Guilty Minds (18 page)

G
ideon Parnell’s admin, Rose, got me in to see him between appointments.

He greeted me with a kind of handshake-hug. He was wearing a dove gray suit, a French blue shirt, and a maroon tie. His cologne was peppery.

“I’m surprised you’re still here,” he said. “I thought you’d be back in Boston by now.”

“I have some unfinished business I need a bit of help on.”

He looked a little perplexed. “Of course. Have a seat.”

I sat on his guest couch, and he sat in a wing chair next to me.

“You know the law firm Norcross and McKenna?” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Certainly.” His voice sounded different now, low and disdainful. “I’d keep my distance, I were you.”

“They’re apparently the key to finding out who really owns Slander Sheet. They’re the firm that incorporated their holding company, the Slade—”

“That’s all water under the bridge at this point, Nick. Slander Sheet is an object of ridicule. I don’t really care who owns that piece of garbage.”

“I do. Because last night, Kayla Pitts was found dead.”

His large liquid eyes widened and his mouth came open. “
What?
” he rasped.

“She was in a hotel room adjoining mine.” I explained about how she’d called and I’d gone to rescue her at the private airport. I left out where I’d gone last night afterward, breaking into Curtis Schmidt’s house—that was irrelevant. And not the sort of detail he needed to know.

“Good Lord,” Gideon said. “You don’t think it could be a suicide?”

“Not given the circumstances, no.”

“You think someone killed her.”

I nodded.

“And staged it to look like a suicide.”

“Right.”

“So who would do such a thing?”

“Maybe someone who was afraid of what she’d expose. Which is why I want to know who the real owners of Slander Sheet are. And I think the answer’s going to be found at Norcross and McKenna.”

He nodded. “I know a lot of people, but I don’t know anyone there. Which is no surprise—that’s a highly secretive crew. I mean, they’re doing all sorts of confidential work for tobacco companies, the nuclear power industry, gun manufacturers . . . but I’m not sure I understand what you’re up to.”

“If I find out who owns Slander Sheet
,
I’m one step closer to finding out who had Kayla murdered.”

“Or Slander Sheet may have nothing whatsoever to do with Kayla’s death.”

“Maybe not. But I intend to find out.”

“Well, you do what you gotta do. Though we can’t keep paying you, you understand.”

“Understood.”

“Personally, I’m not sure what’s to be gained by turning over rocks. Like they say, you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Nick, the work you’ve done on behalf of Justice Claflin has been extraordinary. Let me tell you, Jerry Claflin will never forget what you did.
I’ll
never forget it. What happened to that poor girl is terrible, but it’s not your responsibility. You did nothing wrong.”

“I don’t agree, Gideon. That girl’s death is on me.”

“You’re a compassionate man, Nick, I know that. But you shouldn’t feel guilty. You didn’t do a damned thing wrong.”

I rose, put out my hand to shake his. “Thanks,” I said.

“Hey,” he said. He placed a hand on my shoulder. “You’re a hero.”

I smiled, and nodded, and didn’t argue. But I knew who I had to see next, as painful as it might be.

My father.

F
or years, Victor Heller had been imprisoned in a Gothic redbrick medium-security prison called the Altamont Correctional Facility, formerly the Altamont Lunatic Asylum, in upstate New York. It wasn’t convenient to get to—you had to fly to Albany and then rent a car and drive to the outskirts of a town called Guilderland. But that wasn’t why I didn’t visit him. Every time I saw him it felt like I gave up another piece of my soul. He was not a good man. I learned from him how to tell when someone was lying because he lied like he breathed.

I got a flight out of Reagan National Airport and got to Altamont around noon. He was waiting for me behind the long counter in the visitors’ room.

He was wearing the prison uniform of dark green shirt and slacks. His hair had gone white, and he had a big white Old Testament beard.

He didn’t look well. His head lolled to one side. I was surprised at how much his health had apparently deteriorated in the thirteen months since I’d last seen him.

When I’d called his lawyer to arrange the visit, he told me that Victor was agitating for a compassionate release on the grounds that he had
senile dementia. That was news to me. The few times I’d seen him he was as sharp as ever. “Well, you’ll see,” the lawyer said. “He’s not the man he was.”

I sat down at my side of the counter. My father was mumbling something about ice cream and something about shoes. I looked at him. His face above his beard was raw-looking, with flakes of skin coming off. He had a bad case of psoriasis, like a molting snake.

“Hello, Dad,” I said.

He was looking off somewhere in the distance and kept mumbling. More about ice cream and what sounded like “laundry.”

“Dad?” A little louder this time.

So much for asking for his help with the law firm Norcross and McKenna.

“Robert told me that you’re applying for a compassionate release. Who has to approve it?”

He turned sharply and looked at me. “Bernie?”

Bernie was the name of his college roommate, with whom he’d had a falling out before I was born. I’d heard the name, and never in a positive way. Maybe I looked a little like Bernie.

“You’ve got fourteen years left in here,” I said. “That’s a long time. That’s, what, fourteen times three hundred and sixty-five days, which is . . . like four thousand—forty-five hundred days.”

Victor, still looking off in the distance, rolled his eyes, and snapped, “Five thousand, one hundred, and ten.”

Even at the dinner table of my childhood, Dad, with his slide-rule precision, could never stand to let arithmetic mistakes like this pass. I guffawed in victory.

He leaned forward, glanced uneasily at the guard who’d brought him out, standing about twenty feet away, and whispered, “What the hell do you want this time?”

“What can you tell me about Norcross and McKenna?”

“They won’t represent you. You’re not rich enough.”

“What’d they do for you? Some securities-fraud allegation, right?”

“Is that what I told you?” He smiled wanly. “I needed to find a way to funnel money to a couple of politicians without having my name attached. They took care of it. Whatever black magic they used, I was able to make a couple of, uh,
gifts,
off the books.”

“They’re known mostly for handling dark money, right?”

“They do whatever their clients need. They assure you that your confidential files are protected. Most firms stow old files off-site at a storage facility, an Iron Mountain. But not these folks. Everything stays on-site, under their watchful eyes. They’re very proud of their triple-locked strong room.”

I knew then what my next step had to be.

“They don’t still represent you, do they?”

“No. But if I called them up and said I needed help, they’d fall all over themselves to welcome me back.”

“Huh.” I thought a minute. Norcross and McKenna wouldn’t believe me if I pretended to be there on behalf of my father. They’d see through it too quickly.

“Why are you so interested in Norcross and McKenna?”

“I’m working on a case involving Jeremiah Claflin and a gossip website called Slander Sheet.”

He smiled his crocodile smile. “That’s you?”

“You know what I’m talking about?”

“The sainted Supreme Court justice and the chippie?”

“You get the Internet in here, I guess.”

He lowered his voice. “Amazing how far a pack of cigarettes goes.”

“I want to know who owns Slander Sheet
.
”

“Why?”

How much to tell him? That was always the dilemma. I didn’t trust him, didn’t trust his discretion, and I had no idea what his network was like anymore. How he got word to people on the outside. I never knew what his real, secret agenda was. The more I talked to him, the more corroded I felt.

“Someone had it in for the judge,” I said.

He ran his hand over his eyes. “No doubt.” He blinked rapidly, flecked away a few flakes of dead skin. “A man like Claflin is going to have some formidable enemies.” He raised an index finger, and now he really did look like an Old Testament prophet gone mad. “But it’s always your friends who do you in.”

He should know. Several colleagues of his whom he called friends had cooperated with the prosecutors and provided the evidence that got him locked up for so many years.

As always, my father was talking about his favorite subject: himself.

A
rthur Garvin, my retired police lieutenant friend, lived in an immaculate raised ranch in the distant Maryland suburbs with a lawn like a golf course. He was in overalls and a work shirt and was resealing his driveway. It looked like he was rolling black paint over the dusty asphalt. I parked on the street and strolled across the perfect lawn and waved hello. He waved back and made some sort of oblique hand signal that I assumed meant he needed to finish what he was doing. I sat on the front porch and watched. He’d been a workaholic, like a lot of homicide detectives, when he was on the job, and now he’d probably turned that prodigious energy to weekly changing the batteries in his smoke alarms and weeding. He was a widower, I remembered.

He disappeared into his garage, which looked pristine from here, and came around to the front door from inside the house. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. A strong chemical smell wafted from his clothes, from the driveway sealer. I sniffed. “That stuff can’t be good for you.”

“Good old coal tar.”

“Isn’t that stuff supposed to be toxic?”

He shrugged. He didn’t care. He led the way to a dimly lit front sitting room and we sat down.

“You look good,” I said. “Retirement is treating you well.” He still had that wispy white goatee and the steel-rimmed glasses with lenses thick as an old Coke bottle. They magnified his eyes, insectlike.

“Retirement is hell,” he said. “I’m going out of my goddamned mind.”

“No consulting gigs on offer?”

“Unless I want to be an expert witness for the defense, and you know I couldn’t stand that. Boston okay?”

“Sure.”

“You miss DC.”

“Like I miss a canker sore.”

I told him about Kayla’s death. He listened gravely, asked a few questions, shook his head. He looked amused when I told him about breaking into Curtis Schmidt’s house.

“Let me see the picture,” he said. He meant the photo of Schmidt and a buddy with a fish.

“It’s on my phone.”

I located it in the phone’s camera roll and handed it to him.

He held it at arm’s length from his face. “I see the bald guy, but I don’t see his buddy. Let me get my reading glasses.”

I took back the phone and swiped the photo and pinched and spread my fingers apart to magnify Schmidt’s friend’s face, then I handed it back.

“Oh, yes,” he said at once. “Oh, yes.” He gave a tart little smile. “Thomas Vogel.”

“You recognize the guy.”

“Vogel’s famous.”

“Oh yeah?”

“He was sort of the ringleader. Well, not sort of. He was the ringleader of the fake overtime pay scam. When he was on the force, he surrounded himself with a small group of alpha dogs, including your boy Curtis Schmidt.”

“He get forced retirement, too?”

Garvin nodded. “He was a legend in the department, Vogel was. Thought he was smarter than everybody else, and he probably was. Did undercover work in narcotics and made some prominent busts. After he was forced out, he started this interesting kind of high-end VIP protection service, called Centurions. They’re more like fixers than plain old security guards.”

“‘Fixer’ can mean anything. What do they do?”

“They make scandals go away.”

“For politicians?”

“Sure, and movie stars and rich people.”

“You know this for sure?”

“All I know is gossip. A celebrity is found with a body in his bed, they make the body disappear. Some movie star has a problem with a stalker, they take care of the problem. No restraining order needed. A call girl threatens a congressman with blackmail, they handle it. They resolve the situation without involving the courts. They make problems vanish. They don’t advertise, and they’re not in the phone book. I doubt they have a website. I don’t even think they have an office.”

“How do they get clients?”

“Word of mouth. People just know about them.”

“So,” I said, “they’re probably the ones who staged Kayla’s suicide.”

“Could be. Wouldn’t surprise me. Question is, who hired them? That’s what you really want to know.”

I looked out the window at the perfect emerald lawn, the polished ebony of the driveway. I smelled the coal tar, astringent and medicinal.
There were any number of directions I could have gone from there. But it was becoming clear, at least to me, that the answer might lie in the connection between the Centurions and Slander Sheet
.

And that connection, if there was a connection, would require some serious digging. It wasn’t going to be easy to find.

But I had an idea.

T
hank you for making time to see us, Mr. Troy.”

I nodded, avoided eye contact, looked uncomfortable. Simon Troy was said to be uncomfortable around people.

The woman appeared to be in her midthirties and had glossy black hair. She was attractive, in a matronly way.

“Do you come to town often?”

“As little as possible.” Simon Troy lived in Jenks, Oklahoma, outside of Tulsa, and rarely traveled. He was also a billionaire and one of the largest landowners in the United States and was known to be mostly a recluse. Very few photos of him could be found on the Internet. In truth, I didn’t look very much like him, except for the gray hair and mustache I was wearing, and the black horn-rimmed glasses. But no one here at Norcross and McKenna was going to question whether I was Simon Troy or not. They wanted to believe.

We’d considered creating a false identity, but backstopping it—largely, seeding the Internet with enough plausible appearances—was time-consuming, and we didn’t have the time. Whereas a billionaire like Simon Troy, seldom photographed and never interviewed, seemed
relatively easy to impersonate. Mandy Seeger provided me with a download of what little information on him existed, and I studied it, hard. Dorothy then called the law firm from a spoofed Tulsa phone number to arrange this last-minute meeting.

“Well, Mr. Norcross was happy to clear some time in his schedule to meet with you.”

We didn’t talk again as she led me along a corridor to a corner office. A rotund man with a red face and silver hair bounded from behind his desk, his hand extended.

“A great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Troy. I’m Ash Norcross.”

I gave him a limp, diffident shake, took note of the keycard clipped to his belt.

“Can we get you a cup of tea? I understand you don’t drink coffee.”

“Nothing for me, thanks.”

“Thanks, Val,” Ashton Norcross said, dismissing his admin. To me he said, “I understand you got my name—”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” I said languidly. “I have to get back to Capitol Hill. A few senators I need to see.”

“Well, then, let’s get right to it.” He half-bowed and indicated a seating area with two brocade sofas. I sat, and then he sat across from me. I set down my briefcase to my left, close to him, a few feet away from his keycard. Close enough, I hoped.

“As you may or may not know, I tend to stay out of politics,” I said. “In any public way, I mean. You won’t find my name on any FEC databases, or at least not in a long while. But I’ve come to believe our republic is under assault.”

“And so it is, Mr. Troy. And so it is. No argument here. In fact, we at Norcross—”

“But as you may know, I don’t like to see my name in the paper.”

“Absolutely.”

“I stay as low profile as possible.”

“Understood. You’ve come to the right place.”

“Now, I’ve had a bad experience with one of our local law firms in Tulsa. Turned out that their security was lax. I want to know what precautions you take.”

“Well, our security is state-of-the-art.”

“If I were to become a client, where would you be storing the files you’d keep on me?”

“Oh, data security is paramount here, Mr. Troy. All digital client files are kept on a partitioned, air-gapped, encrypted server.”

“What about paper files?”

“Kept in a separately locked, highly secured strong room.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Certainly. In fact—”

Someone knocked on Norcross’s open door. I turned. A trim guy around sixty with a thick thatch of gray hair stood there with a stupid grin on his face.

Ash Norcross waved him in. “Oh, Jeff, come on in, let me introduce you to Simon Troy. Simon, this is Jeff Winik, one of our partners and a fellow Stanford grad.”

Winik strode toward me, gave me a firm handshake, and said, “You were Stanford ’79, right?”

I nodded.

“I was Stanford ’80!”

“Oh yeah?” I said, smiling blandly as my stomach plummeted.

He went on: “Where’d you live freshman year?”

I regarded him for a few seconds. He wasn’t challenging me, trying to determine whether I was really Simon Troy. He was genuinely attempting to bond.

It was not credible that “Simon Troy” would have forgotten where he
lived freshman year in college. Several long seconds went by while I frantically grappled for an answer. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of my neck into my shirt collar.

Finally I said, “Larkin.” The name suddenly popped into my head after the hours I’d spent cramming, poring over the Simon Troy dossier that Mandy had assembled for me.

“Oh yeah? I was in Branner!”

“Well, nice to meet you,” I said, but Winik was not done with me.

“But then I got a bad lottery number,” he went on, “and I ended up in the trailer park.”

“Huh,” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about.
Trailer park?

“Ever used to hang out at the O?” he said.

The O?
What was that, a bar? The freshman union? I took a flyer and said, “I sort of kept to myself. I didn’t really hang out.” An all-purpose answer, but it seemed to satisfy him.

“Well, Mr. Troy doesn’t have much time,” Norcross said, blessedly cutting the conversation short. “He wants to see the strong room.”