A
t a few minutes after seven I sat bolt upright in bed and remembered that Kayla’s room was going to be cleaned this morning and I didn’t want that to happen yet. No matter what the DC police wanted.
Mandy and I had talked until almost three in the morning, and I wasn’t going to last long on four hours of sleep. But I forced myself to get up. I ordered coffee from room service and opened the connecting door to Kayla’s room. It was dim: The drapes had been drawn, probably by the mobile crime techs last night, for privacy. I checked the door to the hallway, found that the Do Not Disturb sign was still hanging on the handle. Maybe the sign would have kept the housekeepers from entering the room. But maybe not; maybe the night manager’s orders would override the sign’s authority.
The room still smelled of Kayla. I could detect a very faint waft of patchouli near the rumpled bed. Her clothes were discarded on the floor nearby. I suppose I was looking for signs of struggle, but I am not a homicide detective. Then again, neither was Balakian, really.
I took a deep breath and then went into the bathroom and turned on the light. The blood on the tub and the tile wall had dried. There was
blood on the floor as well, next to the tub. It was reddish-brown and glossy. It was no easier to see it this morning than it had been last night. I stood and surveyed the scene. I saw the broken wineglass and the shards of glass on the vanity and the floor and decided I’d better get into some shoes or, barefoot, I’d get cut.
When I returned wearing a pair of sneakers, I stood at the verge of the bathroom, looked around again. Slowly. I tried to imagine how Kayla did it, if it was really a suicide. She’d been deeply frightened, no question, but would simply being frightened lead someone to kill herself? No, it didn’t make sense. But maybe the feeling of hopelessness caused by the situation she found herself in. That might be enough to do it.
Possibly. I thought it through.
So having decided to end her life, she looks around the hotel room for something to do it with. She’s going to slit her wrists, because she’s heard you can bleed out that way and die peacefully.
It wasn’t true, of course. The vast majority of people who cut their wrists survive. As many as ninety-nine percent. It’s most often a form of self-mutilation, a display, a cry for help, not an effective means of suicide. And it’s quite painful.
But maybe she doesn’t know this. Someone has to be in the one percent.
She doesn’t have a knife. She doesn’t even have a shaving razor. But she has a wineglass. She smashes it on the bathroom vanity and selects the sharpest shard.
She runs a bath, because that’s how she’s heard it’s usually done, in a bath. She tries; she pokes the shard of glass into the delicate skin on the inside of her wrist and discovers that it’s extremely painful. She runs it along a vein and then stops because it hurts so much. Those were the so-called hesitation marks that Detective Balakian had noticed. Homicide detectives look for hesitation marks as evidence of a true suicide.
Textbook
, Balakian had called it.
This is textbook, man
.
I stopped.
Textbook
.
Either poor Kayla really did kill herself or someone made it look that way. And if someone killed her and set it up to look like a suicide, whoever did it was no amateur. No, it was someone who knew what a suicide scene should look like. Right down to the hesitation marks.
It was a professional. It had to be. Someone who knew what a homicide detective would look for.
I couldn’t help but think of Curtis Schmidt, a former DC cop.
A former cop.
But I realized I was getting ahead of myself. I had no reason other than instinct, gut feeling, to believe it wasn’t a suicide.
The doorbell sounded in the next room. It had to be my coffee.
I went back to my room and let in the room service guy with the trolley. I had some coffee, then took a shower and got dressed. I looked respectable even if I felt like a wreck. A caffeinated wreck, at least.
After my third cup of coffee, I called down to the hotel’s front desk and was told the security director wouldn’t be in until nine. So I returned to Kayla’s bathroom. I stood and looked over the blood spatter and tried to find meaning and logic in it, a pattern of some sort. The tub had been emptied, but dried blood remained on the tiled wall behind the tub, on the tub’s ledge, and on the floor. Most of the blood, I assumed, would have come when the carotid artery was severed. That would have been a gusher, spewing blood everywhere, as far as the floor beyond the tub.
And that was what I was struggling with. If someone had killed her—slashed at her neck and wrists while she was in the tub—he’d have been hit with blood. He’d have tracked it elsewhere in the bathroom or in the hotel room in general. He couldn’t help it. It would have gotten on his clothes, on his hands, and there would be traces of it here and there.
Smeared on the door handle or on the toilet’s flush lever. In the sink or on the vanity.
But there was nothing. The place was clean. I scanned carefully the bathroom walls and floors and the toilet and the vanity. And didn’t see any blood. I turned and faced outward and got down on my hands and knees and crawled around the carpet, searching for a dark fleck, a smear. A trace of blood. I was doing the sort of minute search that Detective Balakian and his crew should have done, and might have, if they weren’t so convinced it was a suicide.
Nothing.
I stood and, hunched over, examined the carpet, the path between the bathroom and the door. But nothing. After twenty minutes of this, I stopped. I was starting to lose focus.
Kayla’s killer, if there was a killer, had been neat and thorough and extremely careful.
Or maybe there was no killer. Maybe she had really killed herself, a tragedy of another sort.
I went to the bathroom to wash my hands, which were soiled from running them across a carpet that needed to be vacuumed better. The killer, if there was a killer, would have washed his hands right here. He’d have gotten blood on his hands, for sure. He’d have gotten blood on the basin, maybe on the faucet handles. But they were clean. I shut off the hot and cold handles, and then some little tickle in the back of my brain caused me to look at them more closely. I turned the cold lever all the way on, and there, on the back side of the lever, was a dark stain.
At first it looked like rust. But I looked closer and confirmed: It was a splotch of blood.
I shut the water off and then peered again at the backside of the lever. It was definitely dried blood.
But how did it get there?
It couldn’t have been Kayla. Someone in the process of killing herself wouldn’t bother to wash her hands. If it was Kayla, there would be blood drips visible elsewhere, between the tub and the sink, on the vanity, on the floor.
Someone had cleaned the bathroom thoroughly but missed one out-of-the-way spot.
To me, it said homicide. But I was no expert.
A
t nine o’clock I tried the hotel security director again. I told him I was a hotel guest and had a few questions for him.
“Oh, you’re in the suite, number three twenty-two,” he said. “Yes, I just heard, I’m so sorry.” He told me to come to his office on the first floor behind reception.
He was an elegantly dressed, dark-skinned man named Wanyama. His accent, his British-inflected diction, sounded African, probably Kenyan. He was soft-spoken and polite in manner. He sat at a small desk, crowded with loose-leaf binders and manuals, that probably was shared with others.
“My condolences,” he said. “It’s so painful when a loved one takes her own life.”
I didn’t want to tell him I barely knew her, so I just said, “Thank you.”
He nodded.
“I’d like to know whether she used her keycard at all last night.”
“Her . . . key?”
“Yes. I know your PMS, your property management system, records
all uses of room keys. There’s a log. An audit trail. I’d very much appreciate it if you’d check your database.”
“I understand. I’m awfully sorry, but we can only give out that sort of information to the police.”
“It’s my room. I paid for it. I have the right to know if she left the room at some point and then came back in.”
He looked at me for a few seconds. Then he nodded and turned to his computer. He entered a few keystrokes. “The key was issued at 7:16
P.M
. last night, and according to our system it was used just once.”
I thought for a moment. I’d escorted her to her room and used her keycard to open the door to her room. I’d considered withholding the key from her so she didn’t get any ideas about leaving the room and going someplace where I couldn’t protect her. But in the end I left the card on the desk in the room. I’d asked her to stay in the room, and she did.
“What about the door?” I said.
He nodded again. “It was opened, let me see, five times. Once at 7:16, of course.”
“And then around eight or so?” When Dorothy had returned bearing clothes for Kayla. That had been the second time.
“Yes. At 8:07 and then at 8:11.”
I closed my eyes, nodded. Dorothy entered at 8:07. A few minutes later, I’d opened the door again and hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside handle. Then I’d stuffed a towel under the inside handle.
“Then at 9:36, and again at 10:25.”
I was gone by nine. I didn’t return until after midnight. At nine thirty-six I was probably in Curtis Schmidt’s garage.
“But no keycard was used?”
“Correct.”
“Which means the door was opened from the inside.”
“That’s right.”
It had to have been Kayla who opened the door. But for whom?
“Can you tell if the room phone was used?”
“Yes, one moment.”
He tapped some more and opened a different database. “Yes, just once. An outgoing call was placed at 8:47.”
“Can you see the number that was called?”
“No, for that you need to go to the phone company. AT&T. We don’t have that capability.”
“I’d like to take a look at your surveillance video.”
He smiled, a pained smile, and shook his head. “Only for law enforcement. I’m very sorry.”
I thanked him, and he expressed his condolences again, and as soon as I left his office I called Detective Balakian.
W
hat can I do for you, Mr. Heller?” Balakian said.
“I have some information for you about Kayla Pitts.”
“Information?” Balakian sounded distracted. He was drinking something. Probably kombucha. I could hear the crinkle of paper, a cough in the background.
“A couple of facts that raise some interesting questions.”
“Go ahead.”
“There’s a splotch of blood on the back of the water faucet in the bathroom. Not very big, not easy to see. I’m pretty sure your guys missed it. If it’s Kayla’s blood, you have an interesting situation.”
“How do you figure?”
“You have to wonder how it got there.” I didn’t want to spell it out for him. That would be insulting. “And there’s more.”
“Okay.” More crinkling of paper. Balakian took another sip.
“According to the hotel’s security director, she placed an outgoing phone call at 8:47
P.M
. Then at 9:36
P.M.
and 10:25 her door was opened. From the inside.”
“Uh-huh.”
“That may have been when she let someone in. Her killer.”
“That’s a pretty big leap. She let someone into her room, so it’s homicide, not suicide, is that what you’re telling me?”
“It’s a piece of evidence you need to know.”
“There could be a thousand reasons why she opened her room door. She went out to get ice. She went out for a cigarette break. She went down to the lobby.”
“If she left the room for some reason, she had to have come back in. Which means the door would have been opened from the outside with the keycard after that. But it wasn’t.”
“Anything else?”
“Sure. See if there’s any security footage. They won’t let me view it. And you might want to check for drugs in her system like ketamine. Something that was used to knock her out.”
“That’ll come from toxicology in a couple weeks. But if they find evidence of drugs in a prostitute’s body, well, that’s not exactly going to be front-page news.”
Balakian was not going to be moved from his theory that Kayla was a suicide. It was infuriating, but I was just wasting my time trying to convince him. I knew the girl had been murdered. I didn’t need him to confirm it for me.
There were far more pressing questions to answer.
I said good-bye and hung up, and within seconds my phone rang. It was Mandy Seeger.
“I think I have something,” she said.
W
e met for breakfast at a no-frills diner a few blocks from the hotel. She ordered waffles, the house specialty, and I ordered eggs over medium and a half-smoke. They brought coffee without being asked, and I downed half a mug right away, nearly scalding my esophagus.
She looked surprisingly fresh, for someone who’d gotten hardly any sleep. Her skin was dewy and she smelled like soap. For the first time I noticed that she had freckles across her nose. It was cute. Her hair was pulled back. She was wearing an old, faded pair of jeans and a black T-shirt.
She took a few tentative sips of the hot coffee, and I told her what I’d found out from the hotel security guy.
“You think she let her killer into the room?” she asked.
I nodded.
“So it was someone she knew and trusted.”
“Seems that way. Unless she thought it was someone from the hotel, room service, or security, or a manager. Even though I told her not to open the door for anyone.”
“Oh, man. You know these homicide detectives are supposed to treat every suicide as a homicide until it’s proven different.”
“That’s right.”
“But there’s always other pressures. Numbers pressures. Stats. Like maybe they don’t want to add to the homicide rate.”
“Could be that. Or it could be simple incompetence. Balakian’s new and doesn’t know what he’s doing.” I took a swig of coffee, then said, “So you said you had something?”
“I think so. All right. As we know, Slander Sheet is owned by Hunsecker Media. Which is in turn owned by a company called Patroon LLC, right?”
“Okay.”
“But Patroon LLC is a black box. And for a long time that stumped me. So then I had an idea: pull my payroll tax forms. I looked at my W-2 tax forms from Slander Sheet. And it says that my salary was paid by something called the Slade Group.”
“Another black box, I assume.”
She nodded. “So I went online and searched the electronic database of the State Corporation Commission in Virginia and found something interesting. The Slade Group was incorporated by a law firm, Norcross and McKenna.” She looked at me, expectantly. Her light brown eyes twinkled.
I nodded. “Interesting.”
“You know who they are?”
“I’m pretty sure they represented my dad once. I recognize the name.”
“You know what they’re famous for?”
I shook my head.
“You know what ‘dark money’ is, right?”
“Sure.” Dark money was like the slurry trough of campaign fund-raising in the United States. The superrich, and corporations, could take advantage of a loophole in the law to secretly give unlimited amounts of money to their favorite candidate by passing the contribution through a nonprofit corporation. They could influence elections and do it in secret. It was totally corrupt, but that’s our political system. God bless America.
“I did a piece on dark money for the
Post
. And I kept coming across the name of this one particular law firm, Norcross and McKenna. It specializes in forming phony corporations and nonprofits as a way to hide donors’ names. The firm is based in Leesburg, Virginia, but that’s all I know about it.”
“Sketchy-sounding firm. No wonder my father did business with them. So Slander Sheet is owned by the Slade Group, which is one of these phony nonprofit corporations.”
“That’s right.”
“A corporation formed by this law firm.”
“Right.”
“Do you have any names?”
“For this law firm?”
I nodded.
“They have a website that’s pretty bare-bones.”
“This is great, Mandy. That’s our next move.”
“The law firm?”
“Right.”
“They’re not going to talk to you.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
The waitress appeared with two plates on her arm. She put the eggs in front of me and the waffles in front of Mandy and topped off our
coffees. She returned a minute later with syrup for Mandy and sriracha sauce for me. Mandy tucked right into her waffle without waiting. I liked that. I like a woman who likes to eat.
When she finally took a break, she said, “So, your dad was Victor Heller. Wow.”
“The dark prince of Wall Street himself, yep.” My dad was a prominent Wall Street tycoon who turned out to be a fraud and a liar. A brilliant man, a financial genius, but a twisted soul.
She dribbled syrup on the remains of her waffle. “Is he still in prison?”
“In upstate New York, doing twenty-eight years. He’ll probably die there.”
“Do you ever see him?”
“I visit him from time to time. As rarely as possible.”
“Interesting guy.”
“That’s one way to describe him.”
“So you must have been a smart kid—didn’t you go to Yale?”
“I dropped out. And I’m sure I got in only because Yale figured I was a rich kid and they’d snag some big contributions from my dad. That he’d hidden money away somewhere.”
“Did he?”
“A damned good question. I think so, but he’s not talking.”
She nodded. “You’re in Boston, right? How come you’re not based here?”
“Because I don’t enjoy living in Washington, DC. Never did. Boston’s my town. Besides, my mother lives there, and she’s not going to live forever. So there’s that.” I gulped some coffee. “Is this a job interview? Want to know my biggest weakness?”
She smiled. “So why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Aren’t you done with this job? For Gideon Parnell?”
“As far as Gideon is concerned, I’m done. But as far as I’m concerned, I’m not finished till I find out who killed Kayla and why.”
“And then what?”
“When I find out?”
She nodded.
“I’ll see when I get there,” I said.