Capitol murder

Chapter Twenty-six

The next morning, Dana called Brad at work.

“I’ve found a link between Jessica Koshani and Dorothy Crispin,” Dana said as soon as Brad took her call. “Koshani is rumored to be the owner of Executive Escorts, an upscale call-girl service. Dorothy Crispin was a law student, but she was also a prostitute who turned tricks for Executive.”

“Can you prove this?” Brad asked.

“Right now I don’t have anything that would fly in a court of law or anything Exposed can print without getting hit with a huge libel suit, but multiple sources have told me that your boss was one of Crispin’s customers and that he had some pretty kinky fetishes, S and M, bondage.”

“That’s something I’d rather not know,” Brad said.

“I was also told that Executive secretly recorded their customers’ sex acts as protection in case one of them tried to do something that would threaten the business. If Koshani had that type of leverage on your boss, there’s no telling what she could force him to do. Blackmail is a pretty good motive for murder.”

“That’s a stretch, Dana. And wasn’t Carson with Dorothy Crispin when Koshani was killed?”

“The medical examiner knows she was killed sometime on Sunday between noon and the early evening, but she can’t pin down an exact time.”

“I know for a fact that Carson didn’t kill Crispin. He was in D.C. Clarence Little is a much better bet for both murders. He’s an engineer, and he made pretty good money. He could afford an upscale escort service. Maybe Crispin was the call girl Executive provided. Maybe there was something Koshani recorded in one of his sessions that could be used to convict him of murder.”

“Good thinking, but I still can’t exclude the possibility that your boss was involved in Koshani’s murder. Do you think you can find a connection between Carson and Koshani? Maybe she gave him campaign contributions personally or through her businesses.”

“Can’t you get that information from public records?”

“I might, but you may be able to dig around in your office computers for records of back-door contributions.”

“I won’t do it, Dana,” Brad said firmly. “Senator Carson is my boss, and I’m not going to betray his trust to help you get dirt on him for an article for Exposed. I’m surprised you asked me.”

Dana didn’t respond right away. When she did, she sounded contrite.

“Forget I asked. You’re right. I’ll try to get the information some other way.”

“You know I appreciate all you’ve done for me and Ginny…”

“Don’t apologize. Working as a vice cop and digging up dirt for Pat Gorman has given me an odd view of humanity. Sometimes I forget that there are people who aren’t sleazy and try to act ethically.”

Brad laughed. “I’m no saint, Dana.”

“You come close, Brad. And you better not change. Say hi to Ginny for me.”

Brad hung up just as his intercom buzzed and the senator’s secretary told him that his boss was ready to discuss the testimony of a witness who was going to appear before the Judiciary Committee in the morning. Brad wondered if there was any way he was going to get through the meeting without imagining United States Senator Jack Carson bound, gagged, and naked.

D ana Cutler parked in the shadows up the street from Jessica Koshani’s house. She wasn’t worried about being seen in Koshani’s upscale neighborhood. There were no lights on in any of the houses at two in the morning, and the mansions stood well back from the street, surrounded by walls. As soon as Dana got out of the Rover, a frigid wind forced her to pull her watch cap tight over her ears and hunch her shoulders. According to the readout on her dashboard, the air temperature was 39, but that didn’t take the wind-chill factor into account.

Dana jogged down the street. She didn’t see any lights in Koshani’s house. When she was a few feet from the gate that guarded the property, she noticed a keypad. Bummer. She eyeballed the wall on either side of the gate to gauge whether she could scale it. When she turned her attention to the gate for the same reason, Dana noticed that it was slightly ajar. She breathed a sigh of relief. Dana bet that Portland police officers had been through the house at the request of the D.C. police and had forgotten to close the gate. Dana pushed the gate inward, slipped through the opening, and hurried toward the front door hoping that it, too, was unlocked. It wasn’t.

Dana circled around the back of the villa to a large covered patio. On the other side of a brown winter lawn was the Willamette River, coal black except for the patches of water that reflected lights from homes on the shore. Dana was about to try one of the French doors when she noticed that a pane of glass had been knocked out of the next door. Dana frowned. Would the police break in this way?

Dana reached through the door and opened it. When she walked inside, she found herself in a large living room that looked as though it had been searched. She turned in a slow circle, looking through the debris that littered the expensive Persian rug for DVDs that might star Jack Carson. There was a home theater in the room next to the living room. A bookcase next to the television had been filled with movies that were now scattered across the floor, their cases open with many of the disks beside them. Dana sighed and started going through them anyway, hoping that whoever had come before her had missed something. Twenty minutes later, she decided that the disk wasn’t mixed in with the movie collection.

A search of the downstairs did not turn up more DVDs, and Dana headed upstairs to find the bedroom, the most likely place to find porn. She was afraid to turn on any lights, so she’d brought a heavy police flashlight that could double as a weapon.

The bedroom was dominated by a king-size bed covered by black satin sheets. The first thing that looked interesting was a large flat-screen television that was attached to the wall opposite the bed. Under the TV was a DVD player. Dana turned in place looking for the DVDs and found a cabinet near the bed. She did a knee bend. The cabinet door was open. She played the flashlight beam across the area and around the interior. It was empty. Dana stood up. If the DVD of Carson’s sessions with Dorothy Crispin had been in this cabinet, it was gone now. But who had it? She’d searched enough places when she was with D.C. Vice and Narcotics to know that the police would have no compunctions about trashing the home of a low-level dealer. Members of the upper classes were usually treated more diplomatically. She couldn’t discount a police search, but someone else may have gone through the house looking for the incriminating DVD.

As Dana descended the stairs, she noticed a small oil painting in an ornate gold frame. She didn’t know much about art, but she recognized the work as Impressionist. She checked the signature. It was a Cezanne. She looked at the living room walls and picked out a Warhol. A thought occurred to Dana. If these paintings were the real thing, they were very valuable. A woman who owned a ritzy villa was also going to own expensive jewelry. Factor in the woman’s ties to criminal activity, and you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that she would have a top-of-the-line alarm system.

Dana walked to the front door. The keypad for the alarm was attached to the wall next to the door, but it hadn’t gone off. A green light shone above the numbers on the pad. Koshani would have set the alarm when she flew to D.C. The police would have been able to get the alarm code if they searched at the behest of the D.C. police, but they would have reset the alarm when they left unless the alarm wasn’t on when they arrived. The only conclusion Dana could draw was that the person who had searched the house had the alarm code and the code for the front gate.

How had that person learned the code? The answer that Dana came up with made her queasy. She remembered the torture she’d endured during her kidnapping. If the meth cooks who’d held her had asked for the code to her alarm, she would have given it to them to stop the pain. Jessica Koshani had been tortured methodically. She would have given up her alarm code without much resistance.

Dana left the house empty-handed and drove back to her hotel to pack for her flight to D.C. During the drive, she mulled over what she knew. A few things bothered her, and one of the most troubling questions involved the identity of the person who had taken the DVDs. Did it make sense that Little had them? With every cop in the country looking for him, would he have risked capture to travel to D.C. to get an alarm code from Jessica Koshani? Dana had a hard time believing that Clarence Little was jumping back and forth across the country when he had so much to lose if he was captured. So if Little didn’t break into Koshani’s house, who did?