Guilty Minds

by Joseph Finder

  This seemed like a bad option.

  Two: I glanced at the light, lacy curtains that hung next to the glass sliders. There were six panels of curtains, each curtain about six feet long.

  Knotted together, losing about a foot in length for each knot, that was thirty feet.

  I could sustain a drop of around thirty feet to the grass or bushes below, if I had to. If I fell right.

  Quickly I thought it through. I couldn’t do it without making noise. Plus it would take me at least ten minutes to remove the curtains, then remove the hooks from the fabric, and turn the curtains into a long rope and climb down from the balcony. Since this apartment, like Kayla’s, faced the front of the building, I’d risk being seen by anyone driving up—and by the police, if they happened to be leaving at the time.

  Not a feasible option. I was stuck with the bad option.

  Brazen it out.

  Walk across the living room, as quietly as possible, and just hope that somehow I wasn’t spotted.

  I took a breath, exhaled, and then began moving slowly, as light on my feet as I could be, toward the front door. One foot in front of the other.

  When I took a third step I was able to see into the bedroom. I saw a slice of a bed, a brown bedspread or coverlet. A lump in the bed. Someone’s legs, presumably. The pallid blue-gray wash of the TV, just out of sight.

  I took another careful step. Now I would see her head and shoulders, and she’d be able to see me. Unless her attention was riveted on the TV. Maybe her head was turned at such an angle that she wouldn’t see me in her peripheral vision. The door was about ten feet away from me. The TV chattered and blared and barked and reverberated.

  The floor creaked audibly underfoot.

  My insides clenched.

  Would she hear the squeak over the clamor of the TV? Maybe. Maybe not.

  Then I saw that the bed was empty.

  What had, a moment ago, looked like someone’s torso or legs under the coverlet was in fact just a heap of bedding.

  So if she wasn’t in the bed, and the TV was on, where—?

  A toilet flushed.

  I thought quickly. He? She? Was in the bathroom, off the bedroom, and she was probably about to emerge.

  For a split-second I froze.

  Stop or advance? When she came out of the bathroom, the odds would greatly increase of her spotting me in her peripheral vision.

  Decided, then.

  I took three quick steps and reached the front door.

  The door locks here were identical to Kayla’s, upstairs. Two thumb latches that turned counterclockwise to unlock the dead bolt.

  I turned the top one, and it made a loud clunking sound, audible everywhere in the apartment, no question about it.

  I turned the second thumb latch and yanked the door open.

  Without waiting another second, I vaulted through the door, and leaving it open behind me, ran down the corridor toward the stairwell.

  26

  You can’t count on always being lucky, even if you consider yourself a lucky guy, as I do. I’d just escaped a jam—a disaster averted—but it had been a close thing. At least I’d gotten something out of it, I told myself, something valuable: proof that Kayla had bought tickets to Mississippi for the day before she’d allegedly serviced a Supreme Court justice.

  In retrospect, as I drove the black Suburban back to the Shays Abbott office at M Street and New Hampshire, it had seemed worth the risk. I just had to remind myself that I wouldn’t always be this lucky.

  I’d broken into her apartment hoping to access her credit card bills so I could identify places she frequented—health clubs, bars, restaurants. Armed with that knowledge, I figured, maybe I’d eventually locate surveillance cameras that had recorded her. A long shot, no question.

  But discovering in one of those credit card bills that she’d bought plane tickets: that was far better than scouting around for CCTV cameras in DC.

  “You didn’t get in to her apartment,” Dorothy guessed as I arrived in the conference room. I’d changed out of my HVAC uniform and back into my street clothes. I was limping slightly, apparently having pulled something in my right calf.

  “O ye of little faith.” I gave her a swift recap of what had happened.

  “Heller,” she said. “Man.” Then she laughed. “At least she wasn’t home at the time. You plant the GPS?”

  I nodded, told her what I’d found out about the US Airways flight.

  “Jackson, Mississippi,” she said. “I wonder why.”

  “Going home, I figure.”

  “But home is Tupelo, and Jackson is almost two hundred miles away.”

  “It’s probably the closest airport. I doubt there are any direct flights from DC to Tupelo, Mississippi.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Then she flew back two days later. That’s a lot of driving for less than two days at home. Why wouldn’t she take a connecting flight to Memphis?”

  “Good question,” I said.

  “Well, the important thing is that it proves she couldn’t have been with Claflin at the Hotel Monroe on those two nights.”

  “Almost.”

  “You don’t think that’s enough?”

  “We have proof she bought airline tickets. That’s not proof she flew to Mississippi. Or that she was actually there. What would really nail this thing down would be her CDRs.”

  She groaned. “I can’t, Nick. It’s impossible.”

  CDRs are call detail records generated by cell phones and kept in the mobile phone company’s databases. They contain all sorts of data, like phone numbers dialed or received, the start time and length of each call—and then the really useful information: the location where you were when you placed or received a call.

  As everyone who watches movies or TV knows, our cell phones are constantly pinging cell towers. Mobile phone companies know where our phones—i.e., we—are at all times. It’s undeniably creepy. A CDR documents which cell towers a mobile phone pinged during the course of a call. If you know the location of the nearest cell towers, their longitude and latitude and nearest street address, you know where the caller was.

  If we could get the CDRs for Kayla’s phone, we could prove she was in Mississippi and not in Washington during two of the nights in question.

  The problem was, if you weren’t law enforcement, it was next to impossible to get someone’s CDRs—even your own, for that matter. Not so long ago, you just had to know someone in the phone company. Money would change hands under the table. But the companies had begun putting in logging systems that keep close track of who accesses call detail records. She was right: She couldn’t get Kayla’s CDRs.

  “I hate to ask Frank Montello,” I said, “but I don’t think we have a choice.”

  When I told him what I wanted, he said, “No can do, Heller. Not anymore. Verizon Wireless is really cracking down. All the cell cos are. Everyone’s gotten scared.”

  “Is it a matter of money?”

  “It’s a matter of no one wants to risk their job anymore.”

  “My client is willing to pay extremely generously,” I said, and I mentioned a range I was willing to pay.

  Instead of blowing me off, or hanging up, he suddenly sounded interested. He countered.

  Then I countered back, and fairly quickly he admitted he might know a software guy who worked for Verizon Wireless who might be able to defeat the logging system and get CDRs for me. I suspected that his source at Verizon was someone he didn’t like to go to very often, someone easily spooked, but for the right price . . .

  There’s almost always a right price.

  Montello told me he’d get in touch with his source and see what he could do. It might take a while. He wasn’t sure. I offered a twenty percent premium on my already generous offer if he could get me something that afternoon.
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  Even before I’d finished talking to Montello, Dorothy had put a website up on the projection screen. It was the gossip site TMZ. The lead story, in a box with a red border, had a headline in big black type: HIJINKS IN THE HIGH COURT. This was over a big picture of Justice Claflin with a wild, leering look on his face. I recognized the photo. It had been taken at a party for his sixtieth birthday when he was about to blow out the candles.

  I put down the phone and groaned.

  “The story’s starting to spread big-time,” she said. She pulled up the Drudge Report. The same picture appeared there under the headline THE LOVE JUDGE.

  “Shit.” Drudge was a gossip site, but it had first broken the story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, so it had a certain residual credibility. “What about the Times or the Post?” I asked.

  “Nothing there. Not yet.”

  “Good. How about Perez Hilton?”

  “Nothing. But check this out.” She clicked on Politico. On its front page was a small box with a photo of Claflin, apparently at a State of the Union speech. Over it was the headline CLAFLIN IN POSSIBLE CALL GIRL SCANDAL?

  “That’s not good,” I said. “Politico is mainstream. At least it’s a question mark.”

  Probably the best headline was the one in Vox: JUSTICE SERVED?

  BuzzFeed ran a listicle about the top ten DC sex scandals, from Monica Lewinsky in 1998 to Senator Gary Hart and his girlfriend Donna Rice in 1987. A congressman caught sending lewd messages to young male pages in 2006, and a senator arrested in a Minneapolis airport bathroom in 2007 soliciting sex from an undercover police officer.

  It must have been hard to narrow the list down to just ten. I could think of quite a few more.

  “How much time do we have?” I asked Dorothy.

  “Just about six hours.”

  “Six hours to blow this story up.”

  “Nick, this story is spreading like wildfire. Way faster than I expected. I think we have enough to go to Slander Sheet and demand a retraction.”

  I cupped my chin in my hand and thought. True, the Claflin story was going big faster than I’d expected. None of the standard bearers of the old-guard legacy print media had picked up on it yet, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if their online versions ran something with a question mark, and soon. It was just too explosive a story to ignore.

  “I’m going to talk to Gideon,” I said.

  27

  I wandered through the maze of hallways until I found Gideon Parnell’s office. His door was closed. His admin, Rose, sat at a desk right outside. She was on the phone. She nodded, smiled at me, held up an index finger.

  When she hung up I said, “Rose, I need five minutes of Gideon’s time.”

  She looked at his closed door, then back at me. “His phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Can it wait till things slow down?”

  “I don’t think they’re going to slow down any time soon,” I said.

  “He’s on the phone with the chief justice. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  She tapped at her keyboard. I sat down in one of the visitor chairs lined up outside his office.

  After a moment, I remembered about the bald man who’d been following Kayla, Curtis Schmidt. I had a source within the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police who I’d worked with on a previous case, involving my brother, Roger. The last I knew, Detective-Lieutenant Arthur Garvin was with the Violent Crime branch, on a retirement waiver. When I worked with him, a few years back, he was just past the department’s mandatory retirement age of sixty, though they made exceptions in certain cases. But only up to sixty-four. He had to be retired by now.

  I called him on his personal cell number. He answered right away, crisp like the cop he was for so long. “Garvin.”

  “Art, it’s Nick Heller,” I said.

  A pause. “Heller!” he said. “Uh-oh. You in some kind of trouble?”

  I laughed and got right to it. “Do you happen to know a retired police sergeant named Curtis Schmidt?”

  There was a pause. “Not that I can recall.”

  “I need to find out what I can about the guy. What he’s up to, who he’s working for, whatever you can get.”

  “I can make some calls, maybe dig around. What’s this about?”

  Gideon’s office door opened and he emerged.

  “I gotta go, Art. I’ll fill you in next time we talk. I owe you.” I ended the call and stood up. “You got two minutes?” I asked Gideon.

  “Of course. Come on.” He led me into his office and closed the door behind him. “You have something?”

  I nodded. “How’s the chief justice holding up?”

  “He’s despondent, as you can well imagine. His office is directing people to the court’s public affairs office, and they’re giving out a statement that I crafted. What do you have?”

  “Enough to go to Slander Sheet and demand a retraction,” I said. I told him what we had.

  “Do we know she actually took those flights?”

  I smiled. The same question I’d asked. And I wasn’t even a lawyer. “Not without getting the flight manifest from US Airways, and that’s something only law enforcement can do.”

  “That seems like a hole, don’t you think? She might have bought tickets and not flown.”

  “It’s a hole, but a minor one. We have less than six hours, and I think the smart play is to go to Slander Sheet with what we have. It’s enough.”

  “Not yet,” Gideon said. “We need proof she was in Mississippi and not in DC at the time.”

  “I think we’re in a strong enough position now.”

  He shook his head. “I want that accusation discredited once and for all, no ambiguity about it, no games, no waffling.”

  “I understand, but I think we can work with what we have.” I found myself in an unusual position. Normally I’m on the other side, pushing for more evidence, a more conclusive case. “They’d be idiots not to issue a retraction.”

  “I’m the client,” Gideon said firmly. “And I’m asking you for more.”

  “The problem is, for me to get anything more definitive could take a few days, and by then it’s too late. We have less than six—”

  My phone rang. I glanced at it: Frank Montello. “Excuse me,” I said, and I answered the call. “Frank.”

  “You’re not answering your e-mail.”

  “You have something?”

  “Check your in-box,” he said. “You owe me a chunk of change.”

  When I explained to Gideon what call-detail records were, he broke out in a broad grin.

  28

  Gideon inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly.

  “Thank God. And thank you.” His chin tipped up ever so slightly. “It’s time we paid Slander Sheet a visit.”

  “Not you,” I said.

  “Not me? And why the hell not?”

  “It paints a big target on your back. Draws their attention to you. I think you should remain behind the scenes and let me be the up-front guy. The flak catcher. That’s what you pay me for.”

  After a long moment of silence he said, “You’re right.”

  On my phone I forwarded the call records to Dorothy—I was surprised at how big the file was—and then spent ten minutes with Gideon as he suggested to me some legal language to use with Slander Sheet.

  When I got back to the conference room, Dorothy got up and threw her arms around me. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that.

  “You did it,” she said.

  “We can celebrate when Slander Sheet issues a retraction. Why is the file so big?”

  “It’s a whole lot of data. A lot of the time she was using a navigation app on her phone that kept pinging the cell towers. Communicating, broadcasting nonstop. So the data is almost continuous, back-to-back. We can see where she went for hours at a time.
Showing an almost perfect path of travel.”

  “And where’d she go?”

  “When she arrived in Jackson, she traveled from the airport to a Budget Rent a Car agency on the airport grounds. Then she drove about four miles to a town called Pearl, Mississippi, on the outskirts of Jackson. That’s where she spent most of her time. In the town of Pearl.”

  “What’s there?”

  “The Central Mississippi Correctional Facility.”

  “Who’d she visit?”

  She nodded. “I searched the Vinelink inmate locator under the name of Pitts, and I found a Raelyn Pitts, twenty-seven years old.”

  “Her big sister.”

  “Right. She was visiting her sister in prison. She stayed at a Comfort Inn near the prison both nights, June 6 and 7, and went to visit her sister twice.”

  “You got all this from the latitude and the longitude of the cell towers?”

  She shook her head. “They also give you street addresses. So I did some cross-referencing.”

  “That just leaves one night unaccounted for. June 12.”

  “Wrong. We got that, too.”

  “How so?”

  “They sent a month’s worth of call records, a full billing cycle. On June 12, she spent the evening at a sports bar in Arlington, Virginia, for most of the night. Never left Arlington.”

  That meant that all three nights were accounted for. All three nights when she was supposedly with the chief justice she was provably somewhere else.

  I called Slander Sheet and tried to get an appointment with the founder and editor in chief, Julian Gunn. I was told he was tied up. But once they heard I represented Gideon Parnell, Gunn freed up some time. He probably wanted to dance a victory jig in front of me.

  I felt good. We had evidence that was rock solid, even better than I’d expected to come up with.

  But there was something about this case that still bothered me, that had begun to nag at me, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.