Guilty Minds

46

What can I do for you, Mr. Heller?” Balakian said.

“I have some information for you about Kayla Pitts.”

“Information?” Balakian sounded distracted. He was drinking something. Probably kombucha. I could hear the crinkle of paper, a cough in the background.

“A couple of facts that raise some interesting questions.”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s a splotch of blood on the back of the water faucet in the bathroom. Not very big, not easy to see. I’m pretty sure your guys missed it. If it’s Kayla’s blood, you have an interesting situation.”

“How do you figure?”

“You have to wonder how it got there.” I didn’t want to spell it out for him. That would be insulting. “And there’s more.”

“Okay.” More crinkling of paper. Balakian took another sip.

“According to the hotel’s security director, she placed an outgoing phone call at 8:47 P.M. Then at 9:36 P.M. and 10:25 her door was opened. From the inside.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That may have been when she let someone in. Her killer.”

“That’s a pretty big leap. She let someone into her room, so it’s homicide, not suicide, is that what you’re telling me?”

“It’s a piece of evidence you need to know.”

“There could be a thousand reasons why she opened her room door. She went out to get ice. She went out for a cigarette break. She went down to the lobby.”

“If she left the room for some reason, she had to have come back in. Which means the door would have been opened from the outside with the keycard after that. But it wasn’t.”

“Anything else?”

“Sure. See if there’s any security footage. They won’t let me view it. And you might want to check for drugs in her system like ketamine. Something that was used to knock her out.”

“That’ll come from toxicology in a couple weeks. But if they find evidence of drugs in a prostitute’s body, well, that’s not exactly going to be front-page news.”

Balakian was not going to be moved from his theory that Kayla was a suicide. It was infuriating, but I was just wasting my time trying to convince him. I knew the girl had been murdered. I didn’t need him to confirm it for me.

There were far more pressing questions to answer.

I said good-bye and hung up, and within seconds my phone rang. It was Mandy Seeger.

“I think I have something,” she said.