Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

“About me.”

“Right.”

“Is this — Heller, is this because of last night?”

“Of course not. It’s because you’ve been at the center of this thing since the beginning, which makes it dangerous for you if you stick your head up.” But was it, at least in part, about last night? I couldn’t ignore what I felt for her. That had to factor in. Would I be as protective of her if we hadn’t been intimate? I didn’t know. Maybe not.

But I knew what I knew, and I knew that Vogel’s people were dangerous and probably knew no limits, and that she was a soft target.

“Nick, I’ve been threatened before. But in the end, you don’t go after a journalist. You don’t kill a reporter. That just doesn’t happen.”

I happened to know for a fact that she was wrong. I knew of several journalists who were killed investigating big financial scandals. I hesitated, considered whether to say anything, and finally said, “It does happen, Mandy. It has happened, and it could happen. Don’t be foolish.”

“Jesus, Heller. Now you’re trying to scare me off?”

I was afraid she’d take it this way. Telling her about a genuine threat to her life was making her even more defiant.

“Let me pick you up. You can do whatever work you want to do here.”

“No.”

“All right, look. If you really insist on interviewing people, at least let me go with you.”

“Are you serious? Like I need a bodyguard?”

“Would my presence be that odious to you?”

She laughed.

I said, “Think of it as teaming up.”

“No, you know how I think of it? You want to chaperone me everywhere like I’m some Saudi woman, that’s what it is. It’s ridiculous. And I don’t want any part of that.”

“At the very least will you agree to work over here?”

“Yes. I’ll do that for you.”

“Great, let me pick you up.”

“No need. I’ll be over there soon. When I’m ready.”

“Okay,” I said, because I knew it wouldn’t do any good to push it further. No sense in being overbearing. “I’ll see you over here.”

Looking back on that day, it pains me to admit that I should have been more insistent, more overbearing, refused to take no for an answer.

Unfortunately, I didn’t.

Art Garvin called me back about an hour later.

“All the MPD has on Tom Vogel is a PO box.”

“Where?”

“Thurmont, Maryland.”

“Shit. No street address?”

“No. Nothing. Buddy of mine who used to hang out some with Vogel says he built his house himself. He’s some kind of gifted carpenter. It’s big — he called it a compound. It’s out in the woods, sort of a remote location.”

I thanked him and hung up. Half an hour later, I met Balakian at a hipster coffee shop on H Street in a part of Northeast called the Atlas District. Indie rock on the speakers, exposed brick, and not a lot of seating. He was already at a table drinking something light brown in a bottle. I ordered black coffee, which seemed to disappoint the bearded barista, who probably wanted to draw a fern pattern in the foam of a cappuccino.

“Kombucha?” I said with a smile as I sat down with my coffee. I could smell the skunky odor of rotten oranges wafting from his cup, and I wrinkled my nose.

“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” he said. He was wearing a tweedy checked jacket with a vest and a dark blue shirt and a scarf around his neck. “So, dude, I owe you an apology.”

“Oh yeah?”

“We found a print.”

“Where?”

“On a piece of broken glass.”

“The wineglass?”

He nodded. “I went back to the MCL and asked them to look for prints, just in case. So they took the broken pieces of the wineglass from the bathroom and processed them in the superglue fuming chamber. Pulled up a couple of partials and ran ’em through NGI.” NGI, for Next Generation Identification Program, was the turbocharged successor to the old national criminal fingerprint database, IAFIS.

“And you got a match.”

“Right.”

“Who?”

“One of ours. A retired MPD sergeant named Richard Rasmussen.”

I shrugged. I’d never heard the name before. “Let me guess. He works for Centurion Associates.”

He scratched his little beard and sipped his drink. He said nothing. My phone vibrated in my pocket.

“You have a print on what could be the murder weapon,” I said. “Isn’t that enough? Did you bring him in for questioning yet?”

“I think it’s enough. I wrote out an affidavit. It’s on my lieutenant’s desk.”

“When does it become an arrest warrant?”

“The lieutenant has to approve it, then it goes to the US attorney’s office, then it goes before a judge.”

“So you might not get an arrest warrant after all.”

“Might not. Anyway, I’m still circling. Part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you.”

“What do you want to know? I mean, I don’t know the guy — never heard his name before.”

“You’re doing sort of a parallel investigation. What’s your take on how it went down?”

“My take? The girl was paid to make a false accusation against Justice Jeremiah Claflin. To claim they had a sexual relationship.”

“Paid by the Centurions?”

“That I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Then paid by whom?”

“I’m working on that. She said it was an ‘organization of businessmen’ that paid her, that’s all she knew.”

“Go ahead.”

“I think the Centurions were brought in at first to protect her, to keep her from talking to anyone. Then to deal with her. First they tried to get her out of Washington, but I got in the way. They were afraid she’d start talking to me, I assume. She’d become a problem that had to be eliminated.”

“So why did she start talking in the first place?”

“I asked her questions. That was how it started. And she was scared. Maybe she felt bad about what she’d done. She had a conscience. Or maybe it wasn’t conscience at all. Maybe she was just scared she’d been caught in a falsehood. Whatever the reason, she started talking, and she had to be silenced.”

“And they staged it to look like a suicide.”

“Not too badly either. It convinced you for a while, right?” My phone kept vibrating. “Any luck on the call she placed from the room phone?”

“Yeah. She called a friend. I guess she just wanted to talk. She was scared.”

“And when she opened the door, at nine thirty-six?”

“Who knows. Rasmussen, probably. Maybe he said it was hotel security. Or the night manager. Or any of a number of things he could have said to get her to open the door. But open it she did. Then he left at ten twenty-five, when he was done.”

He took another sip of the vile brew. I pulled out the phone and glanced at it. Mandy.

“If you have Rasmussen’s print,” I said, “why are you still circling? Why not at least bring the guy in for questioning?”

“Frankly, because I’m getting heat.”

“From...?”

“My bosses. My sergeant wants this case closed — he doesn’t want me to keep stirring it up. He doesn’t want another murder on the books. I’m facing a lot of ridicule for persisting.”

“So why are you?”

“It’s... something just doesn’t feel right about this case.”

“Is that why you wanted to meet outside police headquarters?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know how... extensive the Centurions’ reach is.”

“Within homicide branch.”

He nodded, looked away for a beat. “There’s a reason why I caught this case. And just me, solo.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’m a novice. They didn’t expect me to push too hard. They knew I wouldn’t make waves. And they could hang me out to dry if it came to that.”