Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

I had to proceed on the assumption that he or she did. Even if only peripherally.

Given my height and build, I probably wasn’t going to slip by unseen. Neither moving slowly nor sprinting by.

I’d be seen.

Standing there in the living room of a stranger’s apartment, hoping the resident didn’t see me here, I looked around and noticed a walker and a spare cane. So she was elderly. An old woman or an old man. Maybe both. Only one walker, so probably just one person.

Let’s assume it’s an old lady. If she saw me in her apartment, she would almost certainly scream and then call the police, and I couldn’t have that.

Since the lights in the apartment were on, I also assumed that she’d awakened for the morning, turned on the lights, maybe had a little breakfast, and then got back into bed to watch TV.

Based on the volume of the TV, I assumed also that she was hard of hearing. But not necessarily blind. It was fifteen or twenty feet from where I was standing to the front door, with an open bedroom door in between.

I didn’t know what to do.

So I began to game out my options.

One: I brazen it out, just walk boldly to the front door, open it, and leave. She’d probably see me and panic. Scream and call 911. The police dispatcher would immediately notify the police on the scene. I wouldn’t have time to run down six flights of stairs, or take the elevators.

This seemed like a bad option.

Two: I glanced at the light, lacy curtains that hung next to the glass sliders. There were six panels of curtains, each curtain about six feet long.

Knotted together, losing about a foot in length for each knot, that was thirty feet.

I could sustain a drop of around thirty feet to the grass or bushes below, if I had to. If I fell right.

Quickly I thought it through. I couldn’t do it without making noise. Plus it would take me at least ten minutes to remove the curtains, then remove the hooks from the fabric, and turn the curtains into a long rope and climb down from the balcony. Since this apartment, like Kayla’s, faced the front of the building, I’d risk being seen by anyone driving up — and by the police, if they happened to be leaving at the time.

Not a feasible option. I was stuck with the bad option.

Brazen it out.

Walk across the living room, as quietly as possible, and just hope that somehow I wasn’t spotted.

I took a breath, exhaled, and then began moving slowly, as light on my feet as I could be, toward the front door. One foot in front of the other.

When I took a third step I was able to see into the bedroom. I saw a slice of a bed, a brown bedspread or coverlet. A lump in the bed. Someone’s legs, presumably. The pallid blue-gray wash of the TV, just out of sight.

I took another careful step. Now I would see her head and shoulders, and she’d be able to see me. Unless her attention was riveted on the TV. Maybe her head was turned at such an angle that she wouldn’t see me in her peripheral vision. The door was about ten feet away from me. The TV chattered and blared and barked and reverberated.

The floor creaked audibly underfoot.

My insides clenched.

Would she hear the squeak over the clamor of the TV? Maybe. Maybe not.

Then I saw that the bed was empty.

What had, a moment ago, looked like someone’s torso or legs under the coverlet was in fact just a heap of bedding.

So if she wasn’t in the bed, and the TV was on, where—?

A toilet flushed.

I thought quickly. He? She? Was in the bathroom, off the bedroom, and she was probably about to emerge.

For a split-second I froze.

Stop or advance? When she came out of the bathroom, the odds would greatly increase of her spotting me in her peripheral vision.

Decided, then.

I took three quick steps and reached the front door.

The door locks here were identical to Kayla’s, upstairs. Two thumb latches that turned counterclockwise to unlock the dead bolt.

I turned the top one, and it made a loud clunking sound, audible everywhere in the apartment, no question about it.

I turned the second thumb latch and yanked the door open.

Without waiting another second, I vaulted through the door, and leaving it open behind me, ran down the corridor toward the stairwell.

You can’t count on always being lucky, even if you consider yourself a lucky guy, as I do. I’d just escaped a jam — a disaster averted — but it had been a close thing. At least I’d gotten something out of it, I told myself, something valuable: proof that Kayla had bought tickets to Mississippi for the day before she’d allegedly serviced a Supreme Court justice.

In retrospect, as I drove the black Suburban back to the Shays Abbott office at M Street and New Hampshire, it had seemed worth the risk. I just had to remind myself that I wouldn’t always be this lucky.

I’d broken into her apartment hoping to access her credit card bills so I could identify places she frequented — health clubs, bars, restaurants. Armed with that knowledge, I figured, maybe I’d eventually locate surveillance cameras that had recorded her. A long shot, no question.

But discovering in one of those credit card bills that she’d bought plane tickets: that was far better than scouting around for CCTV cameras in DC.

“You didn’t get in to her apartment,” Dorothy guessed as I arrived in the conference room. I’d changed out of my HVAC uniform and back into my street clothes. I was limping slightly, apparently having pulled something in my right calf.

“O ye of little faith.” I gave her a swift recap of what had happened.

“Heller,” she said. “Man.” Then she laughed. “At least she wasn’t home at the time. You plant the GPS?”

I nodded, told her what I’d found out about the US Airways flight.

“Jackson, Mississippi,” she said. “I wonder why.”

“Going home, I figure.”

“But home is Tupelo, and Jackson is almost two hundred miles away.”

“It’s probably the closest airport. I doubt there are any direct flights from DC to Tupelo, Mississippi.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Then she flew back two days later. That’s a lot of driving for less than two days at home. Why wouldn’t she take a connecting flight to Memphis?”

“Good question,” I said.

“Well, the important thing is that it proves she couldn’t have been with Claflin at the Hotel Monroe on those two nights.”

“Almost.”

“You don’t think that’s enough?”

“We have proof she bought airline tickets. That’s not proof she flew to Mississippi. Or that she was actually there. What would really nail this thing down would be her CDRs.”

She groaned. “I can’t, Nick. It’s impossible.”

CDRs are call detail records generated by cell phones and kept in the mobile phone company’s databases. They contain all sorts of data, like phone numbers dialed or received, the start time and length of each call — and then the really useful information: the location where you were when you placed or received a call.

As everyone who watches movies or TV knows, our cell phones are constantly pinging cell towers. Mobile phone companies know where our phones — i.e., we — are at all times. It’s undeniably creepy. A CDR documents which cell towers a mobile phone pinged during the course of a call. If you know the location of the nearest cell towers, their longitude and latitude and nearest street address, you know where the caller was.

If we could get the CDRs for Kayla’s phone, we could prove she was in Mississippi and not in Washington during two of the nights in question.

The problem was, if you weren’t law enforcement, it was next to impossible to get someone’s CDRs — even your own, for that matter. Not so long ago, you just had to know someone in the phone company. Money would change hands under the table. But the companies had begun putting in logging systems that keep close track of who accesses call detail records. She was right: She couldn’t get Kayla’s CDRs.