Guilty Minds (4 page)

W
hether he was a real cop or not, the guy with the blond brush cut who’d so politely guided me to my locker—even providing the quarter—was obviously the one who’d emptied it. He’d picked out my locker in advance, which meant he had a copy of the key. He didn’t need to take one of the spares. He’d just waited for me to leave and then removed my laptop and iPhone. Had I been on alert, and had I known what to look for, I’d have noticed that he was wearing the uniform of a DC city cop. It had been a simple if brazen move, and the only reason it worked was that I hadn’t been operating with my usual wariness.

The question was, who was he and how did he know I’d be here?

This I couldn’t yet figure out.

I stopped mid-stride. I had a strong feeling that I was being watched. That the guy was somewhere nearby, within eyesight.

It was more than a feeling, of course. It was the result of “situational awareness,” which is the military’s fancy term for knowing what’s going on around you. In combat, your life can depend on whether you notice anomalies: the scuff of a boot, the glint of a weapon. I sensed a stillness at my eleven o’clock and turned. There, at the head of the staircase at
the other end of the great hall, was a familiar blond crewcut. A man in a policeman’s uniform.

I walked casually in that direction, as if I hadn’t seen anything, but the man began going down the stairs, so I accelerated my pace until I was almost running. He must have realized he’d been spotted. By the time I reached the steep marble stairs, he was nowhere in sight. These were stairs meant for dignified procession, not hot pursuit. They were also not stairs you’d want to take a header down.

The problem was that I didn’t know the building’s layout at all. I’d had no reason to acquaint myself with the exits, not when I was just having a discreet private meeting with a Supreme Court justice. I hadn’t expected trouble because I figured no one knew I’d be here.

But obviously someone knew.

At the ground floor, I stopped, oriented myself. To my left was the visitors’ entrance. It wasn’t an exit, just an entrance. Maybe someone in a policeman’s uniform could slip out that way. The long, broad corridor was sparsely decorated with display cases. Down at the other end I saw a cafeteria and a gift shop. There seemed to be only two exits for the general public. One was upstairs, outside the courtroom, through the huge bronze doors. You couldn’t enter that way, but you could leave. The other exit was on this level, straight ahead of me. It appeared to lead to the plaza behind the court building, on Second Street. There was no security here. People were strolling out casually.

I had to make a decision. Try to force my way out the entrance, race for the exit onto Second Street, or stay inside the building and look for him here. It was possible he hadn’t left.

I went out the Second Street exit, looking in all directions, but it was no use. He wasn’t there.

That was all right. I didn’t have time to look anymore. I had far more urgent business to get to.

I
’d forgotten what life was like without a cell phone. I had phone calls to make but no way to make them. I had to walk two blocks to find a pay phone that worked. It was covered with an ad for Red Bull. The holes in the mouthpiece were clogged with some mysterious brown substance that probably wasn’t Red Bull. When I remembered I had no quarters, I got change at a deli on East Capitol Street. I returned to my Red Bull pay phone, fished out Gideon Parnell’s business card from the breast pocket of my suit jacket, and called his mobile number.

He answered right away. “This is Gideon Parnell,” he said in his basso profundo.

“It’s Nick Heller.”

“You’ve spoken to my friend.”

“I’ll take the case.”

“Excellent. You have everything you need?”

I told him I thought I did and that I’d call back immediately if I didn’t. I understood that we were on a tight deadline—we had barely twenty-six hours before Slander Sheet’s deadline.

Next I wanted to call Dorothy, but her cell number was programmed
into my iPhone, and I couldn’t remember it. Not so long ago I took pride in my ability to memorize numbers, but that seemed to be decaying, an evolutionary casualty of technology. Instead, I called my office and asked to be transferred.

“I called you a couple of times,” Dorothy said when she answered. “You must have been in your meeting with the justice.”

“What’s up?”

“I had that brainstorm I was talking about. How to hack into Lily Schuyler.com.”

“Tell me.”

“I used an old tried-and-true hacker trick—SQL injection. I found the customer log-in area on the website and started running script against the username and password fields. Trying to cause a buffer overflow.”

“Right,” I said, though I had no idea what she was saying.

“So I created a query in code, thirty characters long, and put that query into the username field. It dumped me into the back end of the website—the index.”

“I thought you were uncomfortable doing hacker stuff like that.”

“I am. But time is really short, and I was desperate. Also, it’s Gideon Parnell. I’d do anything for that guy. You know he marched with Martin Luther King?”

“Yep. I appreciate it.”

“I’ll e-mail you when I have something useful.”

“Oh, that reminds me. I don’t have a phone or a laptop anymore.”

“Anymore?”

“I’m temporarily back in the Dark Ages, and I don’t like it as much as I thought I would.”

I explained.

“Well, they’re both password-protected, the phone and the MacBook Air,” she said, “so you’re not at risk of losing information. More
interesting . . .” I heard her tapping away at her keyboard. She seemed to be talking to herself.

Dorothy had set up both my phone and my laptop and given them to me plug-and-play. I’m no computer savant, but in my business you can no longer be ignorant about technology, unfortunately. At the very least you need to hire people who are good at it and let them do their thing. She insisted that Macs are extremely secure devices, and that the iPhone is the most secure phone you can get. I do what she recommends.

“Hold on one second,” she said. There we are. You have Find My iPhone turned on, very nice, and . . . oh, crap.”

“Now what?”

“They just turned it off.”

“How do you know this?”

“I see you had it at the Supreme Court building, but then it goes dark. That tells me they turned the phone off as soon as they stole it, and probably the laptop, too, to defeat the tracker. Someone knows what they’re doing. That’s too bad.”

“I’m going to need my phone and computer replaced.”

“Stop in at an Apple Store. There’s a couple in the district. Or else I can bring them to you.”

“How’s that?”

“You’re going to be in DC for at least a couple of days. My brother’s in the hospital in Prince George’s and I want to pay him a visit.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your brother.” I wasn’t aware that she had a brother. She was extremely private when it came to her personal business. “Ask Jillian to book us a couple of hotel rooms in DC,” I said. “It’s being billed to Shays Abbott, so make it a high-end place, something nice. Would you mind taking a piece of luggage for me?”

“Your go-bag?”

“Right.” In my office I always keep a packed carry-on case with a few
days’ clothing and a shaving kit and miscellaneous necessities. Just in case I have to go somewhere out of town at the last minute.

“Sure. Nick, how did they know it was you?”

“The guy who stole my laptop, you mean?”

“Right.”

“I haven’t figured that out yet, but I will.” I told her I’d check back in with the office a little later on, since I was no longer reachable anywhere, and I hung up.

I summoned a mental image of the fake cop who’d guided me to my locker at the Supreme Court. I concentrated, did a mental inventory and download. I remembered him being about my height but broader and heavier. He had a blond buzz cut and his face looked flushed. Eye color? Gray, maybe, or light blue, but light in any case. Age? Somewhere in his thirties. I was putting together what birdwatchers and military types call the GISS, which stands for “general impression of size and shape.” For birders, it’s a way to make a field identification when you don’t know a bird’s species.

I turned away just when the pay phone rang. I picked it up.

“Nick Heller’s line.”

“Nick?” It was Dorothy.

“Yup.”

“Oh, good. As long as you stay by that pay phone all day, we should be fine. I’ve found our girl.”

H
er real name is Kayla Pitts. Kayla spelled with a
K
. She’s twenty-two, and she comes from Tupelo, Mississippi.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Employee records on their server.”

“You find a phone number?”

She read it to me. It had a 571 area code, for Virginia. I wrote it down in my little black notebook.

“Address?”

She read that aloud, too, and I wrote it down.

“Now what?”

“Now I go to see her.”

“How?”

“I’ll think of something.”

—

Three hours later I was sitting in a rented black Chevy Suburban parked outside Kayla Pitts’s apartment building on Glebe Road in Arlington. It was a huge crablike complex built of white brick that belonged on the
outskirts of Moscow: like late Soviet-era public housing built on the cheap, almost defiantly so.

I had with me my new phone and MacBook Air—I didn’t want to wait for Dorothy, so I made a stop at the Apple Store—and I was browsing LilySchuyler.com’s website, piggybacking on someone’s Wi-Fi signal, probably one of her neighbors’.

So my computer screen was filled with color photos of women in various states of undress, four across. Some of them were nude, with the pertinent areas blurred out. Some wore elaborate black lace bustiers with fishnet stockings and spike heels. Or caged corset teddies with sheer side panels and lace fronts. Or tiny bikini bottoms, or thongs. It was like an L.L. Bean catalog of women for almost every taste. At the top of the page,
LILY SCHUYLER
appeared in gold script letters that were probably meant to look high-end. I clicked on “About Us” and learned that it was an “exclusive and discreet social introduction service that provides upscale companionship to sophisticated and discerning gentlemen.” They offered “the most beautiful, exquisite, and sensual young ladies ever to work in the escort industry.” All the girls were “ladies,” and all potential clients were “gentlemen.”

A few of the exquisite ladies had what’s called the “girl-next-door look,” though no girl like these ever lived next door to me. They appeared to be pure, innocent, “collegiate.” Almost demure, if you could call a woman who posed in a lacy pink bra on a call girl website “demure.”

All of the pictures looked Photoshopped, some more than others. Some had their faces blurred out entirely, some didn’t. They had names like Savannah and Sabrina, Bethany and Kendra, April and Sydney and Sierra and Giselle.

Heidi L’Amour—Kayla Pitts—was one of the demure collegiate ones. Also one of the prettiest, so far as I could tell. At least you could see her
face clearly. Her photo showed a young woman in her early twenties with lustrous blond hair down to her collarbone. She wore a simple black top with cap sleeves, cut low enough to reveal the cleft of her bosom but not so low it looked trashy. God forbid the photos on a call girl website should look trashy. Her chin rested on her left hand.

Photoshop can disguise blemishes and flaws and even give a chunky girl a slender waist, but it couldn’t simulate this kind of natural beauty. She had delicately arched brows, a pert nose, a sweet smile. She had an open face and a kind, vulnerable expression.

HEIDI VACATION,
the caption said, as if
Vacation
were her last name. When I clicked on her picture, her profile page came up. More photos, including one in a lacy bralette and matching G-string, side-tie. Her arms raised, hands behind head, a dreamy look in her eyes. Here it said Heidi L’Amour was on vacation and gave no end date:

22 years old, 5’5”, 125 lbs, 36D natural. Very Open-Minded GFE.

Heidi is a stunning young blonde beauty with a face and accent as sweet as a Georgia peach. She’s new to the DC area and is a brilliant and accomplished college student with a girl-next-door look. She loves fine dining and is as comfortable at a five-star restaurant or a cocktail party as she is sitting in front of the fire drinking red wine. She has insatiable desires, longing for fulfillment, and can always be relied upon to give you the ultimate GFE.

I knew that GFE meant “girlfriend experience,” which basically meant she kissed, along with everything else. Men paid extra for a prostitute who could pretend to be in love with them, which I find a little sad.

No prices listed. Just a row of five diamonds. Maybe if you had to ask you couldn’t afford it. I clicked around the website some more and saw
that some of the girls had as few as three diamonds. No one had more than five.

The answer to the price mystery turned up on the “Services & Rates” page. Five diamonds represented “our most highly rated tier of model.” In other words, the most expensive girl. They even offered five-diamond packages. One hour with a five-diamond girl cost $4,000. A package of “three unrushed decadent hours over drinks and dessert” was $10,000. Another package, for “gentlemen with savoir faire,” offered a full night of “ultimate pampering.” That would set the discerning gentleman back $22,000.

Heidi L’Amour did not come cheap.

So this was the girl Justice Claflin had allegedly hired. I didn’t believe it.

—

Now I knew approximately what she looked like. Her GISS, at least. For half an hour I had been watching people come and go from the apartment building. If I saw anyone who vaguely resembled Kayla, I was ready to jump out of the car and approach her. But no one looked remotely like her. I was looking for a small, blond young woman of slight build. I saw a few guys in their early twenties, an elderly woman with a walker, a middle-aged woman with a few kids. But not her. If she were at home, she’d have to emerge eventually. But I could be sitting here in a rented car waiting for twenty-four hours, and I didn’t have the time.

Besides, it wasn’t even a sure thing that she was at home.

I decided to try the direct approach. I got out of the car and entered the lobby, which was large and garishly lit. It was lined with mailboxes on either side. Oversized envelopes, which didn’t fit in a mailbox, were lined up on a shelf.

At the front was an intercom system where you searched for the
resident’s name and it pulled up a number to punch in. I grabbed an envelope and searched the building directory until I found
PITTS, K
.

I entered her number in the intercom and waited for it to ring. I could hear the ringing through a tinny speaker, but nothing more happened.

After a minute, I rang again, and I waited some more.

My plan, if she answered her door, was to tell her I was a courier with a package that required her signature. An old trick that usually worked. That would likely bring her downstairs, out of her apartment.

But after five minutes of waiting, I began to believe that she wasn’t at home, and I started mulling over my options.

Since I had her mobile phone number, there was an array of trickery at my disposal. More if I wanted to bring in Dorothy, but she was probably on a plane by now.

There was an app on my iPhone—the kid at the Apple Store had “restored” to my new phone everything that had been on the stolen one, which I’d deactivated—that would enable me to “spoof” a number. That meant that when I called someone who had caller ID—and on cell phones, everyone does—they’d see that the call was coming from whichever number I chose.

I could call or text her from the phone number belonging to Mandy Seeger, the Slander Sheet reporter. That number was on the note she’d sent to the Supreme Court’s public affairs office. It was a fair assumption that the reporter had been in close touch with Kayla over the past few weeks or so. They might have texted each other. A text from Mandy Seeger asking her to meet somewhere might bring her in from wherever she was.

But that trick would only work so far. The moment she texted the reporter back and reached the real person, the ruse would be over.
What are you talking about?
I didn’t ask you to meet!
Mandy would reply.

So . . . there was a variation on that trick that might work a little better.

Another app on my iPhone called Burner would give me a temporary phone number in almost any area code I chose (except, for some reason, New York’s 212 area code) that I could use to call or text her. She could call or text me back on the same number and reach me without ever seeing my real phone number, which had a 617 area code, for Boston. I needed a number with a Washington area code.

I still liked the idea of pretending to be the journalist. Kayla probably had a relationship of trust with her, reporter and source. If Mandy asked to meet, she was likely to agree to it. If that didn’t work, I’d try something else.

I left the lobby and returned to the car. Then I took out my phone and fired up Burner. I chose the area code for Washington, 202, and texted Kayla’s phone:

Kayla, it’s Mandy on a new phone. We have to meet.

Then I waited.

More than a minute.

Then a text came back:

When?

Relieved—it had worked—I texted back:

Now. 30 min.

A pause, shorter this time, then:

OK, where?

I thought a moment. As soon as she saw me, she’d figure out that I had impersonated the reporter from Slander Sheet
.
I’d have to talk fast or do something to convince her I wasn’t a danger. That was best attempted in some public space.

I texted her the name and address of a Starbucks I’d passed not too far from her apartment building.

OK,
she replied.
30.

Meaning she’d be there in half an hour.

I got to the Starbucks ten minutes later and found a table with sightlines to both entrances. I sipped a black coffee. The table wobbled. I looked around to see if she’d arrived early, but I didn’t see anyone who resembled her. Just the usual assortment of Starbucks customers. A young intern in a rumpled white button-down shirt placing an order for eleven beverages including a banana chocolate Vivanno, whatever that was. A couple of hipsters. A businessman in a suit and tie looking at an iPad, probably between appointments. A guy and a girl, college-student age, chatting awkwardly, maybe on a date.

After I’d been sitting for fifteen minutes, a petite blond woman entered. She was wearing heavy black-framed glasses, an oversized sweatshirt, and flip-flops. The sweatshirt said
CORNELIUS COLLEGE
in red block letters. She was small, vulnerable-looking. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She scanned the interior, back and forth.

She looked frightened. That’s what grabbed my attention most of all. What was she afraid of?

Finally she sat down at a table and took out her phone. She glanced at it, looked around some more. I got up and approached her table. It was crowded enough in the coffeehouse that it didn’t necessarily seem creepy when I said, “Can I join you?”

She looked up at me, scrunched her eyes. “Sorry, I’m meeting a friend.”

I nodded. “Mandy asked me here.”

“Who are you?” she said with suspicion.

I stuck out my hand. “Kayla,” I said, “I’m Nick Heller.”