Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

An hour later I was back at the hotel making calls.

I was in the shower around six when my cell phone started ringing. I let it ring to voice mail. There was no call I was waiting for, no one I needed to talk to.

It rang again immediately, but I had a headful of shampoo, and I let it go to voice mail again.

When I was drying myself with one of the hotel’s big, very thick bath towels, the phone rang a third time.

This time I picked it up.

The caller ID showed a number with a 571 area code. It looked familiar. I decided to answer it.

“Mr. Heller?” a voice whispered.

“Yes?”

“Nicholas Heller?” Still a whisper.

“Yes?” I said again, annoyed. It sounded like a prank call.

“Mr. Heller... I’m sorry... I need your help. Please.”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Kayla.”

For a moment I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. “Who?”

“Kayla Pitts.”

The call girl whose lies had launched this whole thing. Of all people to hear from. How had she got my cell number? Then I remembered handing her my business card.

Her voice remained a whisper, but it sounded frantic.

“Please, help me. I think they’re going to kill me. Please. Oh, God. Please help me. No, I—”

The call ended abruptly, then there was a jostling noise, and then silence.

It sounded like the phone had been grabbed out of her hand.

I stood there a moment, dripping water, trying to make some sense of what had just happened. The girl had sounded genuinely in distress, but why would she be calling me? I found the call in my Recents and hit the button to call it back. It rang and rang and then went to voice mail: “Hi, this is Kayla. You know what to do.” It was the same number I’d used when I’d spoof-texted her, pretending to be Mandy Seeger.

I dried myself off and dressed quickly, thinking all the while. What was the girl up to? My phone showed two voice mails, both from her. I played them.

The same whispered voice. “Is this... Nicholas Heller? It’s... Kayla... Pitts, you know... I need your help. I’m... I’m in a van, I don’t know where they’re taking me... please help me.”

And then the next message: “It’s Kayla again. If you get this... just, please, you’ve got to help me. They won’t tell me where I’m going and... just call me, please, I’m scared.”

The two messages were fragmentary and frantic enough to sound genuine. But were they? I picked up the hotel phone and called Dorothy’s room.

“It’s obviously a setup,” Dorothy said, once she’d listened to the messages.

She’d just come out of the shower herself and smelled of shampoo or conditioner. Her close-cropped hair glistened with tiny droplets of water. She wore a white T-shirt and gray sweatpants.

“They hired this girl because she can act, right? She could say she had sex with a Supreme Court justice she never met and be convincing at it. Now they’re using her to draw you out somewhere so they can...” She fell silent, thinking.

“So they can what?”

“Whoever’s trying to set up Claflin is probably royally pissed off that you screwed up their plan. And they...” She paused again. “I don’t know, Heller, I don’t like this. It’s a trap of some kind.”

“The girl sounds terrified. Like she’s been abducted.”

“But why would she be calling you? You work for the other side.”

“I don’t know. It sounds genuine to me.”

“So what do you want to do about it?”

“Can you locate her phone?”

She looked at me, eyes wide, shrugged. She did not like to disappoint. “Not without physical access to it.”

“How about the Find My iPhone thing you used to locate my stolen phone?”

She shook her head. “I can’t think of a way. We don’t know her Apple ID. Her — what about the GPS tracker?”

I nodded. “It’s in her laptop bag. If she was really abducted, she’s not going to have her laptop with her, right?”

“Who knows. Let me get my laptop and we’ll see.”

She went to her room and was back a minute later with her laptop and her iPad. She set them both down on the suite’s dining table, which we’d been using for work. Both machines had been preloaded with the GPS program.

“It’s still in Arlington,” she said. “Hold on. It’s moving.”

I came over and looked at her laptop screen. A green dot was inching slowly over a map of northern Virginia, along a road identified as Route 66.

“Let’s go,” I said.

I’d parked the Suburban on the street, and not in the hotel garage, exactly for a time like this, when we needed to move fast. While I maneuvered the SUV through the streets of Washington, Dorothy located the moving dot on her iPad. We crossed the Potomac on Memorial Bridge and continued on the interstate, Route 66, heading north and then west.

I was tempted to speed but didn’t want to risk getting stopped. The dot, blue on her iPad, was still in Arlington, but considerably west of us. We were heading due north along Custis Memorial Parkway, which was what Route 66 was called in Arlington. It was rush hour, it was getting dark, and the traffic was heavy, a sluggishly flowing metal river of vehicles.

“I still think this is a setup,” Dorothy said.

“I hear you. We disagree.” I gave her a meaningful look. “Notice I haven’t heard back from Kayla since the call was cut off?”

“So?”

“Seems inconsistent with a setup. If they’re trying to lure me, they’d have her keep talking to me, keep stringing me along. The way it happened, it’s more likely they found her talking on the phone and grabbed it.”

“I’m not going to say it again.” She looked at me, then back at her iPad. “They’re in Falls Church now.”

“How often does the tracker update?”

“Every sixty seconds.”

“You charged it before you gave it to me, right?”

“Huh. I forgot. Very funny, Heller.”

“How long does the battery last?”

“Thirty days at rest. In motion, considerably less, but it should last the rest of the day at least. Probably a couple of days. They’re still on the interstate, in Falls Church, heading west/northwest.”

“Take my phone,” I said, “and try texting her again, just in case.” I took my phone from my jacket pocket and handed it to her.

“And say what?”

“Just ‘where are you?’”

It had just begun to rain, a few droplets splashing against the windshield. I put on the wipers, which only smeared the glass, so I flicked on the washers, and that cleared it up. But the rain only came faster, thrumming against the SUV’s hood.

“No reply?” I asked.

“Nothing.” She was silent for a time, and then went on, “Nick, what do you think’s going on? What’s your theory, why she called you?”

“She knows what I do for a living. She knows I have some idea what she’s involved in. I think she called me out of desperation — she doesn’t know what else to do or who else to turn to. She’s scared. That’s what I think.”

“So what’s happening to her? Hold on — they’re at the junction with 267, and they just took the exit onto the Dulles toll road. Where are they headed, do you think?”

“Dulles airport,” I said.

“Why?”

“Their whole plan just collapsed and they want to get her out of town before it spins out even further.”

“Who’s they?”

“That’s the question. It’s whoever wanted to take Jeremiah Claflin down.”

“And getting her out of town means — what?”

“That I don’t know either. She was the most important part of this conspiracy, whatever this conspiracy is, but also, I’m guessing, the soft spot — the most vulnerable part. She’s a frightened young woman who could easily spill the truth about what’s going on. And who put her up to it.”