Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

“I want to go to sleep,” she said. “I’m so wiped out.”

“Do that. We’ll talk in the morning.”

There was a knock at the door. I went over to the peephole and saw Dorothy. I opened the door. She was carrying a couple of plastic shopping bags, one from CVS and one from Macy’s. She looked at Kayla, then at me, wonderingly.

I opened the room door again and hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the outside door handle. Then I fastened the security latch. It was too easy to defeat those hotel security latches with a length of stiff wire. I’d done it myself. So I got a towel from the bathroom, rolled it up, and stuck it under the door’s lever handle. That would foil any attempts to beat the latch.

I had to move her as soon as possible. Tonight I would make some calls and get her a safe house outside of DC.

“I got you a toothbrush and toothpaste, honey,” Dorothy said gently, setting the bags down on the bed next to Kayla. “A nightgown. A pair of pants that might be too big, now that I look at you, and some T-shirts.”

“Thank you,” Kayla sniffed. “You know, in my line of work there are always these guys who want to save you . They’re the worst. You want them to just get the hell away, you know? But it’s different when you actually need...” Her words were once again swallowed up by sobs.

“Come,” I said to Dorothy. “Let’s let Kayla get some sleep. I have something I need to do.”

Nick,” Dorothy said quietly, “what are we doing?”

We sat in the living room of my suite, the connecting door to Kayla’s room open. I’d set down my wineglass of Scotch and ordered coffee from room service.

“About what?”

“With her? She’s a scammer and a grifter, and need I remind you, she also happens to be a prostitute.”

“And a victim.”

“Of her own making.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Not to me. If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t be here.”

“If it wasn’t her, it would have been someone else. Anyway, she may prove useful.”

“But that’s not why you rescued her.”

I shrugged. What could I say? She was right; I’d saved the girl because she was being used; she was a pawn in a struggle I didn’t yet understand. And because I liked her for some reason. But I didn’t want to argue with Dorothy. She had her moral code, a complex one, and I respected it, but she didn’t view Kayla as damaged goods, a victim of circumstance, as I did.

A knock at my door. I checked the peephole. I could see a young woman in a hotel uniform with a rolling cart. I opened the door, and she rolled in the cart and set up the coffee.

I offered Dorothy some, and she accepted. She had work to do. She was determined to trace the ownership of Slander Sheet and she had a few online leads. She sat at her laptop at the dining table/work station. Meanwhile, after I’d had a few sips, I called Mandy Seeger’s cell phone and got a message — not hers, but a robotic female voice from the phone company saying, “The number you dialed has been changed, disconnected, or is no longer in service.”

So I called the main number for the Slander Sheet offices in DC, figuring that there’d probably be staffers working at night.

A young-sounding man answered the line. “Slander Sheet.”

“Mandy Seeger, please.”

A pause. “Uh, yeah, she doesn’t work here anymore. Sorry.”

That was fast, I thought.

“Do you have any contact number for her? I’m a friend.”

A pause. “Hold on.” He sounded reluctant.

He put the phone down. I heard voices in the background. He came back on the line and dictated a phone number. I thanked him and hung up.

I wanted to talk to Mandy Seeger because she was another victim in the Claflin business. She, too, had been used, like Kayla, only in a different way. Now that she’d been fired, I suspected she would be happy to tell me what she knew about who owned Slander Sheet.

Her phone rang and rang and went to a recording of her voice. I left a message.

Then I found Curtis Schmidt’s wallet, the one I’d taken off him, and took out his Maryland driver’s license. It listed his home address. I looked it up on Google Earth and then switched to Street View.

One of the great advantages of Google Maps and Google Earth is that they enable you to do a kind of close reconnaissance of houses. That’s why criminals like Google. Now they can case their targets remotely.

Curtis Schmidt lived in Bethesda, on Moorland Lane. His house was a handsome three-story brick colonial with a detached garage, situated on a small but nicely landscaped plot of land graced with mature trees. The house and the neighborhood were too nice for a cop to afford, and it made me wonder when Schmidt had gone bad. I surveyed the house and the neighbors’ houses from every angle I could. The houses were unusually close to one another, I noted.

I checked the address in the usual databases to see whether Schmidt had a wife and family, but from all indications it appeared that he lived alone. Then, using my burner phone, I called Schmidt’s home number, which Dorothy had found in one of our databases. It rang eight times and then went to voice mail, a muffled male voice that said only, “Leave your name and phone number at the tone.”

I changed into my Allied HVAC uniform, assembled a small bag of tools, and said good-bye to Dorothy and went down to the Suburban.

As I drove up Connecticut Avenue, heading northwest toward Maryland, my iPhone rang.

It was Mandy Seeger.

“Did you call to gloat, is that it?” she said.

“I called because I want your help. It wasn’t your fault. Kayla lied to you. She was paid and blackmailed, both.”

“How — how do you know?”

“She told me so. She got paid twice. Not just by Slander Sheet. How much did you guys pay her, by the way?”

“Ten thousand bucks. What do you mean, she got paid and blackmailed? By who?”

“That’s just it. She doesn’t know.”

“Where is she? I tried to call her, but no answer. I thought she was screening her calls and didn’t want to talk to me.”

“She’s with me.”

“With you ?”

“We’re keeping her safe. The people who paid her tried to grab her and take her out of town, fly her somewhere.”

“‘People’? Like who?”

“I’m trying to find out. I thought you might want to help me.”

Slander Sheet had just destroyed her credibility as a journalist and then fired her. She had to be hopping mad.

“Hell yeah, I want to help you. Not tonight, though. I’m wiped out. I can barely talk.”

“Tomorrow as soon as you’re up, give me a call.”

“I will. And — Heller?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

I found Schmidt’s house easily — I recognized it from Google — and drove past it slowly. The house was dark; the lights were off. I tried his home phone one more time, calling from my burner, and there was no answer.

It was a fair assumption that he wasn’t home, but I couldn’t be sure. Where was he? Hospital, maybe, getting something done to his hyperextended knee. Though there wasn’t much that could be done. Surgery, maybe, if a ligament was torn. A lot of physical therapy. Ice.

Tax and residential records confirmed that he lived alone, without a wife and/or kids. But that didn’t mean he might not have a girlfriend visiting, asleep in the house. Or he could be there alone and just not answering.

So I circled around and pulled into his driveway, behind the detached garage, where I parked. That seemed less suspicious than parking a few blocks away and approaching by foot. If neighbors were watching, they’d see a big, official-looking black Suburban in the driveway; nothing furtive about that. Hence the service uniform. The direct approach was often best.