I
spent the night.
You never know the etiquette, after you sleep with a woman. If you leave right away, you’re no better than a dog. But not all women want to wake up with a man in their bed.
We snuggled together, and I fell asleep, and I awoke sometime later to discover that it was early morning, though still dark. I got up quietly so as not to wake her and padded into her living room area where she kept the accordion file of her sources, her story leads.
The file was filled with tantalizing rumors. I pored through it. At one point I made coffee—she had a complicated Swedish coffee machine that took some figuring out—and when I was searching her cabinets for a cup, Mandy appeared. She was wearing the lacy panties she’d had on the night before, and a white tank top.
“Mmm. Could you pour me some, too?”
“Of course.”
“The mugs are in the cabinet to the right of the stove.”
“Good morning,” I said, taking down two mugs. I took the one that had
The
Washington Post
logo on it, in case it spurred bad memories, and gave
her the one with the WAMU logo on it, the local NPR affiliate. The coffee was delicious. She got some milk from the refrigerator, offered it to me, and when I demurred she poured some into her mug. She took a sip.
“I enjoyed that,” she said after a while. I knew she didn’t mean the coffee.
“So did I.”
“I hope you don’t mind my asking: Are you involved with someone?”
I shook my head.
“Back home in Boston, I mean. Are you sure?”
“As far as I know.”
“I was actually engaged.”
“To who?”
“A lawyer at WilmerHale.”
“It is Washington, after all. The odds are good you’d end up with a lawyer.”
“We broke up around the time I got fired from the
Post
. That was another thing my drinking screwed up.”
“Maybe it was just as well.”
“He was a really nice guy.”
“Then I’m sorry.”
“He wasn’t very interesting. But he put up with me, which is no minor consideration.”
There was a long pause. Maybe she wanted to trade ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend stories. But I didn’t do that. I patted the accordion file. “Thanks for this.”
“Find anything?”
“You’re a really good reporter.”
“Is there a ‘but’?”
“You were working for a shitty website. But you’re a reporter of an extremely high caliber.”
“You already got into my pants, Heller. You don’t have to be so nice.”
I didn’t laugh. Quietly, I said: “I think you were targeted.”
“Targeted how?”
“I think you were given that Claflin story deliberately.”
“I don’t . . . follow.”
“You were given a big story that was guaranteed to self-destruct. Just solid enough to withstand fact-checking by a smart journalist, like you. But with hidden fissures so that a high-powered investigator, with enough resources, would be able to take it down. Someone really determined.”
“Like you.”
“Like me.”
“Meaning I got played.”
“Maybe we both got played.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I think you played your role and I played mine.”
“Both of us? Why?”
“Because someone wanted you to stumble and fall.”
“Who in the world cares enough about me to try to destroy me? That doesn’t make sense, Heller. I’m just a journalist. Who’d been fired from
The
Washington Post
. Working for a bottom-feeding website. Who would even
bother
?”
“You knew something. You had something. You had to be discredited. You and Slander Sheet both. The Claflin story was a booby-trap. A butterfly mine. You pick it up, and it blows up in your hands.”
“Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
“Perfectly. Whoever they were, they knew what they were doing.”
“I’ll play along. What were they so afraid of?”
“Well, let’s think about what you were working on.”
“Stories for Slander Sheet?”
I nodded.
“Half a dozen, maybe more. The chief of staff at the White House—”
“With the shoplifting wife?”
“Right.”
“What else?”
“There’s a B and D club in Washington, and it’s rumored that a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff belongs.”
“B and D as in bondage and discipline?”
“Right.”
“Did you have a name?”
“Members of the club wouldn’t talk to me. So, no.”
“You said something about a retired cop on his deathbed, something like that? A homicide by some Washington bigwig that was covered up?”
“Right. The Senator Brennan thing.”
“How sure are you that it involved drunk driving?”
“Not sure at all. That was just my working theory.”
“How sure are you that it involved Brennan?”
“That was just a theory, too.”
I was silent. “Maybe it’s that.”
“Or the B and D club. Or any of a dozen stories I did.”
“Possibly, yes.”
“And maybe your speculation is wrong and I wasn’t targeted.”
“True.”
“Maybe they were targeting Slander Sheet, and I was accidental collateral.”
I remembered that Kayla said she was told to ask for Mandy specifically. “I’d say both you and Slander Sheet
,
at the same time.”
“Still sounds like a stretch,” Mandy said.
“Didn’t it ever strike you that it was a little too easy?”
“What was?”
“What I was hired to do. Disprove the Claflin story you were doing for Slander Sheet. It should have been harder.”
“How do you mean?”
“Look at it from their point of view.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Whoever was trying to bring Claflin down. They go to the trouble of booking hotel rooms at the Hotel Monroe in Claflin’s name. They actually have someone show up at the hotel and pretend to be him and check in. And then they don’t bother actually going into the room. What’s that all about?”
“They didn’t know the hotel’s keycard system kept track.”
I shook my head. “I wonder. Then two of the nights Kayla was supposed to have met with Claflin she was actually in Mississippi.”
“So?”
“We found out about the flights by getting into her laptop. But there are other ways we could have learned she flew to Mississippi to visit her sister. We could have gotten into her credit cards some other way. If I were trying to set Claflin up, I wouldn’t have picked a couple of nights when she was
provably
out of town.”
She looked at me for a few seconds. “You have a very conspiratorial turn of mind, anyone ever tell you that?”
“All the time,” I said.
D
orothy was awake and working at the dining table in the suite’s living room when I returned to the hotel with two coffees from Starbucks. I handed her one.
“Cream, two sugars, right?”
“Thank you,” she said, taking it. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said,
JESUS IS MY
ROCK
AND THAT’S HOW I
ROLL. “How was it?” She gave a cryptic little smile.
I had a feeling Dorothy was deliberately being ambiguous. Poking at me. She knew I’d spent the night with Mandy. She wasn’t stupid. But I decided to ignore it. “It was interesting,” I said. “I don’t think Ellen Wiley was involved. Scratch that theory. But she wants to help us out.”
“She does? Why?”
“She likes the cut of my jib.”
Dorothy shook her head, as if to say, I don’t know what you’re talking about and I’m not going to ask.
“I traced the tail number,” she said.
“Tail number?” I’d forgotten what she was talking about.
“At the Middleton airport. The plane they were about to take Kayla away on.”
“Right, sorry.”
“It was a 900EX Falcon jet, made by Dassault, and it’s owned by Centurion Associates Inc.”
“Great. What about an address?”
“Just a PO box number in Langley, Virginia.”
“Langley, huh?” That was where the CIA was located. “Was there an address on the Centurion Associates website?”
“There is no Centurion Associates website.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if you go to CenturionAssociates.com, you get a 404 error. ‘The page you’re requesting is not found.’”
“Maybe it’s a different domain name.”
“No, that’s it. I ran a WhoIs search on it, and it’s registered. It’s a valid domain name.”
“So who’s it registered to?”
“All the registration information is hidden. It’s registered to Domains by Proxy.”
“So can you hack into it?”
She shook her head. “There’s nothing to hack into.”
“I’d call that low profile.”
“As far as I can tell, they don’t have an office either. Just a PO box.”
“Interesting. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I left the Rubber Ducky behind on that job.”
She exhaled. “Okay. If they find it, which might take a while, there’s nothing on there tying it back to us.”
“Sorry about that.”
She shrugged. “It happens. They’re cheap. No big deal.”
“I should get dressed. Detective Balakian wants to see me.”
“The homicide detective?”
I nodded.
“I thought he’d concluded it was a suicide.”
“Maybe they’re having second thoughts.”
“New information?”
“That’s what I want to know.”
—
Detective Balakian was wearing the same outfit as last time, the white shirt with the skinny black tie, and I wondered if his wardrobe was limited. Or maybe he’d found his look and wanted to stick with it. He met me at the front desk of the police station, a converted old elementary school, and brought me to an interview room on the first floor.
There were four chairs at a rectangular table. He pointed to the one he wanted me to sit in.
“Is this being videotaped?” I asked.
“Do you have any objection?”
“No. I just like to know.”
“Thanks. It’s a lot less work than typing it up. Thanks for coming in.” He sounded much more conciliatory than the night of Kayla’s murder. Something had obviously changed.
“Sure,” I said, instead of what I was thinking:
You didn’t exactly give me a choice.
“Coffee?”
“No thanks.”
He sat in one of the other chairs and took out a small spiral-bound notebook. After a long pause, he said, “Why were you so convinced Kayla Pitts may have been a homicide victim?”
Now, finally, he was taking this case seriously. “Because I talked to her a few hours before her death. I told you that.”
“Nothing else you might have heard?”
I shook my head. “I thought you decided it was a suicide.”
“Toxicology came back.”
“And?”
He hesitated. He took a drink of something brownish in a mug that was too light to be coffee. “There was a powerful sedative in her system.”
“Ketamine,” I said.
“Rohypnol, actually.”
“Roofie. I thought tox results take weeks.”
“We put a rush on it.”
“Ah.” Like he had the juice to do that. It must have been all the news stories that had put pressure on the MPD, convinced someone at the top to expedite it.
He knew I’d fixed a drink for Kayla, and giving someone a drink is the standard way to roofie somebody. So I wanted to make sure he could rule me out as a suspect. “You’ve got the contents of the hotel wastebasket,” I said. “Run a tox assay on the remnants.”
“Already did,” Balakian said. “Trust but verify, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“You said she called you and asked for your help, the night of her death. Why’d she ask for you?”
We’d already been over this. Was he trying to catch me in an inconsistency? “We met after I tracked her down. She decided she trusted me. She knew I was an outsider, not with the people who were kidnaping her.”
“That was the only time you two had met?”
“Right.”
“You said she was being taken somewhere against her will. You don’t know where?”
“Right.”
“She didn’t know?”
“She didn’t.”
“And you don’t know who her would-be kidnappers were?”
“I have a pretty good idea. The tail number on their plane traces to a company called Centurion Associates of Langley, Virginia.”
“The security firm.”
“Is that what they are?”
He ignored my question. “Why didn’t you tell me this when we spoke at the hotel?”
“I didn’t know. We just found out.”
He said nothing.
“Can I ask a question or two?”
“Go ahead,” he said unenthusiastically.
“Have you looked at the hotel’s surveillance tapes?”
“Closely. There’s not a lot of them. Nothing in the elevators, nothing on the guest floors. This is a hotel that values its guests’ privacy more than their safety. You can enter the hotel and head right for the elevator bank without being captured on video.”
“What about the service entrance?”
“There’s cameras there. But we don’t find anyone entering there and taking the elevators up during that time period.”
“What about the call she placed at eight forty-seven?”
“That went to a disposable cell phone. Which doesn’t help us at all.”
“Look, can we speak frankly?” I said.
“That’s not what we’ve been doing?”
“You said it yourself, this looked like a ‘textbook’ suicide. The slit wrists and throat, the bathtub, the hesitation marks. Then there’s the Rohypnol. Did she take it as a recreational drug? Most likely she was given a roofie to make her cooperate when they killed her, while she bled out.”
He nodded.
“Whoever did this knows what a homicide investigator looks for.”
He said nothing.
“This was a ‘suicide’ staged by a former cop, maybe even a former homicide detective.”
“That’s a wild allegation.”
“No, it’s a theory. One you should take seriously.”
“Let’s say I did. How does this help solve her murder?”
“It points to Centurion Associates. Apparently Centurion is staffed by ex-MPD cops.”
“And you think one of them killed Kayla Pitts.”
“Like I said, it’s a theory.”
“Huh,” Balakian said. For the first time he didn’t bat my suggestion away. “You may have something here.”