Guilty Minds

26

You can’t count on always being lucky, even if you consider yourself a lucky guy, as I do. I’d just escaped a jam — a disaster averted — but it had been a close thing. At least I’d gotten something out of it, I told myself, something valuable: proof that Kayla had bought tickets to Mississippi for the day before she’d allegedly serviced a Supreme Court justice.

In retrospect, as I drove the black Suburban back to the Shays Abbott office at M Street and New Hampshire, it had seemed worth the risk. I just had to remind myself that I wouldn’t always be this lucky.

I’d broken into her apartment hoping to access her credit card bills so I could identify places she frequented — health clubs, bars, restaurants. Armed with that knowledge, I figured, maybe I’d eventually locate surveillance cameras that had recorded her. A long shot, no question.

But discovering in one of those credit card bills that she’d bought plane tickets: that was far better than scouting around for CCTV cameras in DC.

“You didn’t get in to her apartment,” Dorothy guessed as I arrived in the conference room. I’d changed out of my HVAC uniform and back into my street clothes. I was limping slightly, apparently having pulled something in my right calf.

“O ye of little faith.” I gave her a swift recap of what had happened.

“Heller,” she said. “Man.” Then she laughed. “At least she wasn’t home at the time. You plant the GPS?”

I nodded, told her what I’d found out about the US Airways flight.

“Jackson, Mississippi,” she said. “I wonder why.”

“Going home, I figure.”

“But home is Tupelo, and Jackson is almost two hundred miles away.”

“It’s probably the closest airport. I doubt there are any direct flights from DC to Tupelo, Mississippi.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Then she flew back two days later. That’s a lot of driving for less than two days at home. Why wouldn’t she take a connecting flight to Memphis?”

“Good question,” I said.

“Well, the important thing is that it proves she couldn’t have been with Claflin at the Hotel Monroe on those two nights.”

“Almost.”

“You don’t think that’s enough?”

“We have proof she bought airline tickets. That’s not proof she flew to Mississippi. Or that she was actually there. What would really nail this thing down would be her CDRs.”

She groaned. “I can’t, Nick. It’s impossible.”

CDRs are call detail records generated by cell phones and kept in the mobile phone company’s databases. They contain all sorts of data, like phone numbers dialed or received, the start time and length of each call — and then the really useful information: the location where you were when you placed or received a call.

As everyone who watches movies or TV knows, our cell phones are constantly pinging cell towers. Mobile phone companies know where our phones — i.e., we — are at all times. It’s undeniably creepy. A CDR documents which cell towers a mobile phone pinged during the course of a call. If you know the location of the nearest cell towers, their longitude and latitude and nearest street address, you know where the caller was.

If we could get the CDRs for Kayla’s phone, we could prove she was in Mississippi and not in Washington during two of the nights in question.

The problem was, if you weren’t law enforcement, it was next to impossible to get someone’s CDRs — even your own, for that matter. Not so long ago, you just had to know someone in the phone company. Money would change hands under the table. But the companies had begun putting in logging systems that keep close track of who accesses call detail records. She was right: She couldn’t get Kayla’s CDRs.

“I hate to ask Frank Montello,” I said, “but I don’t think we have a choice.”

When I told him what I wanted, he said, “No can do, Heller. Not anymore. Verizon Wireless is really cracking down. All the cell cos are. Everyone’s gotten scared.”

“Is it a matter of money?”

“It’s a matter of no one wants to risk their job anymore.”

“My client is willing to pay extremely generously,” I said, and I mentioned a range I was willing to pay.

Instead of blowing me off, or hanging up, he suddenly sounded interested. He countered.

Then I countered back, and fairly quickly he admitted he might know a software guy who worked for Verizon Wireless who might be able to defeat the logging system and get CDRs for me. I suspected that his source at Verizon was someone he didn’t like to go to very often, someone easily spooked, but for the right price...

There’s almost always a right price.

Montello told me he’d get in touch with his source and see what he could do. It might take a while. He wasn’t sure. I offered a twenty percent premium on my already generous offer if he could get me something that afternoon.

Even before I’d finished talking to Montello, Dorothy had put a website up on the projection screen. It was the gossip site TMZ. The lead story, in a box with a red border, had a headline in big black type: HIJINKS IN THE HIGH COURT. This was over a big picture of Justice Claflin with a wild, leering look on his face. I recognized the photo. It had been taken at a party for his sixtieth birthday when he was about to blow out the candles.

I put down the phone and groaned.

“The story’s starting to spread big-time,” she said. She pulled up the Drudge Report. The same picture appeared there under the headline THE LOVE JUDGE.

“Shit.” Drudge was a gossip site, but it had first broken the story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, so it had a certain residual credibility. “What about the Times or the Post?” I asked.

“Nothing there. Not yet.”

“Good. How about Perez Hilton?”

“Nothing. But check this out.” She clicked on Politico. On its front page was a small box with a photo of Claflin, apparently at a State of the Union speech. Over it was the headline CLAFLIN IN POSSIBLE CALL GIRL SCANDAL?

“That’s not good,” I said. “Politico is mainstream. At least it’s a question mark.”

Probably the best headline was the one in Vox: JUSTICE SERVED?

BuzzFeed ran a listicle about the top ten DC sex scandals, from Monica Lewinsky in 1998 to Senator Gary Hart and his girlfriend Donna Rice in 1987. A congressman caught sending lewd messages to young male pages in 2006, and a senator arrested in a Minneapolis airport bathroom in 2007 soliciting sex from an undercover police officer.

It must have been hard to narrow the list down to just ten. I could think of quite a few more.

“How much time do we have?” I asked Dorothy.

“Just about six hours.”

“Six hours to blow this story up.”

“Nick, this story is spreading like wildfire. Way faster than I expected. I think we have enough to go to Slander Sheet and demand a retraction.”

I cupped my chin in my hand and thought. True, the Claflin story was going big faster than I’d expected. None of the standard bearers of the old-guard legacy print media had picked up on it yet, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if their online versions ran something with a question mark, and soon. It was just too explosive a story to ignore.

“I’m going to talk to Gideon,” I said.