Guilty Minds

58

The drive to Upperville took a little more than an hour, straight down 66 west and then up north to Route 50.

I wore a suit — I had nothing fancier with me, of course, than the suit I’d worn on the way down from Boston — and Mandy wore a white zip-front peplum jacket over a matching skirt. She also looked like she’d spent some time putting on her makeup. She looked terrific, sophisticated and attractive.

I drove, and we fell into easy, companionable conversation. We talked for a while about her time working for The Washington Post, and about my time in Iraq and Bosnia. She seemed to enjoy bumping up against the barrier of what I couldn’t talk about. I could see what a relentless reporter she must be. She told me about all the research she’d done on Justice Claflin when she was writing the piece about Kayla, and I asked if she wouldn’t mind sharing her other files with me.

“Sure. There’s all kinds of goodies in my files.”

“Anything on me?”

“You flatter yourself. Slander Sheet was only interested in the powerful and the famous. The more lascivious, the better. Gideon’s in there.”

“Gideon?”

“Rumored to be something of a dog.”

“He’s seventy-five.”

“Makes no difference. Did you know his sister was raped?”

I shook my head.

“Years ago. Helped shape the man he turned out to be.”

“How so?”

“Apparently the rapist was a white guy. And they never caught him.”

“Maybe there wasn’t enough evidence. Or maybe they couldn’t be bothered.”

“Maybe. And the wife of the White House chief of staff has a shoplifting problem, apparently. And the number-two at the CIA may have plagiarized his Woodrow Wilson School master’s thesis.”

“Do you care about all this stuff? I mean, the gossip?”

“Not especially.”

“Me neither. Did you ever care? Before you got fired?”

In a small voice she said, “It paid the mortgage.”

I let the subject drop.

When we passed Manassas, she said, “So what’s the game plan? Are you just going to ask her if she ordered the murder of Kayla Pitts?”

“You know the game: You go in at a slant. Get her to talk. Suss her out. Get a sense of how much she knows.”

“And when she lies?”

“I get lied to all the time. It’s my business.”

“That must get depressing.”

“Not really. You can learn a lot from a lie. Sometimes more than from the truth. If she lies to us, we’ll learn something, too.”

“But you don’t think she ordered Kayla to be killed, do you?”

“I think she set this train in motion. I think her plan was to use this digital rag Slander Sheet to destroy Jeremiah Claflin, for some reason. She was doing a full-on Hearst — creating the news and then breaking it.”

“You think?”

“Worked with the Spanish-American War, right?” She knew what I was talking about, how at the end of the nineteenth century a couple of newspaper moguls, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, had their correspondents invent sensational, fictional stories about atrocities in Cuba, which eventually provoked the United States into going to war with Spain. Because Hearst and Pulitzer had their own war going on — over circulation. They did it to sell newspapers.

“Okay,” she said, “but killing Kayla...?”

“My gut says Ellen Wiley ordered up a scandal. Not a homicide. I think the thugs she hired just took things one lethal step further — killing the girl so she couldn’t compromise them. At the end of the day, everyone saves his own ass first. Law of human nature.”

“You think she knows her people did it?”

I nodded. “And maybe, just maybe, she’ll feel a pang of guilt and come clean. Or at least open the door a crack. But I need to see her face-to-face so I know what she knows.”

There was a long pause, and then she said, “Thanks for including me.”

“In what?”

She waved a hand. “In all this. I need to put things right. As much as I can.”

“I understand.” I felt roughly the same way.

It wasn’t until we’d been on Route 50 for a while and passed a sign for the Upperville Baptist Church that we realized we’d arrived.

“But where’s the town?” Mandy said.

“Good question.”

Upperville wasn’t even a town; it was an unincorporated community, an assortment of old stone and brick buildings, most of them lined up along Route 50. There was a sandstone Episcopal church, a post office, a fire department. An inn once owned by George Washington, or so the Internet had told us. And horse farms. A lot of horse farms. A sign announced that this was the site of the annual Upperville Colt and Horse Show.

We stopped at a general store, and Mandy ran in to ask directions. Past the cemetery and then continue on for a couple of miles, she was told. On either side of the road were horse fences. There was a break in the fence and an unmarked road. We turned left there, as instructed. Soon we came to a stone fence. Inset in one of the pillars at the opening was a granite block inscribed ELM SPRING FARMS. Entering ahead of us were a Bentley and a Range Rover. We were obviously in the right place.

The road went on for a long while, jigging to the left and then to the right and then straight, lined with gracefully pruned elm trees and pin oaks. Just beyond the trees, on the right, was a clearing. In the gaps between the trees I could glimpse a long straight lane of asphalt paving, which I soon realized was an airstrip. It seemed to be about a mile long. The road continued another half mile or so. Finally it broadened out and the trees ended. Parked on either side of the wider road were a lot of cars.

Expensive cars, too. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs and Range Rovers, Bentleys and Jaguars and Lamborghinis and Ferraris. And then there were the retro vehicles, the woody-sided station wagons, and the pickup trucks that probably belonged to the real hands-on horse-farm owners who had so much money they didn’t need to impress you. A young guy in a valet uniform was guiding the cars into their slots.

We’d timed this well, in the middle of the arrival rush. We parked the Suburban and joined the parade of party guests walking down the driveway toward the extremely large redbrick Georgian house. I knew it was at least ten thousand square feet, on a two-thousand-acre plot of land that also included a private airstrip and stables and paddocks.

But when we got to the front door, there was a problem. A couple of pretty blond young women were sitting at a table just inside, handing out name badges and checking names off a list.

We were not on any list, of course.

“James and Lisa Grant,” I said pleasantly.

Mandy glanced at me quickly. We hadn’t discussed whether we’d pretend to be a married couple; I’d just improvised it, last minute, forgetting that neither of us wore wedding bands.

“Grant,” one of the girls murmured, running her finger down a column. “Um, how do you spell that?”

“Like it sounds.” Behind them was a painting of a white barn that I was pretty sure was by Georgia O’Keeffe.

“Um, I don’t see a Grant here.” She turned to the blonde sitting next to her. “Do you have James Grant?” They probably each had half the alphabet. The second blonde scanned her list, running an index finger down her list. She shook her head.

Then Mandy stepped forward. “I’ll just write out our name badges if you give me a couple of blanks.” As if the real problem was that we didn’t have any badges. Not that we weren’t on the list of invited guests.

The two blondes looked at each other, and the first one shrugged. You could see the conflicting instincts battling it out in their heads — Only admit guests on the list! versus Never insult the guests!

Never insult the guests won out, as I knew it would. How did they know the Grants’ names hadn’t been accidentally left off?

“Sure,” the first blonde said uncertainly, pulling out blank name badges from a box and handing them to Mandy.

The entry hall, tiled in terra-cotta, gave way to a great hall with twenty-foot ceilings, very grand and formal. The floor was black-and-white harlequin tiles, the walls were painted oxblood, there were dramatic swags of drapery and gilt-framed equestrian paintings. The room was crowded. It looked like there were sixty or seventy people. We each took hors d’oeuvres from a waitress and flutes of champagne from a waiter and entered the fray.

It didn’t take long at all to identify Ellen Wiley. She was a tall, attractive woman in her seventies who looked easily twenty years younger. She had the figure of a woman who did a lot of Pilates. She was wearing a long-sleeved gold evening dress with a diamond choker. Her hair, light brown with blond highlights, was styled in a short, flattering shag. She was talking to a silver-haired man who looked ex-military, and she was laughing, a deep swooping laugh.

“Now what?” Mandy said.

“We drink, we talk, we suffer through the inevitable pitch for money, and then we wait until we can get her alone.”

Mandy and I talked for a long while, keeping to ourselves, like you weren’t supposed to do at a party like this. Someone clinked a glass, then others clinked in response, and the room quieted. Ellen Wiley — we’d identified her correctly — made a speech about how for every US soldier killed in war, seven are wounded. She talked about the invisible wounds of war, like post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, and major depression. She introduced one grievously wounded soldier, recently back from Iraq, and he spoke a few words and reduced a few people to tears.

She finished speaking, and a few minutes later I saw her approach us. Her hand was extended. “You’re the Grants, I’m told,” she said, a smile lighting up her face. Her eyes were a bright blue.

“James Grant,” I said and shook her hand. She’d been briefed. James Grant was a major donor to conservative causes.

“Lisa Grant,” Mandy said and did the same.

Up close you could see the skillful plastic surgery she’d had, particularly in the tight lines around her eyes when she smiled. She turned toward me. “I understand you wanted to talk to me, Mister, uh Grant.” She raised her eyebrows as she said Grant. “Happy to do so, when the guests have gone.”

She smiled again and turned away.

A young guy in a blue blazer came up to us a few minutes later, introduced himself as Rico, and escorted us out of the great room and down a hallway to the library, which was only slightly smaller than the great room. It had large windows and whitewashed stone walls and built-in bookcases. The floors were painted wood. He gestured toward a round tea table with chairs around it in front of a large painting, a big red square that looked like a Rothko. “Mrs. Wiley will be with you soon,” Rico said. When we took our seats, he turned without a word and left.

As we sat, uncomfortable on the hard wooden chairs, we said nothing to each other, because of the possibility of recording devices.

We waited uneasily.

Somehow she knew we wanted to see her. We hadn’t said anything to anyone else at the party, or to the blond girls with the name tags.

I thought back to the folder that Merlin had left in the locked file room at the law firm and wondered whether someone at Norcross and McKenna had made the connection and warned Ellen Wiley. That seemed the likeliest explanation.

But if she knew we were there under false pretenses, why was she still willing to meet with us?

Mrs. Wiley appeared about an hour later. She began speaking as she entered the library, a good fifty feet from us.

“Finally!” she said. “Now the party gets interesting.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Oh, I know every single name on my guest list. I didn’t invite anyone I don’t know. When I’m hitting people up for money, I prefer to know them personally.” She tipped her head to one side, placed a hand on her hip, and smiled coquettishly. “The least you could have done was use your real names.”