than two weeks. He did not, repeat not, call Molly Maids and request a cleaning. Why would he? Nor would the owners have had a reason to do so.
    “You sound familiar,” Teffinger said. “Do I know you?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “That’s weird,” Teffinger said. “For some reason I have the feeling I know you.”
     
    ON THE DRIVE BACK TO HEADQUARTERS, Sydney reset all the radio buttons in the Tundra to hip-hop stations.
    “At first I thought that this whole thing may have just been a spur-of-the-moment sexual attack,” Teffinger said. “Now I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with a premeditated plan. And I think the intended victim was Tessa Blake and not