Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

“So can you hack into it?”

She shook her head. “There’s nothing to hack into.”

“I’d call that low profile.”

“As far as I can tell, they don’t have an office either. Just a PO box.”

“Interesting. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I left the Rubber Ducky behind on that job.”

She exhaled. “Okay. If they find it, which might take a while, there’s nothing on there tying it back to us.”

“Sorry about that.”

She shrugged. “It happens. They’re cheap. No big deal.”

“I should get dressed. Detective Balakian wants to see me.”

“The homicide detective?”

I nodded.

“I thought he’d concluded it was a suicide.”

“Maybe they’re having second thoughts.”

“New information?”

“That’s what I want to know.”

Detective Balakian was wearing the same outfit as last time, the white shirt with the skinny black tie, and I wondered if his wardrobe was limited. Or maybe he’d found his look and wanted to stick with it. He met me at the front desk of the police station, a converted old elementary school, and brought me to an interview room on the first floor.

There were four chairs at a rectangular table. He pointed to the one he wanted me to sit in.

“Is this being videotaped?” I asked.

“Do you have any objection?”

“No. I just like to know.”

“Thanks. It’s a lot less work than typing it up. Thanks for coming in.” He sounded much more conciliatory than the night of Kayla’s murder. Something had obviously changed.

“Sure,” I said, instead of what I was thinking: You didn’t exactly give me a choice.

“Coffee?”

“No thanks.”

He sat in one of the other chairs and took out a small spiral-bound notebook. After a long pause, he said, “Why were you so convinced Kayla Pitts may have been a homicide victim?”

Now, finally, he was taking this case seriously. “Because I talked to her a few hours before her death. I told you that.”

“Nothing else you might have heard?”

I shook my head. “I thought you decided it was a suicide.”

“Toxicology came back.”

“And?”

He hesitated. He took a drink of something brownish in a mug that was too light to be coffee. “There was a powerful sedative in her system.”

“Ketamine,” I said.

“Rohypnol, actually.”

“Roofie. I thought tox results take weeks.”

“We put a rush on it.”

“Ah.” Like he had the juice to do that. It must have been all the news stories that had put pressure on the MPD, convinced someone at the top to expedite it.

He knew I’d fixed a drink for Kayla, and giving someone a drink is the standard way to roofie somebody. So I wanted to make sure he could rule me out as a suspect. “You’ve got the contents of the hotel wastebasket,” I said. “Run a tox assay on the remnants.”

“Already did,” Balakian said. “Trust but verify, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“You said she called you and asked for your help, the night of her death. Why’d she ask for you?”

We’d already been over this. Was he trying to catch me in an inconsistency? “We met after I tracked her down. She decided she trusted me. She knew I was an outsider, not with the people who were kidnaping her.”

“That was the only time you two had met?”

“Right.”

“You said she was being taken somewhere against her will. You don’t know where?”

“Right.”

“She didn’t know?”

“She didn’t.”

“And you don’t know who her would-be kidnappers were?”

“I have a pretty good idea. The tail number on their plane traces to a company called Centurion Associates of Langley, Virginia.”

“The security firm.”

“Is that what they are?”

He ignored my question. “Why didn’t you tell me this when we spoke at the hotel?”

“I didn’t know. We just found out.”

He said nothing.

“Can I ask a question or two?”

“Go ahead,” he said unenthusiastically.

“Have you looked at the hotel’s surveillance tapes?”

“Closely. There’s not a lot of them. Nothing in the elevators, nothing on the guest floors. This is a hotel that values its guests’ privacy more than their safety. You can enter the hotel and head right for the elevator bank without being captured on video.”

“What about the service entrance?”

“There’s cameras there. But we don’t find anyone entering there and taking the elevators up during that time period.”

“What about the call she placed at eight forty-seven?”

“That went to a disposable cell phone. Which doesn’t help us at all.”

“Look, can we speak frankly?” I said.

“That’s not what we’ve been doing?”

“You said it yourself, this looked like a ‘textbook’ suicide. The slit wrists and throat, the bathtub, the hesitation marks. Then there’s the Rohypnol. Did she take it as a recreational drug? Most likely she was given a roofie to make her cooperate when they killed her, while she bled out.”

He nodded.

“Whoever did this knows what a homicide investigator looks for.”

He said nothing.

“This was a ‘suicide’ staged by a former cop, maybe even a former homicide detective.”

“That’s a wild allegation.”

“No, it’s a theory. One you should take seriously.”

“Let’s say I did. How does this help solve her murder?”

“It points to Centurion Associates. Apparently Centurion is staffed by ex-MPD cops.”

“And you think one of them killed Kayla Pitts.”

“Like I said, it’s a theory.”

“Huh,” Balakian said. For the first time he didn’t bat my suggestion away. “You may have something here.”

Ellen Wiley’s pied-à-terre in Washington was on N Street in Georgetown, a handsome Federal-style town house, redbrick with black shutters. The door was answered by a maid in a uniform of gray dress and white cuffs and bib apron. She took me to Ellen, who was sitting in a high-back tufted wing chair in her library, just off the front hallway. The room was lined with books, floor to ceiling. She was talking on a landline phone. She was wearing a black skirt with a white silk blouse cut low enough to show the cleft of her tanned bosom, and a string of pearls.

“But that’s just it,” she was saying, “he has no idea.” She let out a whooping laugh. “Exactly.” She saw me, smiled, and waved me into a nearby chair. “Sweetie, I have to go, I have a visitor.” She paused. “Yes, a gentleman caller.” She laughed again and hung up.

“There he is, Nick Heller!” she announced. “You’re here a full hour early. He’s not coming until eleven.”

We had arranged for me to come by her house at ten, so I just nodded and said, “This shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, then I’ll be gone.”

“Jorge,” she called out, “can you bring this gentleman some coffee?” To me she said, “He makes the best sticky buns.”

“Not for me, thanks.”

“Are you sure? They’re still warm. If I can’t have them, at least my visitors can.”

“Do you plan to meet him in here?”

“Sure, here or in the front sitting room.”

“I’m going to need you to decide now where you’ll meet him.”

“Oh, heavens, then right here.”

“Okay.” I took out from my pocket an infinity transmitter, a small black GSM bug a couple of inches square. I’d already inserted a cell phone SIM card into it. “It would help if you decided now where you’re going to sit.”

“Ooh, spy stuff. I’ll sit right here. He can sit where you’re sitting.”

“Okay, great.” I looked around. The closest power outlet was some distance away. On the table between the two chairs was a brass lamp. I lifted it up. No room under the base. No drawer in the table. “I’m going to put it under the cushion in your chair. You’ll sit there, right?”