Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

It was early evening, and dusk was beginning to gather, but the lights in the old bread factory were blazing. Including the third floor. The lobby of the building was open and unattended. There was a lot of exposed brick and glass and steel. A depressing old relic of a building had been gussied up into a lively, edgy workspace. People were leaving work for the day, and most of them looked to be in their early to midtwenties. A wall plaque gave Slander Sheet’s offices as number 301.

I took the elevator, a big clanking thing that looked like it was once used exclusively for freight, to the third floor. I was the only passenger. Everyone else was going down and out of the building. Fifty feet down a narrow corridor, a glass door was labeled HUNSECKER MEDIA. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and after a few seconds I recalled it as one of the names associated with the Slander Sheet operation.

I pulled open the door, surprised that it wasn’t locked, and looked around. It was all one big open space. More exposed brick here, and pipes, and a pressed tin ceiling. Around a dozen people, all in their early twenties, were seated at several long tables that ran the length of the room, computer stations on either side. There was room at the tables for around fifty. No one seemed to be in charge. Mounted to the ceiling was a huge TV screen displaying article headlines. Next to each one was a number, probably for the number of page views they’d received, and a green up arrow or a red down arrow, probably indicating how each post was trending. The most popular one, the one at the top, was titled CONGRESSMAN DICK: REP. DICK COMPTON SEXTS HIS MAN PARTS TO A CONGRESSIONAL PAGE.

Just about everyone tapping away at their computers was wearing headphones. They were all quiet except for an occasional laugh. It was a digital sweatshop.

I stopped the first person I came to, a heavyset guy with pork-chop sideburns. I touched him on his arm. He took off his headphones. “Yeah?”

“I’m looking for Mandy Seeger.”

He looked around. “She normally sits on that end.” He gestured with his chin. “But I don’t see her. I think she’s gone for the night.”

“You got a way to reach her? It’s important.”

He glanced at me for a moment, incuriously. He shrugged.

I noticed on his monitor a small box on the side that looked like a chat window. I said, “Could you message her for me, please?”

“Uh, like, who are you?”

“Tell her it’s about Gideon Parnell.”

“Gideon Parnell?”

I nodded.

“You don’t look like Parnell.” Even a low-level staffer at Slander Sheet knew who Gideon Parnell was.

“I’m with Gideon. She wants to talk to me.”

He typed something into his chat window. A few seconds later came a reply.

“She says she’s seeing him tomorrow morning at nine.”

“Tell her I know. This is an extra interview, if she’s interested. A special offer.”

More tapping. “She wants your name.”

“Nick Heller.”

He typed my name in the chat window. He waited a few seconds. Then the answer came back.

“She says to meet her at Lobby on Capitol Hill in half an hour.”

I knew Lobby. It was a dive bar: two-dollar beers, beer-and-shot combos with clever names, and Skee-Ball.

“I’ll be there.”

The bar was just as I remembered it: crowded and low-ceilinged, authentically working class, smelling of beer and french fries. The bar back was still painted red, and the beers were listed on a blackboard in different colored chalks. License plates from all fifty states hung on the wall. All types of people still came here: college students and construction workers, Capitol Hill staff, marines from the barracks at Eighth and I, Capitol Hill police, nurses out of DC General, lobbyists. Lobby opened at eight in the morning and closed at two A.M. when the law said they had to.

I found Mandy Seeger holding down a booth. She was in her midthirties, with pale skin and coppery hair, amused light brown eyes, and a lively intelligence in her face. She was not beautiful, yet definitely attractive, and she wore a floral, hippyish dress and large hoop earrings. She didn’t look like a reporter, though I couldn’t say what a reporter was supposed to look like. Just not like this. In front of her was a tumbler of cola. Diet, I was guessing.

She waved at me. “You’ve got to be Nick Heller.”

I sat down on the other side of the booth. “How could you tell?”

“You’re too old to be a college student, and you’re not nerdy enough to work on the Hill. Also, you look like a guy who can kick ass.”

“Not at all. I’m a pacifist. I prefer to mediate.”

“Well, you look like someone who could have been in the Special Forces. Or some kind of soldier, ten pounds ago.”

I had no doubt that Kayla Pitts had already told her about me. But I played along. “You did some Googling.”

She laughed. She had a great, throaty laugh. “You barely exist on Google. You don’t even have a website.”

“I don’t need one.”

“Well, la-di-dah. I had to do a hell of a lot more than Google.”

“And yet you’re still willing to meet me.”

“Morbid curiosity.”

A waitress came by with a pad.

“Another Diet Coke,” Mandy said.

The waitress turned to me.

“I’ll have a Natty Boh.”

When the waitress left, Mandy said, “Natty Boh, huh?”

I shrugged. That was localese for National Bohemian beer, which I knew they served here on tap. “Russian owned, by the way,” I said.

“No, actually, it’s owned by Pabst.”

“Right. And Pabst is owned by a Russian oligarch now.”

“Well, who knew?” She shrugged, conceding the point. I had a feeling she didn’t like being wrong. “So you’re almost a local boy, aren’t you?”

“I spent some formative years in DC.”

“Working for some supersecret unit of Defense intelligence. I know.”

“Everything in the Pentagon is classified. Lunch menus in the cafeteria are classified. You must know that.”

“ ‘Classified’ is just a red flag to me.” She smiled. “And after the Pentagon you went private, working for Jay Stoddard.”

I nodded.

“Working for big companies and politicians and the rich and powerful.”

“Largely. But not always.”

“Not a lot of people know about you. But the ones who do had mostly good things to say.”

“Clearly you didn’t talk to everybody.”

“So Gideon Parnell hired an investigator. That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”

“Why’s that?”

“If my story weren’t totally solid, they wouldn’t bother to put someone like you on it.”

“Not at all. Most people are afraid of Slander Sheet. A lie this outrageous, you take it seriously. You do what you can to make sure it dies a proper death.”

“I think Gideon hired you for clean-up duty.”

“I don’t do that.”

“Come on. You’re an attack dog for the rich and powerful.”

“Not exclusively.”

“Only the rich and the powerful can afford you.”

I didn’t want to tell her that I took this job because I believed the story was a lie, and I could see where this conversation was going, so I took a detour. Decided to try my best to defang her. “You did some great work at the Post .”

“You have no idea what kind of work I did,” she said with a grin.

“Not true. You did that major series on the out-of-control secrecy in the US government a few years back. That was huge. What’d you say, like almost a million people hold top-secret security clearances? More than the entire population of Washington, DC?”

She shrugged. “Right.”

“And you were also the first one to write about the CIA’s secret prisons overseas — that was a big deal, too, that piece. And the one about the abuses at Walter Reed.”