“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.
63
Dorothy 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.”
64
Ellen Wiley’s pied-à-terre in Washington was on N Street in Georgetown, a handsome Federal-style town house, redbrick with black shutters. The door was answered by a maid in a uniform of gray dress and white cuffs and bib apron. She took me to Ellen, who was sitting in a high-back tufted wing chair in her library, just off the front hallway. The room was lined with books, floor to ceiling. She was talking on a landline phone. She was wearing a black skirt with a white silk blouse cut low enough to show the cleft of her tanned bosom, and a string of pearls.
“But that’s just it,” she was saying, “he has no idea.” She let out a whooping laugh. “Exactly.” She saw me, smiled, and waved me into a nearby chair. “Sweetie, I have to go, I have a visitor.” She paused. “Yes, a gentleman caller.” She laughed again and hung up.
“There he is, Nick Heller!” she announced. “You’re here a full hour early. He’s not coming until eleven.”
We had arranged for me to come by her house at ten, so I just nodded and said, “This shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, then I’ll be gone.”
“Jorge,” she called out, “can you bring this gentleman some coffee?” To me she said, “He makes the best sticky buns.”
“Not for me, thanks.”
“Are you sure? They’re still warm. If I can’t have them, at least my visitors can.”
“Do you plan to meet him in here?”
“Sure, here or in the front sitting room.”
“I’m going to need you to decide now where you’ll meet him.”
“Oh, heavens, then right here.”
“Okay.” I took out from my pocket an infinity transmitter, a small black GSM bug a couple of inches square. I’d already inserted a cell phone SIM card into it. “It would help if you decided now where you’re going to sit.”
“Ooh, spy stuff. I’ll sit right here. He can sit where you’re sitting.”
“Okay, great.” I looked around. The closest power outlet was some distance away. On the table between the two chairs was a brass lamp. I lifted it up. No room under the base. No drawer in the table. “I’m going to put it under the cushion in your chair. You’ll sit there, right?”
“Honey, I don’t even have to move. Do I have to do anything with it?”
“Ignore it. I’ll call into it just before he arrives, and it’ll go right into transmission mode. I’ll be listening in from my cell phone in my car.”
“Anything you want me to ask him?”
“All I care about is that you seem genuinely interested in hiring Centurion Associates. That you have serious security concerns. The more complicated, the better. Maybe you have a stalker who won’t go away. They pride themselves on being able to handle difficult cases. Just be a tough customer.”
“Oh, that I can do,” she said. There was a flash in her eyes, and she gave a fierce smile, and I realized that I wouldn’t want to negotiate a contract with her.
—
I’d rented a silver Chrysler 200 because it was the most inconspicuous, anonymous-looking car I could find. I’d parked it across the street from Ellen Wiley’s town house and about a hundred feet down the block.
I sat there and waited. The traffic on N Street was two-way, but it was light. At ten minutes before eleven, a white Cadillac Escalade pulled up to the curb in front of Wiley’s house, slowed, and then moved ahead seventy-five feet or so and parallel parked. I took out my binoculars and focused on the vehicle. I saw two men in the Escalade, the driver and a passenger.
This had to be Thomas Vogel, accompanied by someone from Centurion Associates.
They were early. They knew who Ellen Wiley was and knew she represented an excellent business opportunity.
I continued to watch them through the binoculars. I could see the passenger talking to the driver. The body language indicated that Thomas Vogel was the passenger, talking to a subordinate.
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