Guilty Minds (9 page)

W
e gathered around the mahogany table. Gideon sat at the head.

“We are well and truly screwed,” he said. “Has it been picked up by any other websites yet?”

I shook my head.

“Give it a couple of minutes,” Dorothy said.

“I’m sorry about this,” I said. “I really thought we’d have killed this thing by now.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” said Gideon. “This was always a Hail Mary pass.”

“We’re not done yet,” I said.

Gideon looked at me, tilting his head. “What the hell are you talking about? It’s out there now, Heller.”

“Lots of things are out there on the Internet. Websites about how reptile extraterrestrials are running the US government.”

He shook his head, as if in disgust, his eyes closed. “The world has changed since the Kennedy administration. Back then, everybody knew that Jack Kennedy had a parade of women coming through the White House. But not a word of it ever made the papers. Now, anything and
everything does. Absolute rubbish gets reported on the basis of nothing more than rumor.”

“Not true,” I said. “It’s just gotten a lot more complicated.”

“If someone snapped a picture of the president with a hooker today, it would be online in minutes.”

“Sure. There’s always some website that’ll publish anything. But the Claflin story hasn’t been picked up by the mainstream media yet. Meaning it hasn’t been validated. That usually takes a while.”

Gideon tilted his head like a Jack Russell Terrier listening to his master’s voice. “I hope you’re right. Go on.”

“You see, right now it exists only on the Internet. As long as it stays an Internet-only story—Slander Sheet
,
Gawker
,
TMZ
,
Drudge
,
Vice
,
whatever—it’s just gossip. It’s not news. It doesn’t become permanent until it’s validated by the old ‘legacy’ media. The mainstream media.
The
Washington Post,
The
New York Times,
The
Wall Street Journal
. The NBC evening news, NPR, CNN. At that point it’s written in ink. It’s permanent.”

“And when does that happen?”

“You probably know better than me. I don’t know the exact timing. Doesn’t the
Times
have a morning news meeting or whatever?”

Gideon looked at his watch. “At ten o’clock this morning,
The
New York Times
has their front-page meeting.”

“There you go. Someone’s going to mention the rumor about Claflin and a call girl. They’re not going to ignore it.”

“No, probably not.”

“Who runs the meeting? There’s always one person. It’s not a democracy.”

“The executive editor. I’ve met him.”

“Okay, so the editor’s going to ask, ‘Who else is running with it?’ What they really want to know is, Is anybody
else
in the mainstream
media covering it? Any of the other big dogs? But it’s not going to be any of them. Not this fast. Not in two and a half hours.”

“But this thing’s going to spread like gonorrhea.”

“No doubt. It’ll be picked up first by BuzzFeed or Drudge or TMZ
.
But that’s not enough to push it over the line into the mainstream. So maybe the
Times
assigns a couple of reporters to poke around the Slander Sheet story, see if there’s any solid evidence there.”

“But it’s also going to be picked up by some of the more respectable websites like Politico and Roll Call
.
”

“Maybe. But not the big dogs. Not yet. Does
The
New York Times
have another front-page meeting today?”

“At four-thirty.”

“That’s the one we have to worry about. Four-thirty. Enough time will have gone by that they can at least do a piece about the reaction to this rumor.”

“You’re right. Four-thirty.”

“That’s nine hours from now. Not much time.” I got to my feet. “So what are we doing, sitting here, talking? Dorothy, come on. We’ve got work to do.”

G
ideon gave us a conference room to use.

It was like every other office conference room I’d ever seen, only nicer. There was a long, coffin-shaped table, made of mahogany. Around it were arrayed high-backed chairs that seemed to be upholstered in leather. Starfishlike speakerphones were placed every four seats or so. Down one wall ran a long credenza.

Dorothy pushed a button somewhere, and a panel on the far wall slid away, revealing a large video projection screen. She hooked up her laptop to some port built into the table—she worked without hesitation, seeming to know what she was doing—and the bright red Slander Sheet logo came up on the screen.

SUPREME COURT JUSTICE IN CALL GIRL SC
ANDAL
remained number 1 in the most viewed column. She clicked around to TMZ. The Claflin story had been picked up. The headline read:

UH-OH
DISORDER IN THE COURT
TOP JUDGE SCREWS AROUND

“Shit,” I said.

“That took almost an hour,” Dorothy said. “Longer than I expected. I have a feeling it’s just going to accelerate from here.”

She quickly went through a series of websites—OK! Magazine
,
RadarOnline.com
,
Star Magazine
,
National Enquirer
,
PopSugar
,
ETonline—and found nothing. She entered “Jeremiah Claflin” into Google and pulled up the British tabloid
The Daily Mail
.

“It’s here, too,” she said. “Does this count as a news site?”

“Not even close. But it’s on the border between gossip and real news. All right, look. We have an ironclad alibi we can’t use. So let’s focus on Kayla.”

“Nick, you’ve already shown that neither of them could have been at the Hotel Monroe. What more do you think we’re going to get?”

“Absence of proof isn’t proof of absence. We need to focus on proving a positive, not proving a negative. We already know Kayla wasn’t at the Monroe on those three nights. You have a backdoor into the Lily Schuyler website. See if she had any other clients those nights.”

“Nothing. I already checked.”

“Well, she must have been
somewhere
. What about her Facebook page?”

“That was the first place I looked. Nothing there either. I’ve looked on Tumblr and Pinterest and everywhere I can think of, and nothing. But I have an idea.”

I looked at her.

“You know how you can post a picture on Facebook and it auto-suggests the names of the people in the picture?”

“You know I don’t have a Facebook account.”

“Right. Well, it freaks me out. Facebook is using facial recognition software for that, and for most people, those photos are visible to any of the billion people on Facebook. So I’m thinking there’s got to be a way
to run a search of all DC-area Facebook accounts using a picture of Kayla and facial recognition.”

“Huh. Worth a try, I suppose. But you’re giving me another idea. Surveillance cameras.”

“Sure.”

“Traffic cameras, toll cameras, pharmacies, parking garages, supermarkets, gas stations, gyms, banks . . . that’s a lot of cameras. All we need is a time-stamped video of her on one of those nights.”

“You’re talking about searching all the surveillance cameras in her neighborhood? That’s impossible. In nine hours? We’d be lucky to get a gas station and a CVS and a Safeway.”

“No, we’d have to focus on places we know she frequents.”

“How?”

“Her credit card statements. See if she made any charges those nights.”

“And how do we get her credit card statements?”

There was a knock on the door. Gideon Parnell was now wearing a suit. “I think my e-mail in-box is going to crash our servers,” he said. “I’m getting e-mails from colleagues and friends and journalists from around the globe. This thing is really blowing up.”

“Hang tough,” I said. “This is going to go all over the web before the day is through. But as long as it’s slugged to Slander Sheet and doesn’t make the legit news websites, we’ll be okay.”

“I don’t understand, what makes you so confident you can still kill this snake?”

“Because the media establishment doesn’t yet own the story. Gideon, with all respect, let us do our work without interruption. Really, it’ll be better for all of us.”

After a beat he nodded at me. “Excuse me,” he said, giving me a long steady look. “You’re absolutely right.” He slipped back out and closed the conference room door behind him.

“Heller,” Dorothy said. “You don’t talk to Gideon Parnell that way.”

“He’ll get over it.”

“
I
won’t.”

“I was hoping you’d have a way to get into her credit card statements.”

“Well, she’s got an American Express card and a Citibank MasterCard, and I’ve tried to get in the usual ways. I tried guessing her passwords, tried all the obvious ones, but no luck. You think Montello might have a way in?”

I shook my head. My information broker, Frank Montello, had e-mailed me back last night. All he’d come up with on the number programmed into Curtis Schmidt’s flip phone was that it was another throw-away phone, a burner. That was no more than what I already knew. “I don’t think he can get it to us in time.”

“It’s worth a try.”

I nodded, reluctant.

Montello picked up his phone after six long rings. His voice was faint and muffled, as it always seemed to be, as if you’d just interrupted him doing something far more important than talking to you. He operated in the gray zone between law enforcement and private investigation, a place I tried not to go except
in extremis
. That was the place where money changed hands, where laws were broken: the sort of thing that could lose you your license. You had to be really careful.

Montello knew people at phone companies and credit card companies and banks, people who were willing to sell you inside information. I had no moral objection to paying someone off to get me information I needed. I just preferred to put some distance between the source and me. Montello’s neck was on the block, and he knew it, and that was why he charged so much and acted so squirrelly.

I asked him if he had any sources at Citibank’s credit card division or at American Express.

“No one I trust,” he said, and he disconnected the call without further comment.

I looked at Dorothy and shook my head.

She said, “Then we’re out of luck.”

“No, we’re not,” I said, and I explained my plan.

T
here was a uniform shop in Silver Spring I used to frequent when I worked for Stoddard Associates. This place sold everything from chefs’ toques to lab coats to security officers’ blazers to hospital scrubs. I had a good contact there named Marge something, who used to get me whatever I needed, without asking too many questions. When you’re working undercover it helps to have access to a variety of uniforms.

Luckily, they had what I needed, and Marge still worked there.

—

Forty-five minutes later I rang Kayla Pitts’s apartment door buzzer. She didn’t answer. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. She could still be at home. It was ten in the morning; she was likely still asleep. Last time I tried her buzzer she didn’t answer either, even though she was probably at home.

She was surely frightened. Maybe she was hunkering down in her apartment, bracing for the explosion of attention she knew was coming, if it wasn’t already here. Journalists around the world were probably hard at work Googling “Heidi L’Amour” and “Lily Schuyler” and pulling up
her page on the escort service’s website. It was only a matter of time before some smart and enterprising journalist figured out that Heidi L’Amour was actually a young woman named Kayla Pitts. Maybe a friend of hers would turn up and give away her real name. A classmate from Cornelius College might want to sell an interview to the
National Enquirer
. Or one of her colleagues at Lily Schuyler
.

But it hadn’t happened yet. No TV vans idled in the parking lot.

If she was at home, I was going to surprise her.

I hoped she wasn’t.

I waited a few minutes for someone to emerge and let me into the building. But it was a slow time of day, and no one came. So I did the old courier trick, rang a couple of random units until I found one that answered. I said, “package” and sure enough, a few seconds later the buzzer sounded, unlocking the front door.

Naturally, as soon as I passed through the front door, someone was exiting. It was a middle-aged woman with auburn hair, wearing a green business suit with a skirt. She looked at me, then looked away. Even if I didn’t have the uniform on, she’d probably not stop me. The building was too big for anyone to know all the neighbors. But I didn’t want to take a chance.

I took the elevator to the seventh floor. The hallway—worn beige wall-to-wall carpeting in an ugly pattern, a long corridor with identical doors, the overhead fluorescent lighting flickering—was empty. Most of the residents who had jobs had probably already left for work. An odor of fried eggs hung in the air.

Apartment 712 was halfway down the corridor on the right.

I rang the bell. It made a pleasant
bing-bong
. I turned to my side so she couldn’t see me through the security peephole, if she was at home. She wouldn’t forget my face.

I waited. Adrenaline pulsed through my veins. If she was home, and
if she opened the door, I had to move quickly. I had to get into her apartment whether she invited me in or not.

No answer. I listened for any movement within but heard nothing. I rang again and listened. After a couple more minutes I was as sure as I could be that she wasn’t home.

I knew it was possible that she was sitting there in bed, headphones on, ignoring the outside world. Given what was about to happen to her, I couldn’t blame her at all for wanting to escape. Not one bit. That girl’s life was about to be pulled inside out. She was lying—of that I had no doubt—and I should have felt contempt, but I still couldn’t help feeling bad for her. Who knew what pressure she was under. Who knew what sordid life circumstances compelled her to take part in this scam.

I unzipped the small black nylon briefcase and pulled out the lock-pick set I’d borrowed from a friend who lived and worked in Old Town Alexandria, doing roughly my kind of work. He didn’t have a snap gun, which is my preferred tool for picking locks, but I hadn’t forgotten how to use a pick and a tension wrench, the old-fashioned way.

I knelt in front of the door, and in a couple of minutes I realized that I was actually a little rusty. Picking locks is all about the technique, and I found myself fumbling. It was taking me far longer than it should have. I didn’t do it all that often.

A door opened across the hall.

An older woman with gray hair cut in bangs and thick-framed black glasses was standing there, wrapped tightly in a cherry blossom kimono. “Hello?”

I turned around.

She saw my uniform. It was an all-purpose repairman’s uniform, a navy tunic with snaps over a white T-shirt, pens in a breast pocket protector, matching navy Dickies. Stitched over the left breast was “Allied HVAC.” My friend Marge at the uniform outfit had plucked it from
another customer’s order. They always ordered a few extra. I didn’t have much choice—that was all she had at the moment, apart from lab coats and hospital scrubs—but I figured it would work. A uniform from a locksmith’s would have been ideal, but she didn’t happen to have any in stock.

“How ya doin’?” I said.

“Are you working on her lock?” She had a high, birdlike voice.

“Yep.”

“My lock is sticking.”

I turned back to Kayla’s door. “I’ll see what we can do when I’m done repairing hers.”

“You’re not from DC Locksmiths. I thought we could only call DC Locksmiths.”

I didn’t turn around. “Yeah, well, I got the call.”

“Why are you from Allied HVAC? I thought that was just heating and air conditioning and so on and so forth.”

“We have a locksmith division.” It was all I could think of to say.

“Allied HVAC?” she said.

Just then the tumblers lined up and the lock turned. I turned the knob and opened Kayla’s door.

I turned around and smiled. “I’ll see about your lock when I’m done here.”

The old lady just looked at me and then closed her door.

I had a bad feeling about this woman. I’d seen mistrust in her face, and a kind of determination. It was the look of someone who intended to call the police. She didn’t buy my flimsy cover.

I had to move quickly. If she called the cops—and I had to operate on the assumption that she would—I had no more than ten minutes. If that.