Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

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.

Entering Kayla’s apartment, I closed the door quietly behind me. The lights were off. I looked around quickly. I was in a living room. Along one wall were sliding glass doors that gave onto a shallow balcony. The curtains were halfway drawn.

Strong morning sun blazed a large oblong across the room, a short sofa, a couple of matching chairs, a glass coffee table. To the right was a kitchenette, partitioned off from the living room by a breakfast bar with three stools. On the other side of the living room was an open door to a bedroom. I crept quietly through the room, just in case she was asleep in bed.

Once I was halfway across the living room I could see straight into her bedroom. The bed was made. She wasn’t here.

I detoured to the glass sliders. The balcony looked out over the parking lot in front of the building.

No cops yet, but it was too early. I glanced at my watch again. In nine minutes it would no longer be safe to be here.

The bedroom smelled faintly of perfume. Near a window was a small wooden desk. On it were only a lamp, a textbook, a legal pad, a silver clock, a yellow highlighter, and a small stuffed giraffe. No laptop. I scanned the legal pad. Nothing of interest. I gave the room another once-over. Looked in the adjoining bathroom. It was heartbreakingly neat. A lineup of lipsticks, a bottle of Scope mouthwash, an electric toothbrush. Nothing there.

I went back out into the living room, glanced outside again and saw no police cars. Not yet. When I turned around, I noticed a laptop on an end table next to the couch, a well-used Lenovo with stickers all over its case.

There it was. What I was hoping to find.

I opened it and attached a small, preconfigured USB drive. When it mounted, I double-clicked on it. This little device was pre-programmed to plant something called a key logger on her laptop. The key logger would secretly record every keystroke Kayla made on that machine and transmit it wirelessly to Dorothy.

I entered the commands she’d given me.

As I finished typing, I heard the siren.

I leaped up and went to the balcony. A police cruiser was pulling into the parking lot and the siren growled to a stop. The neighbor had called 911, just as I expected. But the police had responded more quickly than I would have thought. Three cheers for the Arlington Police Department.

Not good for me.

There was a lot more I needed to do.

I went to the front door and put my ear against it and listened. Nothing yet. Everything now depended on how quickly the police gained entry to the apartment building. Once they were buzzed in, they’d be up here within a minute or two. By the time I heard the elevator arrive on the seventh floor, by the time I heard it bing, it would be too late.

Now it was a matter of calculation.

I returned to her laptop and opened her Safari browser. I selected History. And there it was: days, maybe even weeks, of her browsing history. Every website she’d visited. Like most people, she didn’t clear her browser’s history.

My eye was quickly caught by one entry:

American Express Credit Cards... Travel and Business Services

She’d gone online to look at her American Express statement, maybe pay the bill. I found another entry in her history:

American Express Login

So I pulled that one up and clicked on it, and her login page came up. The username field was already filled in: KPitts. And the password field was filled with a series of dots for her password. I clicked “Log In,” and her American Express card statement came up.