Guilty Minds

57

I screwed up, Nick,” Merlin said.

“It was a good idea,” I said. “It didn’t work. That’s not screwing up.”

“No, I don’t mean lighting the paper on fire. I thought that was pretty clever. I mean, I left the folder behind.”

“Oh.” I paused. “You did, huh? Yeah, that’s a screw-up, all right.” I felt a surge of hot anger but did my best to conceal it. Merlin looked so dispirited that I added right away, “But not a tragedy. We got the name and her location. We have Ellen Wiley and Upperville, Virginia. I remember that much.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding unconvinced.

We walked down a dark, wide street, moving from pool to pool of yellowish light cast by the sodium-vapor street lamps. Traffic was light, but not nonexistent. It was a little after four in the morning. Dawn was still a few hours off.

Merlin’s mistake had put added pressure on us — “us” being me, Dorothy, and now Mandy Seeger, since I thought of Mandy as being part of our team. Not only had we set off the fire alarm and damaged the strong room door, but at some point soon, someone in the firm would find the misplaced Slade Group file folder, and that would start a clock ticking. The fact that the file had been isolated and removed from the secured file cabinets would tell them it was probably important. That would point a blinking neon arrow at Ellen Wiley’s name. Maybe they’d alert her that someone might be coming for her.

Because someone was.

I allowed myself five hours of sleep. That was about the minimum I could operate on with my cognition fairly intact. At ten in the morning, Dorothy, Mandy, and I gathered in the living room of my hotel suite. I’d given her the name of Slander Sheet’s owner, Ellen Wiley, and she’d made a call to an old friend at The Washington Post.

“So it’s Ellen Wiley, huh?” she said. “Amazing.” She was reclining in one of the big lounge chairs, one leg tucked under the other. She was wearing black leggings and a white button-down shirt. She wore her wavy hair up. I couldn’t decide if she was a redhead or a brunette with coppery highlights.

“The shadowy owner herself,” I said. “What do I need to know about her?”

Mandy was looking over a sheaf of paper. “My friend at the Post pulled a file on Wiley and e-mailed it to me. She’s an interesting case, Ellen Wiley. Extremely rich — a tobacco heiress. She inherited a big chunk of the Philip Morris tobacco fortune. She’s got homes in Upperville, Anguilla, Scottsdale, and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan. I’m pretty sure Upperville is her chief residence. A huge estate on two thousand acres in horse and hunt country. She’s a big patron of the arts. Gives a lot to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Upperville. Divorced three times, each time married to a younger man. She’s not a recluse, exactly, but she’s extremely publicity-averse. She stays away from the press.”

“So why does she own Slander Sheet?” Dorothy asked.

Mandy riffled through the file. “That’s a mystery.”

“I need to see her up close. I want to ask her some questions. I’m fairly good at sussing out liars.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“So where is she now? How do we find out?”

Mandy smiled.

“At her estate in Upperville.”

“You’re sure?”

“She’s hosting a fund-raiser tonight for wounded veterans at her house.”

“So tonight’s out. We go to see her tomorrow.”

“I say we go tonight. You’re a veteran, aren’t you?”

“I wasn’t wounded. Who’s ‘we’?”

She smiled again. “You need a date.”

“I wasn’t invited.”

“What’s ‘invited’?”

“I like your style,” I said.