Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

But Dorothy was quick. “He was on a stakeout.”

“A stakeout?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Couple hours of sitting in a car. I’m sure you’ve been there.”

He looked at me for a beat, as if reassessing. I wasn’t so sure he’d ever been on a stakeout, actually. He seemed awfully young to be a homicide detective. “You say she was being taken somewhere against her will, which is why she called you. Where was she being taken?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t she call the police?”

“I don’t know.”

“And who were her would-be kidnappers?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“You say you live in Boston?”

“That’s right.”

“How long have you been in town?”

“A couple of days.” I’d already been over this with him.

“Sounds to me like she’d been under a great deal of emotional stress. Would you say that’s accurate?”

“I would.”

“Between the attempted kidnapping by an unknown party and the very public nature of her, uh, accusation against a Supreme Court justice.”

I nodded.

“She was in a fragile state, is that fair to say?”

I nodded again.

“Yet you left her alone in this hotel room with a minibar full of alcohol.”

“She was exhausted. She wanted to go to sleep.”

He turned to Dorothy. “Did you check on her at any point this evening?”

“I was asleep myself,” she said.

He turned back to me. “So she called you to help rescue her, and you brought her to this hotel room and then left her here?”

“I don’t think I like what you’re implying,” I said.

“That you left her here in a vulnerable state? That’s not accurate?”

“You’re trying to make it sound like it’s my fault.”

“I didn’t say you did it, Mister, uh, Heller. I said you let it happen.”

“I told you, we had no idea she was suicidal. And I don’t think she was.” I heard myself: I sounded more defensive than I wanted to.

“Hey, don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “How sure are you that this was really a suicide?”

“Do you have any reason to believe it was something else?”

“She was afraid, and she had cause to be afraid.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She was almost abducted. There were people who didn’t want her to talk.”

“Well, we’ll have to open a separate investigation into that. But there are far easier ways to kill someone than by slitting their wrists and their neck. It takes a while to bleed out, and I didn’t see any signs of struggle. There were even hesitation marks, which is textbook — the first couple of times she tried, she was probably surprised at how painful it was and stopped. This is textbook, man. We’ve got a young prostitute, probably mentally unstable, probably with family issues, maybe substance abuse. Who was undergoing a lot of emotional pressure.”

“And didn’t leave a note.”

“Sometimes they leave notes, sometimes they don’t. Plenty of times they don’t. I know it’s hard to accept that someone you care about committed suicide. I understand why you might prefer to think it wasn’t a suicide.”

“So you’ve worked a lot of homicides?”

He didn’t reply.

I wanted to ask him how long he’d been out of homicide school. I had a feeling it wasn’t long at all. He was also here by himself, without a partner. You send an inexperienced homicide detective out solo when you’re fairly sure you’re not dealing with a homicide. When you’re dealing with an apparent natural death or a suicide. That way the newbie investigator develops his chops. It looked like a suicide, so he was investigating it as if it was a suicide.

But what if it wasn’t?

After Detective Balakian had been there for barely an hour and a half, the people from the medical examiner’s office zipped up Kayla’s body in a bag and took her away on a stretcher. I watched them do it, feeling numb.

They drained the tub first to make it easier to remove the body, the blood-tinged water leaving a brick-red residue. Spatters of her blood remained on the tub surround, the lip of the tub, the adjoining vanity.

My phone rang. I glanced at my watch: 12:30 A.M.

Then I took out the phone and saw the caller ID and recognized the number. “Yes?” I said.

“Oh my God,” Mandy Seeger said in a hushed voice. “Is it true?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Kayla’s dead?”

“How — where did you hear this?”

“It’s on Slander Sheet.”

“ What? ” How was that even possible? But then I realized that Slander Sheet probably had tipsters in the Washington Metro police department. Hell, one of the tipsters could have been in this hotel room an hour ago, a mobile crime scene tech or a uniformed officer, texting Slander Sheet on the sly, making a quick buck. I found SlanderSheet.com on my laptop, and there it was.

The headline ran over a photo of Kayla, a.k.a. “Heidi,” from the Lily Schuyler website.

“I got a call a couple of minutes ago from Steve, my replacement,” she said. “He had some questions.”

“When?”

“Like fifteen minutes ago.”

“Who tipped him off?”

I was fairly certain that the only one in the room who knew the identity of the deceased besides me and Dorothy was Detective Balakian.

“Julian.”

“When?”

“Hold on, he e-mailed me first, before he called. Here it is, he forwarded an e-mail from Julian time-stamped eleven fifteen P.M.”

“Julian Gunn knew it was Kayla at eleven fifteen?”

“So?”

“Man, that’s barely fifteen minutes after the police got here.”

“Slander Sheet has sources everywhere,” she said.

Mandy Seeger arrived twenty minutes later. I’d asked her to come over. She’d said she couldn’t sleep, and I was wide-awake anyway. Dorothy had gone to bed.

She was wearing dark jeans and a black top and looked solemn. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

It was almost one in the morning.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, entering the suite and looking around curiously.

“You don’t believe what?”

“Kayla. I don’t believe she — committed suicide. I just don’t think she was the kind of person who’d kill herself. She was tough. She was a survivor. Maybe that’s why we hit it off.”

We sat in the living room of the suite. I’d closed the door to Kayla’s room. It didn’t seem right to be there anymore. A night manager had come an hour earlier and asked if it was okay if he had housekeeping service the room, or did they need the scene preserved? Detective Balakian said they had what they needed. So housekeeping would come in the morning. Until then, Kayla’s blood remained splashed on the walls of the bathroom. And on the floor.

Mandy wanted details, and I gave them. She was silent for a long time after I finished.

I said, “Do you still have friends at Slander Sheet you can get in touch with?”

“I just got fired, Heller.”

“What was the reason Julian gave for firing you?”

“He was furious. He said I’d disgraced Slander Sheet. Like that’s even possible. I should have investigated the story even more thoroughly than I did, he said.”

“Wasn’t he the one pressuring you to get it out there?”

“He was. He just told me to pack up my cubicle and go. My e-mail and my cell phone were immediately cut off.”

“So who was pressuring him ?”

“The S.O., I’m sure.”

“The... ‘S.O.’?”

“It’s a joke. That’s what we lowly employees called Slander Sheet’s shadowy owners. S.O. for ‘shadowy owners.’ Because no one knows who they are. It’s kept a deep dark secret.”