A Minute to Midnight

by David Baldacci

  Wallis took out a photo. “Her prints matched. But I can show you this.”

  “Is she…?” said Clemmons fearfully, her eyes wide as quarters.

  “Yes. But it just looks like she’s sleeping.”

  He passed it across. Clemmons glanced at it for a second and then handed it back and nodded. “That’s her. That’s Hanna.” She looked like she might be sick.

  “I’m sorry,” said Wallis. “No one should have to die that way.”

  Clemmons let out three deep breaths and calmed.

  “You said she was strangled and left on the street in, what town again?”

  “Andersonville, Georgia.”

  “Had you or she ever been there?” asked Pine.

  Clemmons shook her head. “I’ve never even heard of it. I don’t think Hanna had been there before, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “Exactly how did you know her?” asked Wallis, his notebook and pen ready.

  “I won’t beat around the bush. We met when we were both employed as…escorts.” She eyed Wallis nervously.

  He caught the look and said quickly, “I’m investigating a murder, Ms. Clemmons. I have no interest in anything else. Nor do I plan on passing along anything you tell us to colleagues who might have jurisdiction over…escorts.”

  She nodded. “But the fact is we were no longer escorts. We were actors in film. I got into it first and then got Hanna involved. She had this incredibly exotic look to her. Different from the other girls. Facial bone structure I would die for. My looks are a dime a dozen, but not Hanna’s. She was going places.”

  “This is the adult film industry you’re talking about?” noted Blum.

  “Yes,” said Clemmons, a defiant look in her eyes.

  “But you can’t shoot porn films in Georgia,” said Wallis. “Can you?”

  Pine interjected, “The Supreme Court considers it free speech so long as everyone is over eighteen. You put a camera in the equation and pay everyone a wage and it’s art, not prostitution. But I don’t know specifically about Georgia’s laws.”

  “It doesn’t matter because we don’t film in Georgia,” said Clemmons. “We fly out to South Florida every two months, film for two weeks, and then come back here.”

  Wallis looked around at the richly appointed room. “How much does it pay?”

  “Well, it varies a lot depending on your name recognition, popularity, and experience. We both worked our way up. Hanna was making about three grand per film. And I was pulling in twenty-five hundred even though I started before her. That was the exotic look I was talking about. And we could shoot about a dozen films in two weeks.”

  “Twelve films in fourteen days?” exclaimed Blum.

  Clemmons nodded. “Well, it’s not Shakespeare. I mean, nobody’s getting an Oscar for this. The story lines are pretty basic and the dialogue, well, people don’t watch porn for the dialogue. Hair and makeup can take a couple of hours. But we typically use different rooms in the same house, so we don’t have to change locations. They bring the guys in for different segments. The cameraman moves around to get all the angles so we don’t have to stop and keep setting up new shots. It happens pretty efficiently.”

  “So Hanna was making thirty-six grand for a half month’s work?” said Wallis.

  “Well, I would imagine it’s pretty grueling work,” said Pine.

  “It definitely can be,” said Clemmons, giving her an appreciative smile.

  “Right, right,” Wallis said uncomfortably. He cleared his throat. “Now when was the last time you saw Ms. Rebane?”

  “Four days ago. We were planning to return in a week for more filming. We used to spend more time together here, but we’ve sort of gone our separate ways of late. I mean, we’re still friends and all. And we obviously still lived together.”

  “How long have you lived together?” asked Pine.

  “For about two years now. Most of it here. We bought this condo together.”

  Wallis said, “So you last saw her four days ago? Where was this?”

  “We had a late lunch together at a place about a mile from here. After that I went to my boyfriend’s place for the night. I got back the next afternoon.”

  Wallis asked, “Do you know who her other friends were? Did she mention having a boyfriend, someone new in her life?”

  “She didn’t have a boyfriend, at least that I knew of. She didn’t really have many friends.”

  “But you said just now that the two of you have gone your separate ways, so you may not know about a boyfriend,” pointed out Blum.

  “That’s true.”

  “And was there a reason for the two of you going your separate ways?” asked Pine.

  Clemmons looked uncomfortable and didn’t answer.

  “Ms. Clemmons, if you know something that could help us…?” prompted Wallis.

  “Just call me Beth, please.” She sighed and kneaded her thighs with her fists. “Hanna had gotten a little weird as of late.”

  “Weird how, Beth?” asked Pine.

  “She was withdrawn, secretive. She even told me she was thinking of getting out of the business altogether. She actually told me that at our lunch.”

  “Did she say why, or what she was planning to do instead?” asked Wallis.

  “Not really. But, well, it seemed that someone was influencing her.” She smiled in an embarrassed fashion. “She was beautiful and all, but it wasn’t like Hanna was any great thinker or anything. She lived day to day. She was only twenty-seven. She didn’t have her whole life mapped out. She was carefree, enjoying what she had.” She looked around the spacious, light-filled room. “She loved all of this. She grew up really poor overseas.”

  “She was from Estonia,” said Pine.

  “I didn’t know that, she never said. Only that she wasn’t born here. You could tell that by her accent. It was kind of thick. It was hard to understand her sometimes.”

  “She had a lengthy criminal record,” said Wallis. “Solicitation, drugs.”

  “That was years ago,” she said defensively. “She’d been clean for a long time. And we were making a lot more money from film than we ever did—” She caught herself and fell silent.

  “The postmortem showed that she was still using drugs, Beth,” Pine said. “Coke, meth, it was pretty obvious. I can’t imagine you could live with her and not know this.”

  Pine glanced at the woman’s bare arms. She had already noted they were free of needle tracks. But there was something.…

  “Beth?” prompted Pine.

  “We were both in rehab together,” she blurted out. “Okay? She was clean. For a while. Then she fell back into bad ways. I was all over her case about it, but I couldn’t get through to her. And she could still do the work, but…”

  “Maybe someone came into her life to convince her to change what she was doing,” said Blum quietly, keeping her gaze on Clemmons. “Someone recent. Someone who got her to go down the bad path again?”

  “Maybe someone did. But she never mentioned anyone like that to me.”

  “Had she ever spoken of getting married?” asked Pine.

  Clemmons’s large eyes widened. “Married? No, nothing like that. Why?”

  “Just checking all the boxes. Did she ever show an interest in looking at wedding gowns or veils?”

  “No, never.”

  “Did you know that she had had a child?” asked Wallis.

  Beth looked stunned by this statement. “What? Oh my God, are you serious?”

  “The postmortem showed that as well.”

  “She, no, never. I had no idea. Jesus, that is so.…” Her voice faltered and she started to bite at one of her cuticles.

  “Does she have any relations that need to be notified?” asked Wallis.

  “Not that she ever said. No family ever visited here. Certainly no child.”

  “Can we look around her room?” asked Wallis.

  “I guess so. It’s right down here.”

  Clemmons led them to Reban
e’s bedroom, and then walked back down the hall.

  The three of them gazed around at the large bedroom with an attached bathroom.

  Pine briefly thought of the woman who would never be coming back here and then her focus snapped back to the business at hand.

  “Well, let’s get to it.”

  Chapter 22

  AN HOUR LATER Pine sat on the bed and watched as Blum and Wallis continued their search through the belongings and life of a dead woman named Hanna Rebane.

  Wallis came out of the bathroom and shook his head. “Not much here,” he said.

  Blum closed the last drawer in the walk-in closet and came back out. “She had some designer clothes, shoes, and purses,” noted Blum. “The real things, no knockoffs.”

  “But no phone, although there’s a phone charger over there for it,” said Pine, pointing at a small desk built into the wall by the bed, where a power cord was plugged into the outlet.

  “If she took her phone, why not take the charger?” said Wallis.

  “Maybe she didn’t think she would be gone long enough to need it,” replied Pine. “If she wasn’t planning to be gone overnight, she wouldn’t take her power cord. There have to be exterior cameras around this place. Let’s have them pull the footage and see if it shows her coming and going and when. And more importantly whether anyone was with her.”

  They walked back into the other room, where Clemmons was drinking a cup of tea.

  While Wallis went to check with the building security about any surveillance footage, Pine and Blum sat down across from the visibly distraught woman.

  “Did Hanna have a car?” asked Pine.

  “No. Neither did I. If we needed to go somewhere we’d use Uber or Lyft, or a Zipcar for anything longer than just one ride. We could walk to everything we needed. That’s why we picked this building to live in.”

  “The way of the millennials,” noted Blum. “When I got my license at sixteen the first thing I did was start saving for my own car.”

  “So if she left here, she would have taken a car ride service?” asked Pine.

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t seen her phone?”

  “No. She must have taken it with her.”

  “Did she have a laptop or an iPad or something like that?”

  “No, just her phone. She used that for everything.”

  “We can still check into her account to find out if she was picked up by a service,” said Pine while glancing at Blum. “And we can try to track her by her cell phone signal.” She refocused on Clemmons. “Didn’t you worry when your friend didn’t come home? Did you file a missing persons report?”

  “No. I mean, Hanna would go off before. Three, four days, and then she’d come back safe and sound.”

  “Did she tell you where she was going during these times?”

  “No, and I didn’t want to pry.”

  “Was she strung out when she came back?”

  Clemmons looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Had she been going away the whole time you lived here or was it something recent?”

  “It was the last month or so that she started going out and staying somewhere else. Although she was free to bring anybody here. I’ve brought my boyfriends over to stay before. It was no big deal.”

  “And she never mentioned a boyfriend? No pictures on her phone?”

  “No.”

  “Social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any of the others?”

  “She used to do that stuff, but not for the last six months or so. Neither one of us do Facebook anymore. She did Instagram, but she hasn’t posted anything for a long time.”

  “Did she give a reason for that?”

  “No and I never asked. I mean, some people just get sick of doing it all the time. And it’s not like we have a zillion Instagram followers and could make money off it by putting our pictures on there or endorsing some product or other. We’re not like the Kardashians or anything.”

  “Do you have any theories for what might have happened to Hanna?”

  Her eyes welled with tears. “No, I wish I did. She was really nice. And I can’t understand why anyone would want to hurt her.”

  Pine said firmly, “Well, it might be a good thing that you can’t understand people who would do this sort of thing. Because it’s a pretty dark place.”

  This comment drew a sharp glance from Blum.

  “I…I guess,” said Clemmons, rubbing her eyes.

  “So other than her telling you she wanted to leave the adult film business when you two had lunch, did anything seem off about her that you noticed? Was she tense, unfocused? Did she seem scared?”

  “No, not really. We just had lunch and that was it. I was surprised that she was giving up such a great gig, but I can understand it. I plan on doing it for maybe two more years and then I’m going to nursing school. There’s a shortage.”

  “Good for you,” said Blum. “And a much better way to spend your life.”

  “I hope you’re not judging my decisions,” Clemmons said, frowning.

  “I could lie and say I’m not, but everyone always judges everyone else’s decisions. My mother was the queen of that.”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  “I could very well be your mother. And I’m sure she wants you to be happy and safe. And like it or not, a career in nursing is safer and healthier than one in adult films, at least if you look at the statistics.”

  “But the money is so good.”

  “Of course it is, Beth. That’s the whole point. But would you rather be helping a child get well, or help a male actor get off?”

  “You’re very blunt.”

  “I’ve lived long enough to know when politeness is required and when directness gets me to where I need to go. I do wish you the best of luck.”

  Pine rose and so did Blum. Pine handed Clemmons a business card and said, “Anything else occurs to you, please let me know.”

  Clemmons looked down at the card. “And you’ll let me know when you catch whoever did this?”

  “We will,” said Pine. She knelt down to tie her shoelaces, rose, glanced inscrutably at Blum, and then they left.

  * * *

  They met back up with Wallis in the lobby. He looked excited.

  “They do have exterior cameras here. I got them to pull what they have. They have a little room in back for us to watch it. I asked the concierge if he had ever known of a guy visiting Rebane, but he didn’t. The same for the security guard on duty. I asked them to check with their counterparts to see if they ever had. And we’ll canvass her neighbors with the same question.”

  He led them to a room at the rear of the lobby where a uniformed security guard was at a control board. Wallis gave him the date parameters and the man loaded the info onto the system.

  They stood behind him and watched the TV monitor on the board come to life.

  An hour later Pine saw it first. “There, coming out the front door. Freeze that.”

  The guard hit a key on the board, and the picture they were looking at stopped right there.

  Wallis eyed the time stamp on the side of the frame. “That was probably the night her roommate was staying at her boyfriend’s.”

  “Let it run now,” said Pine.

  The guard did so, and they all watched Hanna Rebane walk out the front doors of the building and move out of range of the cameras. She encountered no other person on the way.

  “She’s dressed like she’s going on a date,” noted Blum, who peered closely at the image. “Designer dress, handbag, and shoes that don’t look like knockoffs.”

  Wallis stared at her. “You can tell all that from the video? That’s impressive.”

  Blum glanced at him. “You just have to know what to look for, Detective. Plus, she had all those designers in her closet.”

  They watched the film for a long time.

  However, Hanna Rebane never came back.

  Chapter 23

&nbs
p; IT WAS QUITE LATE as they drove to Andersonville in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts. Pine stared out the window at countryside she had seen only decades ago as a child. It was beautiful land: open fields intermingled with large stands of pine and oak trees. And yet there was an isolation here, which meant a great deal of criminal activity could flourish without serious challenge.

  And it did flourish that night in Andersonville with no challenge at all.

  Wallis dropped them off at the Cottage and promised that he would see if there were any other surveillance cameras near the apartment building that might pick up where the visuals around Rebane’s residence had left off.

  “In addition to canvassing her neighbors, you also need to get a tech team over there to dust for prints and collect other traces,” Pine had told him. “Whoever she might have been seeing could have visited her there when Clemmons was away. If he’s in the system, it would be a shortcut to find out who he is. That and checking her cell phone or credit card activity and seeing if their locations can be traced.”

  “Right.”

  After Wallis drove off the two women walked into the empty breakfast room and sat down opposite each other.

  “Well?” asked Blum.

  “Did you believe everything Clemmons told us?”

  “Of course not. I never believe anything anyone tells me until it’s corroborated. FBI 101. But do you have anything in particular you’re thinking about?”

  “She lied about the drug use.”

  “You nailed her on that.”

  “I meant her own drug use.”

  “Come again?”

  “She injects between her toes. When I went down to ‘tie’ my shoelaces, I noticed it.”

  “You must have suspected she was a user if you employed that sort of subterfuge.”

  “Her edginess was natural today, but it struck me as a little over the top, meaning chemically turbocharged.”

  “Her eyes weren’t dilated. I checked.”

  “No, they were pinpricks. Which means she was either on an opiate like Oxycodone, or maybe morphine or heroin.”

  “It’s a wonder she was able to function. Those aren’t lightweight drugs.”

  “I would imagine she’s built up a tolerance,” said Pine grimly. “She might have taken a quick hit to prepare for meeting us.”