Guilty Minds

19

The hotel that Jillian, my office manager, had booked for us was nicer than the hotels I normally stay in. When I’m traveling on my own dime, I’m partial to the kind of budget hotel that has a coffeemaker and refrigerator in the room and a waffle iron in the breakfast area off the lobby. When someone else is paying for it, though, I like to live well. I work hard for my clients; why shouldn’t I enjoy the perks? This hotel had sumptuous décor and five-hundred-thread-count bed linens. My suite had a separate living room and an ergonomic desk chair. It was a nice hotel. No in-room coffee machine, though.

I unpacked quickly, changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, and called Dorothy. Her room was directly across the hall. She said she was in her bedtime attire but would quickly change and knock on my door. I ordered a steak from room service. Dorothy said she’d already had her dinner.

A few years back I’d hired Dorothy away from the private intelligence firm in DC where we both worked, Stoddard Associates. Jay Stoddard had hired her out of the National Security Agency. She was skilled at cyber investigations, and digital forensics, and she was unshakably loyal to me. I was loyal right back — there were certainly better digital forensics people around but no one as persistent and determined as Dorothy. I’d uprooted her from a comfortable life in Washington, and, though she never reminded me, I never forgot it.

She knocked on the door long before room service arrived. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. She always wore her hair short, but recently she’d been wearing it practically buzzed, to go with the complicated arrangement of piercings on the helixes of her ears. (I was the only one in our office whose ears weren’t pierced.) She was barefoot. Her toenails were painted the same bright shade of pink as her fingernails.

“How’s your brother?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Too late, I just did.”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you some other time.”

“Tell me now.”

She surveyed the room as she entered. “How come you got the executive suite, with the separate living room and everything? You probably have two bathrooms, too.”

“Just one. All I need.” I ignored her question. “Are you going to tell me about your brother?”

“Some other time.”

“Okay.” I usually knew when to stop pushing.

“Internet’s blazing fast for a hotel, by the way.”

She took a glass from atop the minibar and filled it with water from the bathroom sink. Then she sat down in the big wingback chair in the corner of the living room.

“Did you see Representative Compton’s member?”

“I didn’t click through. But I saw the piece.”

“Why are we worried about a trashy online gossip site that runs pictures of congressmen’s dicks? Who’s going to pay any attention to what they report?”

I poured myself a Scotch from the minibar. I wanted ice but didn’t feel like going out to the ice machine or calling room service again, and neat was fine anyway. “It’s all about the life cycle of scandal,” I said. “Everyone pays attention to Slander Sheet, whether they admit it or not, but the serious news establishments, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, aren’t going to report any scandal that comes out on Slander Sheet until it becomes just too big to ignore. And when they do, they’ll report it at a slant. They’ll report on the existence of a scandal, a controversy. Holding their noses. Meanwhile, they’ll send their own reporters to reweave the case. Pretty soon they’ve done their own wave of stories. Then come the ancillary stories, the featurettes on the principals. You can just see the piece on Kayla Pitts, can’t you? Young college girl from rural Mississippi comes to the nation’s capital and gets corrupted. Innocence meets the dubious morality of DC. Very House of Cards.”

“You know it.”

“By then they own the story. They’ve got an equity stake in the narrative.”

“But if you’ve got the proof it couldn’t have happened...?”

“Remember the Duke University lacrosse case? These three poor college guys, members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team, were accused of rape. Their lives were turned inside out. Turns out it was a false accusation. Totally made up, by someone with a history of that kind of thing. Yet it took the mainstream media eight months before they acknowledged the whole story was just a hunk of pulp fiction.”

“I know. I remember.”

“So a false allegation like Slander Sheet’s about to run could do Claflin some serious damage. Once the mainstream media picks it up.”

“You think Slander Sheet’s really going to run with it?”

“For now, that’s what it looks like.” I told her about getting a beer with Mandy Seeger and how badly the meeting had ended. “Can you do a little digging into her?” I said.

“What about?”

“Why in the world she left The Washington Post for Slander Sheet, of all places. I don’t get it.”

She nodded. “You told her about the evidence you found, right?”

“She doesn’t believe it. But I get a feeling it’s not up to her.”

“Who’s it up to, then?”

“Sounds like her boss is the one who’s going to make the decision on whether to run with it or kill it.”

“Who’s her boss?”

“A bastard named Julian Gunn. He’s the editor in chief of Slander Sheet. Supposed to be a real asshole. He’ll run whatever makes the page views blow up.”

“Even if it discredits his own website?”

“I’m sure he doesn’t want to knowingly trash his own creation by breaking a ‘news’ story that’s going to turn out to be false.”

“Right.”

“But he won’t have a problem running a sleazy story that can’t ever quite be disproven. Like those adhesive stickers that always leave a gummy trace, no matter how hard you scrape.”

“So what does Mandy Seeger think, you’re flat-out lying to her?”

“She must truly believe I’m trying to sell them a crock. That we’ve, I don’t know, manipulated the hotel’s computer system. Deleted the digital records.”

She laughed. “I’d believe it. I’ve seen it done. I know how to do it.”

I was quiet for a few seconds. Was it possible? “You think someone might have done just that? Hacked into the hotel’s property management system to make it look like the justice never stayed there?”

“Someone working for the justice?”

“Right.”

She shook her head. “That’s nutty. If you’re going to mess around with the hotel’s property management system, why not delete the whole guest record? So it looks like no one named Jeremiah Claflin ever checked into the hotel?”

“Fair point.”

“You don’t seriously think that, right?”

“I consider all options. But no, I don’t seriously think that.”

“Good.”

“But the fact remains that somebody made off with my laptop and my iPhone, and I don’t think that happens very often inside the Supreme Court building. Someone was very interested in who I am and what I’m up to. Which means that somebody was tailing me.”

“That doesn’t entirely surprise me. The stakes are huge. We’re talking the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Whoever’s setting this up wants to make sure no one pulls it down. Who was following Kayla Pitts?”

I took the wallet from my back pocket that I’d grabbed from the guy whose balls I’d kicked. “An ex-DC cop named Curtis Schmidt.”

“You got his phone, too, right?”

“Right,” I said, and I took that out and handed it to her.

“Cheapo burner piece of crap,” she said, turning it over. “Disposable phone you buy at Costco, comes with a prepaid half hour of phone time or whatever. You think this ex-cop is protecting her, or spying on her?”

“My gut says he’s protecting her. Making sure nothing happens. They’re going to need her.”

“You mean, to do interviews and such.”

I nodded. “That girl was frightened. Like she’s signed on to do something she wishes she never had.”

“Whether she serviced Claflin or not, she’s about to face an avalanche of publicity, and it will not be fun.”

“Whether she slept with him or not?” I said. “She didn’t. It didn’t happen. That I’m sure of.”

“If you say so. When it comes to men and their sex drives, as far as I’m concerned all bets are off. Anything’s possible. I don’t care if you’re the president or the pope.”

“Fair enough. But it never happened.”

“Okay.” She held up the flip phone. “The call history on this thing will be very illuminating.”

“He only called one number.”

“His boss, I’m betting.”

“No doubt.”

“So what do you want to do with it? Are you going to call it? Call the boss?”

“First I want to find out whose number it is.”

“You already tried?”

I nodded. I’d tried the usual databases — Skip Smasher, Tracers Info, TLOxp, IRBsearch — where you can look up mobile phone numbers and find who owns them. All I learned was what I already knew, that it was a prepaid phone. Unregistered. No name associated with it. “It’s a drop phone, that’s all.”

“What about Montello?”

Frank Montello was an “information broker” who lived and worked in suburban Maryland. Not a friend, but a valuable contact. I didn’t know exactly how he practiced his dark arts. I just knew that if I needed to find an unlisted phone number or someone’s home address, and I’d had no luck with the traditional databases, he was the guy I’d reach out to. He knew how to dig deep. He could find out whether someone had had psychiatric problems or was an alcoholic. He could get anyone’s birth certificate or motor vehicle records. I used to find it creepy how much he could find out for me, but I’d gotten jaded. In any case, he was extremely expensive, and sort of unpleasant to deal with. He was usually overworked and slow. I used him selectively and reluctantly.

“He came up empty, but I asked him to keep working on it.”

The doorbell rang, and I opened the door for room service. The woman rolled in a warming cart and began to set up my dinner. The porterhouse looked perfectly cooked. I thanked her, tipped her, and she left.

“You realize I scarfed down pizza at the airport,” Dorothy said, “while you’re dining out on steak.”

“Happy to split it with you. I don’t need the whole thing.”

“I’m not hungry. Just giving you a hard time.”

“Whatever makes you feel good.” I cut off a forkful and took a bite. It was hot and delicious. A solid hit of umami. Hotel room service rarely does a good job with steak. It’s hard to get the timing right. But this one was great.

“What I want to know is who’s behind this,” I said. “It circles back around to the editor of Slander Sheet, this Julian Gunn guy, and what his motivations are. Gunn is leading this, but I’ll bet he’s taking orders from whoever really owns that piece of crap website. Once we find out who the money is behind Slander Sheet, who the real power is, and bring that out, everything will fall into place. We’ll know why this is happening. And we’ll have a way to disprove this thing with some real credibility.”

“That’s not going to be easy, I can tell you that.”

“What have you found?”

“SlanderSheet.com is owned by HunseckerMedia.com. Hunsecker Media.com is owned by some proxy, some limited liability company called, uh, Patroon LLC. Which has to be a shell company. I can’t find anything about it. And I don’t think I’m going to find anything in the next eighteen hours, or whatever we have left.”

“Seventeen.”

“Right.”

“So maybe cyber isn’t the way to find out who owns Slander Sheet. Maybe it’s old-fashioned door knocking and shoe leather and phone calls.”

“I’ll keep trying.”

“Wake me if you find anything.”

“I will. Seventeen hours left. My batteries are running down, Nick, but I’ll do as much as I can.”

“You want to order coffee from room service?”

She glanced at her watch. “I don’t know if coffee’s going to help me at this hour.”

“Tomorrow morning Mandy interviews Gideon, off the record, and I want to be there for that.”

“She’s Mandy to you now?”

I shrugged. “She’s not the enemy. If my theory is correct, she’s being used, too. She thinks she’s really onto a huge scoop and she doesn’t want to back down. Probably because her boss doesn’t want them to back down.”

“Then who’s the enemy?”

I held up Curtis Schmidt’s phone. “Right here.”

I had another Scotch while I checked my e-mail and then e-mailed Montello, the data broker, again. I was beat — it had been a long day, but I had a feeling tomorrow would be even worse.

The five-hundred-thread-count sheets were smooth as silk but cool and creamy. The mattress was firm but not hard. The bed was extremely comfortable. I fell asleep fairly quickly.

The phone rang some time later, an unfamiliar purring ringtone, and I jolted awake. “You got something,” I said.

“This is Gideon.”

“Oh, sorry — Gideon? What’s—” I looked at the digital clock. It was 6:05 in the morning. I’d been asleep for five hours or so.

“It’s online,” Gideon Parnell said.

“What’s online?” It took me a moment to realize. “Slander Sheet? I thought they were giving us forty-eight hours.”

“They ran it anyway,” he said.