Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

“If you say so. When it comes to men and their sex drives, as far as I’m concerned all bets are off. Anything’s possible. I don’t care if you’re the president or the pope.”

“Fair enough. But it never happened.”

“Okay.” She held up the flip phone. “The call history on this thing will be very illuminating.”

“He only called one number.”

“His boss, I’m betting.”

“No doubt.”

“So what do you want to do with it? Are you going to call it? Call the boss?”

“First I want to find out whose number it is.”

“You already tried?”

I nodded. I’d tried the usual databases — Skip Smasher, Tracers Info, TLOxp, IRBsearch — where you can look up mobile phone numbers and find who owns them. All I learned was what I already knew, that it was a prepaid phone. Unregistered. No name associated with it. “It’s a drop phone, that’s all.”

“What about Montello?”

Frank Montello was an “information broker” who lived and worked in suburban Maryland. Not a friend, but a valuable contact. I didn’t know exactly how he practiced his dark arts. I just knew that if I needed to find an unlisted phone number or someone’s home address, and I’d had no luck with the traditional databases, he was the guy I’d reach out to. He knew how to dig deep. He could find out whether someone had had psychiatric problems or was an alcoholic. He could get anyone’s birth certificate or motor vehicle records. I used to find it creepy how much he could find out for me, but I’d gotten jaded. In any case, he was extremely expensive, and sort of unpleasant to deal with. He was usually overworked and slow. I used him selectively and reluctantly.

“He came up empty, but I asked him to keep working on it.”

The doorbell rang, and I opened the door for room service. The woman rolled in a warming cart and began to set up my dinner. The porterhouse looked perfectly cooked. I thanked her, tipped her, and she left.

“You realize I scarfed down pizza at the airport,” Dorothy said, “while you’re dining out on steak.”

“Happy to split it with you. I don’t need the whole thing.”

“I’m not hungry. Just giving you a hard time.”

“Whatever makes you feel good.” I cut off a forkful and took a bite. It was hot and delicious. A solid hit of umami. Hotel room service rarely does a good job with steak. It’s hard to get the timing right. But this one was great.

“What I want to know is who’s behind this,” I said. “It circles back around to the editor of Slander Sheet, this Julian Gunn guy, and what his motivations are. Gunn is leading this, but I’ll bet he’s taking orders from whoever really owns that piece of crap website. Once we find out who the money is behind Slander Sheet, who the real power is, and bring that out, everything will fall into place. We’ll know why this is happening. And we’ll have a way to disprove this thing with some real credibility.”

“That’s not going to be easy, I can tell you that.”

“What have you found?”

“SlanderSheet.com is owned by HunseckerMedia.com. Hunsecker Media.com is owned by some proxy, some limited liability company called, uh, Patroon LLC. Which has to be a shell company. I can’t find anything about it. And I don’t think I’m going to find anything in the next eighteen hours, or whatever we have left.”

“Seventeen.”

“Right.”

“So maybe cyber isn’t the way to find out who owns Slander Sheet. Maybe it’s old-fashioned door knocking and shoe leather and phone calls.”

“I’ll keep trying.”

“Wake me if you find anything.”

“I will. Seventeen hours left. My batteries are running down, Nick, but I’ll do as much as I can.”

“You want to order coffee from room service?”

She glanced at her watch. “I don’t know if coffee’s going to help me at this hour.”

“Tomorrow morning Mandy interviews Gideon, off the record, and I want to be there for that.”

“She’s Mandy to you now?”

I shrugged. “She’s not the enemy. If my theory is correct, she’s being used, too. She thinks she’s really onto a huge scoop and she doesn’t want to back down. Probably because her boss doesn’t want them to back down.”

“Then who’s the enemy?”

I held up Curtis Schmidt’s phone. “Right here.”

I had another Scotch while I checked my e-mail and then e-mailed Montello, the data broker, again. I was beat — it had been a long day, but I had a feeling tomorrow would be even worse.

The five-hundred-thread-count sheets were smooth as silk but cool and creamy. The mattress was firm but not hard. The bed was extremely comfortable. I fell asleep fairly quickly.

The phone rang some time later, an unfamiliar purring ringtone, and I jolted awake. “You got something,” I said.

“This is Gideon.”

“Oh, sorry — Gideon? What’s—” I looked at the digital clock. It was 6:05 in the morning. I’d been asleep for five hours or so.

“It’s online,” Gideon Parnell said.

“What’s online?” It took me a moment to realize. “Slander Sheet? I thought they were giving us forty-eight hours.”

“They ran it anyway,” he said.

While I waited for Dorothy to throw on some clothes, I went online to SlanderSheet.com. The piece was the first thing that came up. In huge red type against a stark white background were the words:

Above the headline was an unfortunate headshot of Jeremiah Claflin, in black judicial robe and tie, smiling like a cat in catnip.

I clicked on the headline. A short article came up, Mandy Seeger’s byline right at the top. All around it were ads with photos of women in bikinis with huge boobs. Atop the article was another headline:

Here was another picture of Claflin, this one in casual attire, getting out of a car. Next to that was a picture of Heidi taken from the Lily Schuyler website.

The piece began:

Jeremiah Claflin, the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, has had at least three trysts with a high-priced escort in DC, sources tell Slander Sheet in an exclusive. The escort, identified as Heidi L’Amour, 22, works for Lily Schuyler, a pricey call girl service that charges upward of $3,000 an hour.

Reliable sources tell Slander Sheet that the country’s top jurist, who is believed to be separated from his wife, did not pay for the prostitute’s services himself. Instead, the sordid trysts were funded by casino mogul and Claflin pal Tom Wyden, who benefited from a favorable decision by the Supreme Court just recently.

The assignations took place at Washington’s ritzy Hotel Monroe on three separate evenings this spring.

...

The office of the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States did not respond to requests by Slander Sheet for comment.

Below the article were headlines about one of the Kardashians, and one about Angelina Jolie, and one about Britney Spears, and a report on Beyoncé buying “$312,000 diamond shoes.”

Then Dorothy knocked on my door and we were off.

In the cab, Dorothy checked Drudge Report and Gawker and Perez Hilton, TMZ and RadarOnline.com, and Celebitchy. All the gossip websites she could think of. The Claflin story hadn’t appeared on any other website yet. But it was early. The piece had just gone up.

“Check this out,” she said, handing me her phone. It was the most viewed column on SlanderSheet.com. Number 1 was “SUPREME COURT JUSTICE IN CALL GIRL SCANDAL.”

It wasn’t even seven in the morning.

“It’s only a matter of minutes before Drudge links to this story,” she said. “Or Wonkette. Then it’s going to blow up big-time.”