Guilty Minds

17

Slander Sheet’s DC offices were located on the third floor of an old bread factory in Shaw, at Seventh and S, a few blocks from the Shaw metro stop. Until the riots of 1968, Shaw was the center of the black middle class in DC. After the riots, most people who could move out to the suburbs did. Now it was the center of a thriving Ethiopian community as well as home to a lot of recent college graduates, who lived in the once beautiful Victorian row houses. It had also recently become the funky home for small businesses and nonprofits and Internet enterprises like Reddit.

It was early evening, and dusk was beginning to gather, but the lights in the old bread factory were blazing. Including the third floor. The lobby of the building was open and unattended. There was a lot of exposed brick and glass and steel. A depressing old relic of a building had been gussied up into a lively, edgy workspace. People were leaving work for the day, and most of them looked to be in their early to midtwenties. A wall plaque gave Slander Sheet’s offices as number 301.

I took the elevator, a big clanking thing that looked like it was once used exclusively for freight, to the third floor. I was the only passenger. Everyone else was going down and out of the building. Fifty feet down a narrow corridor, a glass door was labeled HUNSECKER MEDIA. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and after a few seconds I recalled it as one of the names associated with the Slander Sheet operation.

I pulled open the door, surprised that it wasn’t locked, and looked around. It was all one big open space. More exposed brick here, and pipes, and a pressed tin ceiling. Around a dozen people, all in their early twenties, were seated at several long tables that ran the length of the room, computer stations on either side. There was room at the tables for around fifty. No one seemed to be in charge. Mounted to the ceiling was a huge TV screen displaying article headlines. Next to each one was a number, probably for the number of page views they’d received, and a green up arrow or a red down arrow, probably indicating how each post was trending. The most popular one, the one at the top, was titled CONGRESSMAN DICK: REP. DICK COMPTON SEXTS HIS MAN PARTS TO A CONGRESSIONAL PAGE.

Just about everyone tapping away at their computers was wearing headphones. They were all quiet except for an occasional laugh. It was a digital sweatshop.

I stopped the first person I came to, a heavyset guy with pork-chop sideburns. I touched him on his arm. He took off his headphones. “Yeah?”

“I’m looking for Mandy Seeger.”

He looked around. “She normally sits on that end.” He gestured with his chin. “But I don’t see her. I think she’s gone for the night.”

“You got a way to reach her? It’s important.”

He glanced at me for a moment, incuriously. He shrugged.

I noticed on his monitor a small box on the side that looked like a chat window. I said, “Could you message her for me, please?”

“Uh, like, who are you?”

“Tell her it’s about Gideon Parnell.”

“Gideon Parnell?”

I nodded.

“You don’t look like Parnell.” Even a low-level staffer at Slander Sheet knew who Gideon Parnell was.

“I’m with Gideon. She wants to talk to me.”

He typed something into his chat window. A few seconds later came a reply.

“She says she’s seeing him tomorrow morning at nine.”

“Tell her I know. This is an extra interview, if she’s interested. A special offer.”

More tapping. “She wants your name.”

“Nick Heller.”

He typed my name in the chat window. He waited a few seconds. Then the answer came back.

“She says to meet her at Lobby on Capitol Hill in half an hour.”

I knew Lobby. It was a dive bar: two-dollar beers, beer-and-shot combos with clever names, and Skee-Ball.

“I’ll be there.”