Guilty Minds

36

By the time we were on the main road outside the airport, Kayla Pitts had stopped crying. She seemed embarrassed about it. She sniffed a few times, said, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus.” Her blond hair hung down in straggly tendrils and dark wet clumps.

Dorothy, sitting in the row behind the front seat, watched her warily. She seemed not to know what to make of our passenger.

“Where are you taking me?” Kayla said in a weak, quavering voice.

“Not back to your apartment,” I said.

“Okay.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her right hand. “Good. So where?”

“A hotel.”

To Dorothy I said, “Do me a favor and call the hotel and reserve another room. See if we can get one of the rooms that adjoin my suite.”

“How did you find me?” Kayla asked.

The rain had slowed to a light spattering. I signaled left and merged into traffic, which was considerably lighter now, the worst of rush hour over.

When I didn’t reply right away, she asked, “Did you trace my phone or something?”

“Something like that,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her I’d slipped a GPS tracker into her laptop bag, which would have necessitated telling her I’d broken into her apartment. That would only introduce an element of distrust and paranoia I wanted to avoid. “Tell me what happened.”

“These two guys showed up at my apartment and told me to pack my things. They gave me fifteen minutes. They told me they were taking me out of town.”

“Did they break in?”

“I let them in.”

“Did you know them?”

She shook her head. “I recognized one of them, the big bald guy. He was supposed to keep watch over me.”

I had a tremendous number of questions I wanted to ask, but I wanted to keep her on track as much as possible. “They didn’t tell you where you were going?”

“Just out of town. They put me in the back of a van.”

“What made you think they were going to kill you?”

“I was in the back, but when I put my ear to the front compartment I could hear them talking about me. One of them said something about ‘without a trace.’ The other guy said something like, ‘look like she was running’ and something about ‘before a body turns up.’ And I saw when they were taking me to the van that one of them had a gun. I was scared out of my mind. I didn’t know what to do, who to call. I don’t trust the cops. So I called that reporter at Slander Sheet, but I got a message saying the phone was disconnected. So... I called you.”

“Why?”

She was silent for a long time. She shook her head. “When I met you...? I got the feeling, I don’t know... you were one of the good guys.”

“Okay,” I said. I’d take that.

“I kept calling, and I kept getting your voice mail. And then when I finally reached you, one of the guys must have heard me talking because he grabbed the phone out of my hand.”

“You were brave to do that. And smart.”

“Yeah, but now what? Now what happens to me?”

“We’re going to keep you with us, keep you safe, and I’m going to need your help in finding the people behind this.”

“But I don’t know who they are!”

“You know things. Little details that might not mean anything to you. We’ll talk, and we’ll help each other.”

We all fell silent for a moment. I turned off the windshield wipers; the rain had stopped. After a long while, Kayla said, “Tell me something.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t understand. Why did you come for me?”

“Because I think you can answer some questions for me,” I said.

“And what if I can’t?”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’re still worth saving.”