Guilty Minds

38

Nick,” Dorothy said quietly, “what are we doing?”

We sat in the living room of my suite, the connecting door to Kayla’s room open. I’d set down my wineglass of Scotch and ordered coffee from room service.

“About what?”

“With her? She’s a scammer and a grifter, and need I remind you, she also happens to be a prostitute.”

“And a victim.”

“Of her own making.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Not to me. If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t be here.”

“If it wasn’t her, it would have been someone else. Anyway, she may prove useful.”

“But that’s not why you rescued her.”

I shrugged. What could I say? She was right; I’d saved the girl because she was being used; she was a pawn in a struggle I didn’t yet understand. And because I liked her for some reason. But I didn’t want to argue with Dorothy. She had her moral code, a complex one, and I respected it, but she didn’t view Kayla as damaged goods, a victim of circumstance, as I did.

A knock at my door. I checked the peephole. I could see a young woman in a hotel uniform with a rolling cart. I opened the door, and she rolled in the cart and set up the coffee.

I offered Dorothy some, and she accepted. She had work to do. She was determined to trace the ownership of Slander Sheet and she had a few online leads. She sat at her laptop at the dining table/work station. Meanwhile, after I’d had a few sips, I called Mandy Seeger’s cell phone and got a message — not hers, but a robotic female voice from the phone company saying, “The number you dialed has been changed, disconnected, or is no longer in service.”

So I called the main number for the Slander Sheet offices in DC, figuring that there’d probably be staffers working at night.

A young-sounding man answered the line. “Slander Sheet.”

“Mandy Seeger, please.”

A pause. “Uh, yeah, she doesn’t work here anymore. Sorry.”

That was fast, I thought.

“Do you have any contact number for her? I’m a friend.”

A pause. “Hold on.” He sounded reluctant.

He put the phone down. I heard voices in the background. He came back on the line and dictated a phone number. I thanked him and hung up.

I wanted to talk to Mandy Seeger because she was another victim in the Claflin business. She, too, had been used, like Kayla, only in a different way. Now that she’d been fired, I suspected she would be happy to tell me what she knew about who owned Slander Sheet.

Her phone rang and rang and went to a recording of her voice. I left a message.

Then I found Curtis Schmidt’s wallet, the one I’d taken off him, and took out his Maryland driver’s license. It listed his home address. I looked it up on Google Earth and then switched to Street View.

One of the great advantages of Google Maps and Google Earth is that they enable you to do a kind of close reconnaissance of houses. That’s why criminals like Google. Now they can case their targets remotely.

Curtis Schmidt lived in Bethesda, on Moorland Lane. His house was a handsome three-story brick colonial with a detached garage, situated on a small but nicely landscaped plot of land graced with mature trees. The house and the neighborhood were too nice for a cop to afford, and it made me wonder when Schmidt had gone bad. I surveyed the house and the neighbors’ houses from every angle I could. The houses were unusually close to one another, I noted.

I checked the address in the usual databases to see whether Schmidt had a wife and family, but from all indications it appeared that he lived alone. Then, using my burner phone, I called Schmidt’s home number, which Dorothy had found in one of our databases. It rang eight times and then went to voice mail, a muffled male voice that said only, “Leave your name and phone number at the tone.”

I changed into my Allied HVAC uniform, assembled a small bag of tools, and said good-bye to Dorothy and went down to the Suburban.

As I drove up Connecticut Avenue, heading northwest toward Maryland, my iPhone rang.

It was Mandy Seeger.

“Did you call to gloat, is that it?” she said.

“I called because I want your help. It wasn’t your fault. Kayla lied to you. She was paid and blackmailed, both.”

“How — how do you know?”

“She told me so. She got paid twice. Not just by Slander Sheet. How much did you guys pay her, by the way?”

“Ten thousand bucks. What do you mean, she got paid and blackmailed? By who?”

“That’s just it. She doesn’t know.”

“Where is she? I tried to call her, but no answer. I thought she was screening her calls and didn’t want to talk to me.”

“She’s with me.”

“With you?”

“We’re keeping her safe. The people who paid her tried to grab her and take her out of town, fly her somewhere.”

“‘People’? Like who?”

“I’m trying to find out. I thought you might want to help me.”

Slander Sheet had just destroyed her credibility as a journalist and then fired her. She had to be hopping mad.

“Hell yeah, I want to help you. Not tonight, though. I’m wiped out. I can barely talk.”

“Tomorrow as soon as you’re up, give me a call.”

“I will. And — Heller?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”