Guilty Minds (15 page)

N
ick,” Dorothy said quietly, “what are we doing?”

We sat in the living room of my suite, the connecting door to Kayla’s room open. I’d set down my wineglass of Scotch and ordered coffee from room service.

“About what?”

“With her? She’s a scammer and a grifter, and need I remind you, she also happens to be a prostitute.”

“And a victim.”

“Of her own making.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Not to me. If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t be here.”

“If it wasn’t her, it would have been someone else. Anyway, she may prove useful.”

“But that’s not why you rescued her.”

I shrugged. What could I say? She was right; I’d saved the girl because she was being used; she was a pawn in a struggle I didn’t yet understand. And because I liked her for some reason. But I didn’t want to argue with Dorothy. She had her moral code, a complex one, and I
respected it, but she didn’t view Kayla as damaged goods, a victim of circumstance, as I did.

A knock at my door. I checked the peephole. I could see a young woman in a hotel uniform with a rolling cart. I opened the door, and she rolled in the cart and set up the coffee.

I offered Dorothy some, and she accepted. She had work to do. She was determined to trace the ownership of Slander Sheet and she had a few online leads. She sat at her laptop at the dining table/work station. Meanwhile, after I’d had a few sips, I called Mandy Seeger’s cell phone and got a message—not hers, but a robotic female voice from the phone company saying, “The number you dialed has been changed, disconnected, or is no longer in service.”

So I called the main number for the Slander Sheet offices in DC, figuring that there’d probably be staffers working at night.

A young-sounding man answered the line. “Slander Sheet
.
”

“Mandy Seeger, please.”

A pause. “Uh, yeah, she doesn’t work here anymore. Sorry.”

That was fast,
I thought.

“Do you have any contact number for her? I’m a friend.”

A pause. “Hold on.” He sounded reluctant.

He put the phone down. I heard voices in the background. He came back on the line and dictated a phone number. I thanked him and hung up.

I wanted to talk to Mandy Seeger because she was another victim in the Claflin business. She, too, had been used, like Kayla, only in a different way. Now that she’d been fired, I suspected she would be happy to tell me what she knew about who owned Slander Sheet.

Her phone rang and rang and went to a recording of her voice. I left a message.

Then I found Curtis Schmidt’s wallet, the one I’d taken off him, and
took out his Maryland driver’s license. It listed his home address. I looked it up on Google Earth and then switched to Street View.

One of the great advantages of Google Maps and Google Earth is that they enable you to do a kind of close reconnaissance of houses. That’s why criminals like Google. Now they can case their targets remotely.

Curtis Schmidt lived in Bethesda, on Moorland Lane. His house was a handsome three-story brick colonial with a detached garage, situated on a small but nicely landscaped plot of land graced with mature trees. The house and the neighborhood were too nice for a cop to afford, and it made me wonder when Schmidt had gone bad. I surveyed the house and the neighbors’ houses from every angle I could. The houses were unusually close to one another, I noted.

I checked the address in the usual databases to see whether Schmidt had a wife and family, but from all indications it appeared that he lived alone. Then, using my burner phone, I called Schmidt’s home number, which Dorothy had found in one of our databases. It rang eight times and then went to voice mail, a muffled male voice that said only, “Leave your name and phone number at the tone.”

I changed into my Allied HVAC uniform, assembled a small bag of tools, and said good-bye to Dorothy and went down to the Suburban.

As I drove up Connecticut Avenue, heading northwest toward Maryland, my iPhone rang.

It was Mandy Seeger.

“Did you call to gloat, is that it?” she said.

“I called because I want your help. It wasn’t your fault. Kayla lied to you. She was paid and blackmailed, both.”

“How—how do you know?”

“She told me so. She got paid twice. Not just by Slander Sheet. How much did you guys pay her, by the way?”

“Ten thousand bucks. What do you mean, she got paid and blackmailed? By who?”

“That’s just it. She doesn’t know.”

“Where is she? I tried to call her, but no answer. I thought she was screening her calls and didn’t want to talk to me.”

“She’s with me.”

“With
you
?”

“We’re keeping her safe. The people who paid her tried to grab her and take her out of town, fly her somewhere.”

“‘People’? Like who?”

“I’m trying to find out. I thought you might want to help me.”

Slander Sheet had just destroyed her credibility as a journalist and then fired her. She had to be hopping mad.

“Hell yeah, I want to help you. Not tonight, though. I’m wiped out. I can barely talk.”

“Tomorrow as soon as you’re up, give me a call.”

“I will. And—Heller?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

I
found Schmidt’s house easily—I recognized it from Google—and drove past it slowly. The house was dark; the lights were off. I tried his home phone one more time, calling from my burner, and there was no answer.

It was a fair assumption that he wasn’t home, but I couldn’t be sure. Where was he? Hospital, maybe, getting something done to his hyperextended knee. Though there wasn’t much that could be done. Surgery, maybe, if a ligament was torn. A lot of physical therapy. Ice.

Tax and residential records confirmed that he lived alone, without a wife and/or kids. But that didn’t mean he might not have a girlfriend visiting, asleep in the house. Or he could be there alone and just not answering.

So I circled around and pulled into his driveway, behind the detached garage, where I parked. That seemed less suspicious than parking a few blocks away and approaching by foot. If neighbors were watching, they’d see a big, official-looking black Suburban in the driveway; nothing furtive about that. Hence the service uniform. The direct approach was often best.

I got out and went right to the front door, the way a legitimate repairperson would, and I rang the doorbell. Was the place alarmed? He was an ex-cop; I had to assume it was. I didn’t see any alarm sign on the front lawn or by the door. Which didn’t necessarily mean anything.

I rang again. To the left of the door was a window through which I could see into the house, into the foyer. Inside I could see a red LED glowing in the dark. Odds were good it was an alarm panel. Security experts believed you shouldn’t have your alarm panel within view of the entrance, because that made it too easy for clever burglars who might have somehow obtained the secret code. But Schmidt, the ex-cop, probably wanted it visible, an overt display, a deterrent.

I noticed a point-of-entry magnetic sensor on the window jamb. That confirmed that he had a classic, old-school security system. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, the old-school systems were just about impossible to beat.

There were often ways around them, though.

I returned to the detached garage. Its overhead door was locked. I pulsed on my small penlight, looked through one of the small windows, and saw what I expected: an automatic garage door opener.

That was good.

One of the tools I’d brought was a coil of steel strapping, the sort of thing that’s used to secure pallets of lumber and so on. At one end it was bent into a V. I straightened it and inserted it into the top of the door, between the door and the weather-stripping. Inside, hanging down from the door-opening mechanism, was a manual release, a string with a red handle on it. That was standard on all automatic garage door openers, for use in case of a power failure.

It took about a minute, but eventually my improvised slim-jim hooked onto the handle of the manual release, and I was able to yank it, hard.

Now it was a simple matter to raise the garage door by hand.

The garage smelled of gasoline and motor oil. I found the light switch and flipped it on. No car here. I looked in the obvious places for a key to the house. Nothing.

Then I noticed the eight-foot aluminum ladder mounted on large steel hooks on the wall. I took it down off the hooks, switched off the light, left the garage, and rolled down the overhead door behind me.

I carried the ladder around to the rear of the house and leaned it against the wall, in the shrubbery that ringed the house, just below one of the second-floor windows. It’s extremely unusual to find alarm sensors on the upper stories of a residence. It happens, but I’ve seen it only once.

The window was unlocked. Also not unusual. I edged it open by pressing up against the muntin until the window came open an inch, then I grasped the bottom rail and pulled it up. Feet first, I slid in.

A guest bedroom, by the look of it. A neatly made bed, an end table, a desk and chair. Not much else. No signs of habitation.

It was dark inside the house and smelled faintly of mildew and cigarette. Wall-to-wall carpeting covered the hall floor. I switched on my penlight and illuminated a path. The next room was a bathroom. Next was another bedroom. This one looked like it was where Schmidt slept. A king-size bed, lamps on end tables on either side. A giant flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. In front of it, an exercise bicycle. A chest of drawers. I pulled open the top drawer and found socks.

I thought of something and checked under the pillow on the bed. On the right side was a weapon, a Glock 26 pistol. I pulled it out and stuck it into my tool bag. I had no weapon with me in DC—they were back home, in Boston—and it occurred to me that I might need one sometime.

I switched off the penlight and descended the carpeted stairs to the first floor.

Here I had to be careful. There might be motion sensors. They were cheap and easy to install and often considered part of the basic security package. I stopped on the third-to-last step and surveyed the darkness.

I saw the glowing red LED dot on the alarm panel in the foyer, but nothing else.

I switched on the penlight, traced it around the crown molding on the ceiling, looking for motion sensors, but found none. So I continued the rest of the way down to the landing. There I stood for a moment. The downstairs was neat and clean and looked almost uninhabited.

Through one open door I saw a roomy kitchen with a dining table covered in Formica. One door was closed. I opened it and found a half-bath. A roll of paper towels in a wall dispenser, one rumpled towel. I opened a second door, pointed my penlight, saw a desk and a file cabinet, another big flat-screen TV, a bookshelf. A safe. This was his study. The safe was probably where he kept his guns, the ones that weren’t hidden under his pillow. Maybe other things in there, too. On the desk were an old-looking laptop computer and a couple of framed photos. I glanced at the pictures. They showed Schmidt with his arm around a woman on a beach somewhere, probably Cancún. Another one was of Schmidt and a male friend, with a bristly mustache, who was triumphantly holding up a big bluefish. I tugged at the top file cabinet drawer, but it was locked.

A flash of light caught my eye. I looked up and saw the red light of a motion sensor come on.

My heart began to pound. I’d set it off.

Here was where he placed the motion sensors. Here, where he probably stored his sensitive stuff, the room he was most worried about.

A loud Klaxon blared from speakers throughout the house, a deafening clanging sound, and a tinny pre-recorded voice that proclaimed, “Leave immediately! Leave immediately!”

Then a phone trilled.

That would be the dispatch service, calling to check whether this was a valid alarm, or whether it had been triggered mistakenly by the homeowner.

I grabbed his desk phone.

“Bethesda Alarm Service,” a woman’s voice said.

“Yeah, that was me,” I said. “I screwed up. Can you turn off the damn alarm? I’m going deaf here.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“Curtis Schmidt.”

“Sir, I’m going to need your code word.” She had an Indian accent.

“My code—dammit, I don’t remember, my wife chose that.” I remembered suddenly that Schmidt wasn’t married. But the alarm company wouldn’t have a record of that.

“I need to hear the code word, sir, or I’m required to notify the police.”

“I don’t—look, I’ll look around and see if she put it on a sticky note somewhere—can you turn this off in the meantime?”

“No, sir, we’re not allowed to do that until we hear the homeowner’s code word.”

“Will you hang on?”

“Yes, sir, certainly.”

I dropped the phone, looked around frantically, realized I had to get out of there at once. The response time for the Bethesda police could be as quick as five minutes and as long as twenty. There was no time to run upstairs and climb down the ladder, and the alarm had been triggered anyway, so I might as well exit through one of the doors on this floor. I took out my phone and snapped a picture of the framed photo of Schmidt and his buddy fishing, and I raced to the kitchen. I unlocked the double locks on the back door and pulled it open.

Outside the alarm was clanging loudly, piercing the still night, loud enough to alert the neighbors. I went around to the driveway, walking not running, and got into the Suburban.

I backed up the driveway to the street at a deliberate speed and drove off into the darkness.

W
hat I’d hoped to find was a file, in a drawer or on a computer, or something else that might clarify who Schmidt was working with or for. All I’d ended up with was a picture of Schmidt and a fishing buddy.

Now he knew someone had broken into his house. He’d know who.

My nerves didn’t stop jangling, and my heartbeat didn’t return to normal, until I reached Connecticut Avenue.

I parked the Suburban in a space on Sixteenth Street and returned to the hotel. I nodded at the doorman and found the bank of elevators. We were on the third floor. My suite was number 322. Dorothy, across the hall, was 323. I touched the keycard to the sensor above the lever handle and it winked green to let me in.

It was close to ten o’clock in the evening, and it had been a long day. I was exhausted. I checked my e-mail to see if anything had come in, but there was nothing that required my immediate attention. The connecting door to Kayla’s room was closed. I had left it open. Maybe she had closed it for privacy. I preferred it left open.

I changed into a T-shirt and a pair of sweats, and then knocked softly
on the door, in case she was awake. No answer. I opened the door and peered around. The room was dark but a light in the bathroom was on.

Her bed looked empty. She was probably in the bathroom. I entered her room and knocked on the bathroom door.

The door was slightly ajar, I saw.

“Kayla?” I said.

No answer.

I knocked again, and the door came open an inch or so.

“Kayla?”

Still no answer. Odd. Maybe she wasn’t in the bathroom; she’d gone somewhere, left the room. Exactly what I told her not to do.

Tentatively I pushed the door open, and what I saw next at first didn’t register.

I smelled blood, dark and sweet and metallic. My stomach flipped and my heart began to clatter. I saw Kayla slumped down in what looked like a bathtub filled with blood. Her eyes were open and staring at nothing. Her face was pale, lifeless. Her lips were bluish. Her breasts and abdomen were covered in blood. I took another step and saw one hand curled against her belly, long parallel gashes cut into her wrists, lengthwise. Another couple of gashes at her neck, one that apparently had severed the carotid artery. My eyes were caught by a glint of light. I turned to see, on the bathroom sink, a broken wineglass, the shards scattered across the vanity. One particularly large shard, smeared with blood, twinkled on the edge of the tub. I put a couple of fingers on her neck, next to her windpipe, and felt no pulse, just cold flesh, and I knew it was too late.