Guilty Minds

42

After Detective Balakian had been there for barely an hour and a half, the people from the medical examiner’s office zipped up Kayla’s body in a bag and took her away on a stretcher. I watched them do it, feeling numb.

They drained the tub first to make it easier to remove the body, the blood-tinged water leaving a brick-red residue. Spatters of her blood remained on the tub surround, the lip of the tub, the adjoining vanity.

My phone rang. I glanced at my watch: 12:30 A.M.

Then I took out the phone and saw the caller ID and recognized the number. “Yes?” I said.

“Oh my God,” Mandy Seeger said in a hushed voice. “Is it true?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Kayla’s dead?”

“How — where did you hear this?”

“It’s on Slander Sheet.”

“What?” How was that even possible? But then I realized that Slander Sheet probably had tipsters in the Washington Metro police department. Hell, one of the tipsters could have been in this hotel room an hour ago, a mobile crime scene tech or a uniformed officer, texting Slander Sheet on the sly, making a quick buck. I found SlanderSheet.com on my laptop, and there it was.

The headline ran over a photo of Kayla, a.k.a. “Heidi,” from the Lily Schuyler website.

“I got a call a couple of minutes ago from Steve, my replacement,” she said. “He had some questions.”

“When?”

“Like fifteen minutes ago.”

“Who tipped him off?”

I was fairly certain that the only one in the room who knew the identity of the deceased besides me and Dorothy was Detective Balakian.

“Julian.”

“When?”

“Hold on, he e-mailed me first, before he called. Here it is, he forwarded an e-mail from Julian time-stamped eleven fifteen P.M.”

“Julian Gunn knew it was Kayla at eleven fifteen?”

“So?”

“Man, that’s barely fifteen minutes after the police got here.”

“Slander Sheet has sources everywhere,” she said.