Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

“Your go-bag?”

“Right.” In my office I always keep a packed carry-on case with a few days’ clothing and a shaving kit and miscellaneous necessities. Just in case I have to go somewhere out of town at the last minute.

“Sure. Nick, how did they know it was you?”

“The guy who stole my laptop, you mean?”

“Right.”

“I haven’t figured that out yet, but I will.” I told her I’d check back in with the office a little later on, since I was no longer reachable anywhere, and I hung up.

I summoned a mental image of the fake cop who’d guided me to my locker at the Supreme Court. I concentrated, did a mental inventory and download. I remembered him being about my height but broader and heavier. He had a blond buzz cut and his face looked flushed. Eye color? Gray, maybe, or light blue, but light in any case. Age? Somewhere in his thirties. I was putting together what birdwatchers and military types call the GISS, which stands for “general impression of size and shape.” For birders, it’s a way to make a field identification when you don’t know a bird’s species.

I turned away just when the pay phone rang. I picked it up.

“Nick Heller’s line.”

“Nick?” It was Dorothy.

“Yup.”

“Oh, good. As long as you stay by that pay phone all day, we should be fine. I’ve found our girl.”

Her real name is Kayla Pitts. Kayla spelled with a K . She’s twenty-two, and she comes from Tupelo, Mississippi.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Employee records on their server.”

“You find a phone number?”

She read it to me. It had a 571 area code, for Virginia. I wrote it down in my little black notebook.

“Address?”

She read that aloud, too, and I wrote it down.

“Now what?”

“Now I go to see her.”

“How?”

“I’ll think of something.”

Three hours later I was sitting in a rented black Chevy Suburban parked outside Kayla Pitts’s apartment building on Glebe Road in Arlington. It was a huge crablike complex built of white brick that belonged on the outskirts of Moscow: like late Soviet-era public housing built on the cheap, almost defiantly so.

I had with me my new phone and MacBook Air — I didn’t want to wait for Dorothy, so I made a stop at the Apple Store — and I was browsing LilySchuyler.com’s website, piggybacking on someone’s Wi-Fi signal, probably one of her neighbors’.

So my computer screen was filled with color photos of women in various states of undress, four across. Some of them were nude, with the pertinent areas blurred out. Some wore elaborate black lace bustiers with fishnet stockings and spike heels. Or caged corset teddies with sheer side panels and lace fronts. Or tiny bikini bottoms, or thongs. It was like an L.L. Bean catalog of women for almost every taste. At the top of the page, LILY SCHUYLER appeared in gold script letters that were probably meant to look high-end. I clicked on “About Us” and learned that it was an “exclusive and discreet social introduction service that provides upscale companionship to sophisticated and discerning gentlemen.” They offered “the most beautiful, exquisite, and sensual young ladies ever to work in the escort industry.” All the girls were “ladies,” and all potential clients were “gentlemen.”

A few of the exquisite ladies had what’s called the “girl-next-door look,” though no girl like these ever lived next door to me. They appeared to be pure, innocent, “collegiate.” Almost demure, if you could call a woman who posed in a lacy pink bra on a call girl website “demure.”

All of the pictures looked Photoshopped, some more than others. Some had their faces blurred out entirely, some didn’t. They had names like Savannah and Sabrina, Bethany and Kendra, April and Sydney and Sierra and Giselle.

Heidi L’Amour — Kayla Pitts — was one of the demure collegiate ones. Also one of the prettiest, so far as I could tell. At least you could see her face clearly. Her photo showed a young woman in her early twenties with lustrous blond hair down to her collarbone. She wore a simple black top with cap sleeves, cut low enough to reveal the cleft of her bosom but not so low it looked trashy. God forbid the photos on a call girl website should look trashy. Her chin rested on her left hand.

Photoshop can disguise blemishes and flaws and even give a chunky girl a slender waist, but it couldn’t simulate this kind of natural beauty. She had delicately arched brows, a pert nose, a sweet smile. She had an open face and a kind, vulnerable expression.

HEIDI VACATION, the caption said, as if Vacation were her last name. When I clicked on her picture, her profile page came up. More photos, including one in a lacy bralette and matching G-string, side-tie. Her arms raised, hands behind head, a dreamy look in her eyes. Here it said Heidi L’Amour was on vacation and gave no end date:

22 years old, 5’5”, 125 lbs, 36D natural. Very Open-Minded GFE.

Heidi is a stunning young blonde beauty with a face and accent as sweet as a Georgia peach. She’s new to the DC area and is a brilliant and accomplished college student with a girl-next-door look. She loves fine dining and is as comfortable at a five-star restaurant or a cocktail party as she is sitting in front of the fire drinking red wine. She has insatiable desires, longing for fulfillment, and can always be relied upon to give you the ultimate GFE.

I knew that GFE meant “girlfriend experience,” which basically meant she kissed, along with everything else. Men paid extra for a prostitute who could pretend to be in love with them, which I find a little sad.

No prices listed. Just a row of five diamonds. Maybe if you had to ask you couldn’t afford it. I clicked around the website some more and saw that some of the girls had as few as three diamonds. No one had more than five.

The answer to the price mystery turned up on the “Services & Rates” page. Five diamonds represented “our most highly rated tier of model.” In other words, the most expensive girl. They even offered five-diamond packages. One hour with a five-diamond girl cost $4,000. A package of “three unrushed decadent hours over drinks and dessert” was $10,000. Another package, for “gentlemen with savoir faire,” offered a full night of “ultimate pampering.” That would set the discerning gentleman back $22,000.

Heidi L’Amour did not come cheap.

So this was the girl Justice Claflin had allegedly hired. I didn’t believe it.

Now I knew approximately what she looked like. Her GISS, at least. For half an hour I had been watching people come and go from the apartment building. If I saw anyone who vaguely resembled Kayla, I was ready to jump out of the car and approach her. But no one looked remotely like her. I was looking for a small, blond young woman of slight build. I saw a few guys in their early twenties, an elderly woman with a walker, a middle-aged woman with a few kids. But not her. If she were at home, she’d have to emerge eventually. But I could be sitting here in a rented car waiting for twenty-four hours, and I didn’t have the time.

Besides, it wasn’t even a sure thing that she was at home.

I decided to try the direct approach. I got out of the car and entered the lobby, which was large and garishly lit. It was lined with mailboxes on either side. Oversized envelopes, which didn’t fit in a mailbox, were lined up on a shelf.

At the front was an intercom system where you searched for the resident’s name and it pulled up a number to punch in. I grabbed an envelope and searched the building directory until I found PITTS, K.

I entered her number in the intercom and waited for it to ring. I could hear the ringing through a tinny speaker, but nothing more happened.