Guilty Minds

41

The paramedics canceled the ambulance as soon as they arrived. There was no need for it. There was no question whether she was dead. I heard one of the uniformed officers in Kayla’s hotel room calling for homicide, which was standard — homicide detectives showed up to investigate any death outside a medical environment — and adding, “but I’m pretty sure it’s a suicide.”

An investigator and a driver from the medical examiner’s office showed up shortly thereafter and began murmuring to each other and taking pictures and measurements. Dorothy and I sat in the suite living room, mostly in stunned silence, in a state of shock. Dorothy cried. I was feeling hollow.

I was surprised at how torn up I was by Kayla’s suicide. On some level it felt like my fault. She was on track to make a hundred thousand dollars with a concocted story about Justice Claflin. Until I came along. I’d set off a chain reaction that ended in her feeling alone, desperate, scared, and hopeless. If I hadn’t gotten involved, she might still be alive. And what if I hadn’t broken into Schmidt’s house but stayed here instead? Maybe she’d have had someone to talk to. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt so alone.

I barely knew the girl; I should not have felt her death so powerfully.

Around ten minutes later a homicide detective from Washington Metro Police showed up. He introduced himself as Detective Balakian. He was a young guy, couldn’t have been much more than thirty, with a gold stud earring in his left ear and a Kurt Cobain goatee with chin strap. He was snappily dressed in a skinny black tie, a white shirt with short collar points, skinny trousers, and a quilted Barbour-looking coat. He wore cool-nerd eyeglasses. On his right inside wrist, I noticed when we shook hands, he had a tattoo of an infinity sign. He was the hipster cop, and I took an immediate dislike to him. Most cops at that hour smell like Burger King; he smelled like bánh mì.

While the medical examiner’s investigators and the mobile crime unit people were photographing Kayla’s body and taking measurements, the groovy cop started asking us questions in a soft-spoken voice. He took down our names and brief descriptions of who we were in a small flip-down notebook.

“What’s her name, the deceased?”

I told him.

“What’s your relationship with her?”

“None,” I said. “She asked me to pick her up at a general aviation airport in Fairfax. She was being taken somewhere against her will.”

That naturally piqued his interest, so he asked me to explain, and I did.

“She’s ‘Heidi’? From — Slander Sheet?”

The hipster detective kept up with the tabloid news. I nodded.

“I see. So you’re a private investigator?” He smirked. “Like, one of those cruller-munching divorce dicks, that it?”

“Huh,” I said. “Is that what you learned from 21 Jump Street?”

He nodded. Touché. “Does she have a purse or wallet with an ID?”

“No.”

“Does she have a phone or a laptop?”

“Not here.”

“No phone?”

“It was taken away from her en route to the airport.”

“Do you know who her next of kin are?”

“I know she has a sister in prison. Apart from that, I don’t.”

“Did she have a criminal background, to your knowledge?”

“I don’t know.” But I knew what he was really asking. If she had a criminal background, if she’d ever been arrested, her fingerprints would be in the system somewhere, and they’d be able to make a positive identification of her body. Without next of kin or any ID, they were going to have problems.

“I didn’t find a note,” Detective Balakian said. “Did either of you find anything that looked like a note?”

I shook my head, and Dorothy said no.

“How about her mental state earlier tonight? Was there anything about her, thinking back on it now, that may have indicated she was contemplating killing herself?”

“No.”

“But you did talk with her?”

“We talked, yes. But nothing indicated she was considering suicide. Absolutely not. Though she didn’t like being what she called a ‘prisoner’ here.”

“Was she?”

“Not at all. She could have left at any time. Though I urged her to stay here.”

“So why did she call herself a prisoner?”

“Because I told her not to answer the phone or the door. To let no one in.”

“How would you describe her mental state?”

“She was frightened of the people blackmailing her, that was pretty evident. She was afraid for her sister in prison, what they might do to her. She was scared.”

“All right. I found some little bottles of Scotch and vodka in the trash. Did you witness her drinking?”

“She and I each had a drink or two.”

“So that wasn’t all her.”

“Right.”

“She’d just been humiliated publicly,” Detective Balakian said. “Did she indicate how that might have affected her?”

“We didn’t talk about that.”

“When you left her this evening, she seemed fine?”

“That’s right. Upset and scared, yes. But not suicidal.”

“Where did you go this evening?”

I paused for an instant. Breaking into an ex-cop’s house. Yeah, that would go over well. I couldn’t claim I’d met with someone or he’d want to know who. If I said I went out for dinner, where did I eat?

But Dorothy was quick. “He was on a stakeout.”

“A stakeout?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Couple hours of sitting in a car. I’m sure you’ve been there.”

He looked at me for a beat, as if reassessing. I wasn’t so sure he’d ever been on a stakeout, actually. He seemed awfully young to be a homicide detective. “You say she was being taken somewhere against her will, which is why she called you. Where was she being taken?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t she call the police?”

“I don’t know.”

“And who were her would-be kidnappers?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“You say you live in Boston?”

“That’s right.”

“How long have you been in town?”

“A couple of days.” I’d already been over this with him.

“Sounds to me like she’d been under a great deal of emotional stress. Would you say that’s accurate?”

“I would.”

“Between the attempted kidnapping by an unknown party and the very public nature of her, uh, accusation against a Supreme Court justice.”

I nodded.

“She was in a fragile state, is that fair to say?”

I nodded again.

“Yet you left her alone in this hotel room with a minibar full of alcohol.”

“She was exhausted. She wanted to go to sleep.”

He turned to Dorothy. “Did you check on her at any point this evening?”

“I was asleep myself,” she said.

He turned back to me. “So she called you to help rescue her, and you brought her to this hotel room and then left her here?”

“I don’t think I like what you’re implying,” I said.

“That you left her here in a vulnerable state? That’s not accurate?”

“You’re trying to make it sound like it’s my fault.”

“I didn’t say you did it, Mister, uh, Heller. I said you let it happen.”

“I told you, we had no idea she was suicidal. And I don’t think she was.” I heard myself: I sounded more defensive than I wanted to.

“Hey, don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “How sure are you that this was really a suicide?”

“Do you have any reason to believe it was something else?”

“She was afraid, and she had cause to be afraid.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She was almost abducted. There were people who didn’t want her to talk.”

“Well, we’ll have to open a separate investigation into that. But there are far easier ways to kill someone than by slitting their wrists and their neck. It takes a while to bleed out, and I didn’t see any signs of struggle. There were even hesitation marks, which is textbook — the first couple of times she tried, she was probably surprised at how painful it was and stopped. This is textbook, man. We’ve got a young prostitute, probably mentally unstable, probably with family issues, maybe substance abuse. Who was undergoing a lot of emotional pressure.”

“And didn’t leave a note.”

“Sometimes they leave notes, sometimes they don’t. Plenty of times they don’t. I know it’s hard to accept that someone you care about committed suicide. I understand why you might prefer to think it wasn’t a suicide.”

“So you’ve worked a lot of homicides?”

He didn’t reply.

I wanted to ask him how long he’d been out of homicide school. I had a feeling it wasn’t long at all. He was also here by himself, without a partner. You send an inexperienced homicide detective out solo when you’re fairly sure you’re not dealing with a homicide. When you’re dealing with an apparent natural death or a suicide. That way the newbie investigator develops his chops. It looked like a suicide, so he was investigating it as if it was a suicide.

But what if it wasn’t?