Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

“What about the door?” I said.

He nodded again. “It was opened, let me see, five times. Once at 7:16, of course.”

“And then around eight or so?” When Dorothy had returned bearing clothes for Kayla. That had been the second time.

“Yes. At 8:07 and then at 8:11.”

I closed my eyes, nodded. Dorothy entered at 8:07. A few minutes later, I’d opened the door again and hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside handle. Then I’d stuffed a towel under the inside handle.

“Then at 9:36, and again at 10:25.”

I was gone by nine. I didn’t return until after midnight. At nine thirty-six I was probably in Curtis Schmidt’s garage.

“But no keycard was used?”

“Correct.”

“Which means the door was opened from the inside.”

“That’s right.”

It had to have been Kayla who opened the door. But for whom?

“Can you tell if the room phone was used?”

“Yes, one moment.”

He tapped some more and opened a different database. “Yes, just once. An outgoing call was placed at 8:47.”

“Can you see the number that was called?”

“No, for that you need to go to the phone company. AT&T. We don’t have that capability.”

“I’d like to take a look at your surveillance video.”

He smiled, a pained smile, and shook his head. “Only for law enforcement. I’m very sorry.”

I thanked him, and he expressed his condolences again, and as soon as I left his office I called Detective Balakian.

What can I do for you, Mr. Heller?” Balakian said.

“I have some information for you about Kayla Pitts.”

“Information?” Balakian sounded distracted. He was drinking something. Probably kombucha. I could hear the crinkle of paper, a cough in the background.

“A couple of facts that raise some interesting questions.”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s a splotch of blood on the back of the water faucet in the bathroom. Not very big, not easy to see. I’m pretty sure your guys missed it. If it’s Kayla’s blood, you have an interesting situation.”

“How do you figure?”

“You have to wonder how it got there.” I didn’t want to spell it out for him. That would be insulting. “And there’s more.”

“Okay.” More crinkling of paper. Balakian took another sip.

“According to the hotel’s security director, she placed an outgoing phone call at 8:47 P.M. Then at 9:36 P.M. and 10:25 her door was opened. From the inside.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That may have been when she let someone in. Her killer.”

“That’s a pretty big leap. She let someone into her room, so it’s homicide, not suicide, is that what you’re telling me?”

“It’s a piece of evidence you need to know.”

“There could be a thousand reasons why she opened her room door. She went out to get ice. She went out for a cigarette break. She went down to the lobby.”

“If she left the room for some reason, she had to have come back in. Which means the door would have been opened from the outside with the keycard after that. But it wasn’t.”

“Anything else?”

“Sure. See if there’s any security footage. They won’t let me view it. And you might want to check for drugs in her system like ketamine. Something that was used to knock her out.”

“That’ll come from toxicology in a couple weeks. But if they find evidence of drugs in a prostitute’s body, well, that’s not exactly going to be front-page news.”

Balakian was not going to be moved from his theory that Kayla was a suicide. It was infuriating, but I was just wasting my time trying to convince him. I knew the girl had been murdered. I didn’t need him to confirm it for me.

There were far more pressing questions to answer.

I said good-bye and hung up, and within seconds my phone rang. It was Mandy Seeger.

“I think I have something,” she said.

We met for breakfast at a no-frills diner a few blocks from the hotel. She ordered waffles, the house specialty, and I ordered eggs over medium and a half-smoke. They brought coffee without being asked, and I downed half a mug right away, nearly scalding my esophagus.

She looked surprisingly fresh, for someone who’d gotten hardly any sleep. Her skin was dewy and she smelled like soap. For the first time I noticed that she had freckles across her nose. It was cute. Her hair was pulled back. She was wearing an old, faded pair of jeans and a black T-shirt.

She took a few tentative sips of the hot coffee, and I told her what I’d found out from the hotel security guy.

“You think she let her killer into the room?” she asked.

I nodded.

“So it was someone she knew and trusted.”

“Seems that way. Unless she thought it was someone from the hotel, room service, or security, or a manager. Even though I told her not to open the door for anyone.”

“Oh, man. You know these homicide detectives are supposed to treat every suicide as a homicide until it’s proven different.”

“That’s right.”

“But there’s always other pressures. Numbers pressures. Stats. Like maybe they don’t want to add to the homicide rate.”

“Could be that. Or it could be simple incompetence. Balakian’s new and doesn’t know what he’s doing.” I took a swig of coffee, then said, “So you said you had something?”

“I think so. All right. As we know, Slander Sheet is owned by Hunsecker Media. Which is in turn owned by a company called Patroon LLC, right?”

“Okay.”

“But Patroon LLC is a black box. And for a long time that stumped me. So then I had an idea: pull my payroll tax forms. I looked at my W-2 tax forms from Slander Sheet. And it says that my salary was paid by something called the Slade Group.”

“Another black box, I assume.”

She nodded. “So I went online and searched the electronic database of the State Corporation Commission in Virginia and found something interesting. The Slade Group was incorporated by a law firm, Norcross and McKenna.” She looked at me, expectantly. Her light brown eyes twinkled.

I nodded. “Interesting.”

“You know who they are?”

“I’m pretty sure they represented my dad once. I recognize the name.”

“You know what they’re famous for?”

I shook my head.

“You know what ‘dark money’ is, right?”

“Sure.” Dark money was like the slurry trough of campaign fund-raising in the United States. The superrich, and corporations, could take advantage of a loophole in the law to secretly give unlimited amounts of money to their favorite candidate by passing the contribution through a nonprofit corporation. They could influence elections and do it in secret. It was totally corrupt, but that’s our political system. God bless America.

“I did a piece on dark money for the Post . And I kept coming across the name of this one particular law firm, Norcross and McKenna. It specializes in forming phony corporations and nonprofits as a way to hide donors’ names. The firm is based in Leesburg, Virginia, but that’s all I know about it.”

“Sketchy-sounding firm. No wonder my father did business with them. So Slander Sheet is owned by the Slade Group, which is one of these phony nonprofit corporations.”

“That’s right.”

“A corporation formed by this law firm.”

“Right.”

“Do you have any names?”

“For this law firm?”

I nodded.

“They have a website that’s pretty bare-bones.”

“This is great, Mandy. That’s our next move.”

“The law firm?”

“Right.”

“They’re not going to talk to you.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

The waitress appeared with two plates on her arm. She put the eggs in front of me and the waffles in front of Mandy and topped off our coffees. She returned a minute later with syrup for Mandy and sriracha sauce for me. Mandy tucked right into her waffle without waiting. I liked that. I like a woman who likes to eat.