T
he paramedics canceled the ambulance as soon as they arrived. There was no need for it. There was no question whether she was dead. I heard one of the uniformed officers in Kayla’s hotel room calling for homicide, which was standard—homicide detectives showed up to investigate any death outside a medical environment—and adding, “but I’m pretty sure it’s a suicide.”
An investigator and a driver from the medical examiner’s office showed up shortly thereafter and began murmuring to each other and taking pictures and measurements. Dorothy and I sat in the suite living room, mostly in stunned silence, in a state of shock. Dorothy cried. I was feeling hollow.
I was surprised at how torn up I was by Kayla’s suicide. On some level it felt like my fault. She was on track to make a hundred thousand dollars with a concocted story about Justice Claflin. Until I came along. I’d set off a chain reaction that ended in her feeling alone, desperate, scared, and hopeless. If I hadn’t gotten involved, she might still be alive. And what if I hadn’t broken into Schmidt’s house but stayed here instead? Maybe she’d have had someone to talk to. Maybe she wouldn’t have felt so alone.
I barely knew the girl; I should not have felt her death so powerfully.
Around ten minutes later a homicide detective from Washington Metro Police showed up. He introduced himself as Detective Balakian. He was a young guy, couldn’t have been much more than thirty, with a gold stud earring in his left ear and a Kurt Cobain goatee with chin strap. He was snappily dressed in a skinny black tie, a white shirt with short collar points, skinny trousers, and a quilted Barbour-looking coat. He wore cool-nerd eyeglasses. On his right inside wrist, I noticed when we shook hands, he had a tattoo of an infinity sign. He was the hipster cop, and I took an immediate dislike to him. Most cops at that hour smell like Burger King; he smelled like
bánh mì.
While the medical examiner’s investigators and the mobile crime unit people were photographing Kayla’s body and taking measurements, the groovy cop started asking us questions in a soft-spoken voice. He took down our names and brief descriptions of who we were in a small flip-down notebook.
“What’s her name, the deceased?”
I told him.
“What’s your relationship with her?”
“None,” I said. “She asked me to pick her up at a general aviation airport in Fairfax. She was being taken somewhere against her will.”
That naturally piqued his interest, so he asked me to explain, and I did.
“She’s ‘Heidi’? From—Slander Sheet?”
The hipster detective kept up with the tabloid news. I nodded.
“
I
see. So you’re a private investigator?” He smirked. “Like, one of those cruller-munching divorce dicks, that it?”
“Huh,” I said. “Is that what you learned from
21 Jump Street
?”
He nodded. Touché. “Does she have a purse or wallet with an ID?”
“No.”
“Does she have a phone or a laptop?”
“Not here.”
“No phone?”
“It was taken away from her en route to the airport.”
“Do you know who her next of kin are?”
“I know she has a sister in prison. Apart from that, I don’t.”
“Did she have a criminal background, to your knowledge?”
“I don’t know.” But I knew what he was really asking. If she had a criminal background, if she’d ever been arrested, her fingerprints would be in the system somewhere, and they’d be able to make a positive identification of her body. Without next of kin or any ID, they were going to have problems.
“I didn’t find a note,” Detective Balakian said. “Did either of you find anything that looked like a note?”
I shook my head, and Dorothy said no.
“How about her mental state earlier tonight? Was there anything about her, thinking back on it now, that may have indicated she was contemplating killing herself?”
“No.”
“But you did talk with her?”
“We talked, yes. But nothing indicated she was considering suicide. Absolutely not. Though she didn’t like being what she called a ‘prisoner’ here.”
“Was she?”
“Not at all. She could have left at any time. Though I urged her to stay here.”
“So why did she call herself a prisoner?”
“Because I told her not to answer the phone or the door. To let no one in.”
“How would you describe her mental state?”
“She was frightened of the people blackmailing her, that was pretty
evident. She was afraid for her sister in prison, what they might do to her. She was scared.”
“All right. I found some little bottles of Scotch and vodka in the trash. Did you witness her drinking?”
“She and I each had a drink or two.”
“So that wasn’t all her.”
“Right.”
“She’d just been humiliated publicly,” Detective Balakian said. “Did she indicate how that might have affected her?”
“We didn’t talk about that.”
“When you left her this evening, she seemed fine?”
“That’s right. Upset and scared, yes. But not suicidal.”
“Where did you go this evening?”
I paused for an instant.
Breaking into an ex-cop’s house
. Yeah,
that
would go over well. I couldn’t claim I’d met with someone or he’d want to know who. If I said I went out for dinner, where did I eat?
But Dorothy was quick. “He was on a stakeout.”
“A stakeout?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Couple hours of sitting in a car. I’m sure you’ve been there.”
He looked at me for a beat, as if reassessing. I wasn’t so sure he’d ever been on a stakeout, actually. He seemed awfully young to be a homicide detective. “You say she was being taken somewhere against her will, which is why she called you. Where was she being taken?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t she call the police?”
“I don’t know.”
“And who were her would-be kidnappers?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“You say you live in Boston?”
“That’s right.”
“How long have you been in town?”
“A couple of days.” I’d already been over this with him.
“Sounds to me like she’d been under a great deal of emotional stress. Would you say that’s accurate?”
“I would.”
“Between the attempted kidnapping by an unknown party and the very public nature of her, uh, accusation against a Supreme Court justice.”
I nodded.
“She was in a fragile state, is that fair to say?”
I nodded again.
“Yet you left her alone in this hotel room with a minibar full of alcohol.”
“She was exhausted. She wanted to go to sleep.”
He turned to Dorothy. “Did you check on her at any point this evening?”
“I was asleep myself,” she said.
He turned back to me. “So she called you to help rescue her, and you brought her to this hotel room and then left her here?”
“I don’t think I like what you’re implying,” I said.
“That you left her here in a vulnerable state? That’s not accurate?”
“You’re trying to make it sound like it’s my fault.”
“I didn’t say you did it, Mister, uh, Heller. I said you let it happen.”
“I told you, we had no idea she was suicidal. And I don’t think she was.” I heard myself: I sounded more defensive than I wanted to.
“Hey, don’t beat yourself up about it.”
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “How sure are you that this was really a suicide?”
“Do you have any reason to believe it was something else?”
“She was afraid, and she had cause to be afraid.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She was almost abducted. There were people who didn’t want her to talk.”
“Well, we’ll have to open a separate investigation into that. But there are far easier ways to kill someone than by slitting their wrists and their neck. It takes a while to bleed out, and I didn’t see any signs of struggle. There were even hesitation marks, which is textbook—the first couple of times she tried, she was probably surprised at how painful it was and stopped. This is
textbook,
man. We’ve got a young prostitute, probably mentally unstable, probably with family issues, maybe substance abuse. Who was undergoing a lot of emotional pressure.”
“And didn’t leave a note.”
“Sometimes they leave notes, sometimes they don’t. Plenty of times they don’t. I know it’s hard to accept that someone you care about committed suicide. I understand why you might prefer to think it wasn’t a suicide.”
“So you’ve worked a lot of homicides?”
He didn’t reply.
I wanted to ask him how long he’d been out of homicide school. I had a feeling it wasn’t long at all. He was also here by himself, without a partner. You send an inexperienced homicide detective out solo when you’re fairly sure you’re not dealing with a homicide. When you’re dealing with an apparent natural death or a suicide. That way the newbie investigator develops his chops. It looked like a suicide, so he was investigating it as if it was a suicide.
But what if it wasn’t?
A
fter Detective Balakian had been there for barely an hour and a half, the people from the medical examiner’s office zipped up Kayla’s body in a bag and took her away on a stretcher. I watched them do it, feeling numb.
They drained the tub first to make it easier to remove the body, the blood-tinged water leaving a brick-red residue. Spatters of her blood remained on the tub surround, the lip of the tub, the adjoining vanity.
My phone rang. I glanced at my watch: 12:30
A.M
.
Then I took out the phone and saw the caller ID and recognized the number. “Yes?” I said.
“Oh my God,” Mandy Seeger said in a hushed voice. “Is it true?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Kayla’s dead?”
“How—where did you hear this?”
“It’s on Slander Sheet.”
“
What?
” How was that even possible? But then I realized that Slander Sheet probably had tipsters in the Washington Metro police department. Hell, one of the tipsters could have been in this hotel room an
hour ago, a mobile crime scene tech or a uniformed officer, texting Slander Sheet on the sly, making a quick buck. I found SlanderSheet.com on my laptop, and there it was.
CALL GIRL WHO CLAIMED AFFAIR WITH HIGH COURT JUDGE TAKES HER OWN LIFE
The headline ran over a photo of Kayla, a.k.a. “Heidi,” from the Lily Schuyler website.
“I got a call a couple of minutes ago from Steve, my replacement,” she said. “He had some questions.”
“When?”
“Like fifteen minutes ago.”
“Who tipped him off?”
I was fairly certain that the only one in the room who knew the identity of the deceased besides me and Dorothy was Detective Balakian.
“Julian.”
“When?”
“Hold on, he e-mailed me first, before he called. Here it is, he forwarded an e-mail from Julian time-stamped eleven fifteen
P.M.
”
“Julian Gunn knew it was Kayla at eleven fifteen?”
“So?”
“Man, that’s barely fifteen minutes after the police got here.”
“Slander Sheet has sources everywhere,” she said.
M
andy Seeger arrived twenty minutes later. I’d asked her to come over. She’d said she couldn’t sleep, and I was wide-awake anyway. Dorothy had gone to bed.
She was wearing dark jeans and a black top and looked solemn. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
It was almost one in the morning.
“I don’t believe it,” she said, entering the suite and looking around curiously.
“You don’t believe what?”
“Kayla. I don’t believe she—committed suicide. I just don’t think she was the kind of person who’d kill herself. She was tough. She was a survivor. Maybe that’s why we hit it off.”
We sat in the living room of the suite. I’d closed the door to Kayla’s room. It didn’t seem right to be there anymore. A night manager had come an hour earlier and asked if it was okay if he had housekeeping service the room, or did they need the scene preserved? Detective Balakian said they had what they needed. So housekeeping would come in
the morning. Until then, Kayla’s blood remained splashed on the walls of the bathroom. And on the floor.
Mandy wanted details, and I gave them. She was silent for a long time after I finished.
I said, “Do you still have friends at Slander Sheet you can get in touch with?”
“I just got fired, Heller.”
“What was the reason Julian gave for firing you?”
“He was furious. He said I’d disgraced Slander Sheet
.
Like that’s even possible. I should have investigated the story even more thoroughly than I did, he said.”
“Wasn’t he the one pressuring you to get it out there?”
“He was. He just told me to pack up my cubicle and go. My e-mail and my cell phone were immediately cut off.”
“So who was pressuring
him
?”
“The S.O., I’m sure.”
“The . . . ‘S.O.’?”
“It’s a joke. That’s what we lowly employees called Slander Sheet’s shadowy owners. S.O. for ‘shadowy owners.’ Because no one knows who they are. It’s kept a deep dark secret.”
“Hunsecker Media, right?”
“Right, but they’re owned by some holding company, and that’s a black box.”
“There must have been rumors, at least.”
“Plenty of rumors. But nobody knew anything. Can we get some coffee? They must have room service in this joint.”
I picked up the phone, called room service, and asked for coffee for two.
When I’d hung up, I said, “How did this story first come to you?”
“Through Julian. He gave me Kayla’s phone number.”
“And you think he was fed the story by the owners?”
She nodded. “He never said. But it wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Does he have his own sources? Does he do any reporting?”
She shook her head. “None, and no. He’s not a reporter. He’s the ‘big picture’ guy.” She waggled two fingers on each hand to make scare quotes.
“I always assumed the whole story was cooked up by someone who wanted Claflin out. For political reasons. An enemy.”
“Maybe.”
“So maybe the shadowy owners are political opponents of Claflin.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t seem so sure.”
“Maybe politics had nothing to do with it. Maybe it was someone who didn’t like him personally.”
“Good point.”
“This story was a really big deal for Slander Sheet,” she said. “If it wasn’t for you, this story would have put us on the map.”
“And a big deal for you, personally.”
“More than you know.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s times like these that I really want a drink.”
“Happy to make you one.”
She shook her head. “I don’t drink anymore.”
“Okay.” I remembered she drank Diet Coke instead of beer at the bar a few days ago.
“It’s one in the morning and I’m still in shock, and maybe I should shut my mouth.”
“I get it. You’re on the wagon. Your drinking days are done. That have anything to do with your departure from the
Post
?”
“You think they canned me because I was a lush?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Okay.”
“But what’s the real story?”
She settled back in her chair and took a deep breath.
And I waited for her to lie to me. People always lie about why they left a job.
A personality conflict with my editor
, I figured she’d say, or
I couldn’t do the kind of pieces I wanted to
. Or,
I just like the tempo of the Internet better—it’s the future, right?
I wondered how she was going to spin it.
“The thing is,” she said, “I actually got fired.”
“But you were a star there. I don’t understand.”
“For a while, yeah. But then I went too far. I crossed the line a couple of times.”
“Crossed the line?”
“I got too aggressive on a couple of stories. One time I was working on a story about defense contractors and bribery and the Pentagon, and I pretended to be working for a defense contractor. And I offered the deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for acquisition a bribe. All a lie, of course. But she agreed to it.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah, you can’t do that at the
Post
. You can’t go undercover or pretend to be someone you’re not. You’re not allowed to lie. It’s a legal thing.”
I was surprised, pleasantly so. She’d got fired because she lied. And now she was telling me the truth about her having lied. I admired that. I nodded. “It’s always the lies that get you.”
“Yeah. Well. So they fired me. I guess I can’t blame them. But Slander Sheet didn’t have a problem with aggressive reporting. They didn’t care. They wanted a big name from the mainstream media, and that’s what they got.”
“You start drinking after you got fired?”
“Exactly. A lot. Starting when I got up in the morning. My mom’s an alcoholic, so it runs in the family. And I was afraid . . . I knew where this was going.”
There was a knock at the door. I peered through the peephole and opened the door for room service. The guy wheeled in a cart and put the tray on the dining table. I tipped him and poured coffee for both of us: black for me, cream for her.
“But I got help in time,” she went on. “I signed up with Slander Sheet, and then I joined AA. I figured a few big stories there would catapult me back into the mainstream. I was working on a couple of pieces, and then this Claflin story came along. And now look where I am. I’m washed up as a journalist. My career’s over. And it’s a little late to go to law school.”
“I’m sorry.” I hesitated—I didn’t mean to apologize for debunking Kayla’s story. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Need a researcher?”
She laughed, then I laughed. “You don’t want to work for me,” I said. “The boss is an asshole. But I wouldn’t mind taking a look at your Claflin files.”
She nodded. “Sure. At least Slander Sheet’s reputation has gone to shit. That’s some small consolation. So why do you think Kayla lied? Did someone pressure her?”
“Kayla told me she was offered a hundred thousand dollars in cash to lie about Claflin. Also they threatened to harm her sister in prison if she didn’t cooperate.”
“Christ,” she said, glancing at me, looking queasy. “She cooperated all right. She did a great job. She fooled me.”
“Is it possible the owners of Slander Sheet were behind this? That they were the ones who pressured Kayla to make this accusation, for whatever reason—and then had to cover it up?”
“It’s possible, yes. When you say ‘cover it up’ . . .”
“Made Kayla’s death look like suicide.”
“Wow,” she said. “You mean, did they have her killed? I guess I wouldn’t rule it out. Do the police think it was a suicide?”
“The homicide detective is a novice. This may even be the first homicide he’s investigated, I don’t know. And it looks like suicide, so he convinces himself it’s suicide. His mind is locked in to the suicide theory. He’s got tunnel vision. Confirmation bias. It happens all the time, especially with inexperienced detectives.”
“What makes
you
think it wasn’t suicide?” she asked.
“Because I talked to her a few hours earlier. And she wasn’t suicidal. And if it was murder, that’s on me. I’m the one who promised to protect her.”
She finished her cup of coffee and avoided my eyes. “That girl was a pawn. It breaks my heart.” A pause. “So, a question. What did you want me to come over for?”
“Because I want to find out who murdered Kayla Pitts and flush them out. I need someone who can help with the Slander Sheet end of things. I want to know who the shadowy owners are. And I wondered whether I could count on your help.”
She gave a half smile. “I’m here, aren’t I?”