Guilty Minds

by Joseph Finder

  I hit the speed dial number on my phone for Mandy Seeger.

  “Nick,” she answered. “You back at the hotel?”

  “But you’re not here.”

  “I had work to do. Where my work stuff is. My little home office.”

  “I need you to transport your work stuff over here. Just until we’re done.”

  “How do you define done?”

  “Until we get an arrest in Kayla’s murder.” I thought, if Kombucha was on the right track, that could be soon. But I didn’t want to tell her yet. Not until I talked to Kombucha.

  “I think you and I are working on different things. I want to know who was behind this Claflin hoax that snared me. Who hired the Centurions.”

  “We may never know that.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  I smiled with admiration. “Listen. I don’t think it’s safe for you to be out there investigating.”

  “Safe? Who’s talking about safe? I didn’t go into this line of work to be safe.”

  I heaved a long sigh. I thought: soft target. That was the phrase Vogel had used. Guys like us, we take care of the sheep. We protect them and make sure they live quiet, safe lives.

  “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying,” I said. “Vogel’s people have already killed one person, and I honestly don’t think they’ll hesitate to kill another one if they decide they need to.”

  She was silent for a few seconds. “And you think they’re following me?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. I’ll bet they’ve set up tripwires out there. Certain people, if you go and visit them, talk to them, a wire gets tripped, a bell goes off somewhere, and the Centurions go into action.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you to admit defeat.”

  “I’m not. I’m not giving up.” I hesitated, and then said it: “I’m talking about you. I can take care of myself.”

  “About me.”

  “Right.”

  “Is this—Heller, is this because of last night?”

  “Of course not. It’s because you’ve been at the center of this thing since the beginning, which makes it dangerous for you if you stick your head up.” But was it, at least in part, about last night? I couldn’t ignore what I felt for her. That had to factor in. Would I be as protective of her if we hadn’t been intimate? I didn’t know. Maybe not.

  But I knew what I knew, and I knew that Vogel’s people were dangerous and probably knew no limits, and that she was a soft target.

  “Nick, I’ve been threatened before. But in the end, you don’t go after a journalist. You don’t kill a reporter. That just doesn’t happen.”

  I happened to know for a fact that she was wrong. I knew of several journalists who were killed investigating big financial scandals. I hesitated, considered whether to say anything, and finally said, “It does happen, Mandy. It has happened, and it could happen. Don’t be foolish.”

  “Jesus, Heller. Now you’re trying to scare me off?”

  I was afraid she’d take it this way. Telling her about a genuine threat to her life was making her even more defiant.

  “Let me pick you up. You can do whatever work you want to do here.”

  “No.”

  “All right, look. If you really insist on interviewing people, at least let me go with you.”

  “Are you serious? Like I need a bodyguard?”

  “Would my presence be that odious to you?”

  She laughed.

  I said, “Think of it as teaming up.”

  “No, you know how I think of it? You want to chaperone me everywhere like I’m some Saudi woman, that’s what it is. It’s ridiculous. And I don’t want any part of that.”

  “At the very least will you agree to work over here?”

  “Yes. I’ll do that for you.”

  “Great, let me pick you up.”

  “No need. I’ll be over there soon. When I’m ready.”

  “Okay,” I said, because I knew it wouldn’t do any good to push it further. No sense in being overbearing. “I’ll see you over here.”

  Looking back on that day, it pains me to admit that I should have been more insistent, more overbearing, refused to take no for an answer.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t.

  69

  Art Garvin called me back about an hour later.

  “All the MPD has on Tom Vogel is a PO box.”

  “Where?”

  “Thurmont, Maryland.”

  “Shit. No street address?”

  “No. Nothing. Buddy of mine who used to hang out some with Vogel says he built his house himself. He’s some kind of gifted carpenter. It’s big—he called it a compound. It’s out in the woods, sort of a remote location.”

  I thanked him and hung up. Half an hour later, I met Balakian at a hipster coffee shop on H Street in a part of Northeast called the Atlas District. Indie rock on the speakers, exposed brick, and not a lot of seating. He was already at a table drinking something light brown in a bottle. I ordered black coffee, which seemed to disappoint the bearded barista, who probably wanted to draw a fern pattern in the foam of a cappuccino.

  “Kombucha?” I said with a smile as I sat down with my coffee. I could smell the skunky odor of rotten oranges wafting from his cup, and I wrinkled my nose.

  “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” he said. He was wearing a tweedy checked jacket with a vest and a dark blue shirt and a scarf around his neck. “So, dude, I owe you an apology.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “We found a print.”

  “Where?”

  “On a piece of broken glass.”

  “The wineglass?”

  He nodded. “I went back to the MCL and asked them to look for prints, just in case. So they took the broken pieces of the wineglass from the bathroom and processed them in the superglue fuming chamber. Pulled up a couple of partials and ran ’em through NGI.” NGI, for Next Generation Identification Program, was the turbocharged successor to the old national criminal fingerprint database, IAFIS.

  “And you got a match.”

  “Right.”

  “Who?”

  “One of ours. A retired MPD sergeant named Richard Rasmussen.”

  I shrugged. I’d never heard the name before. “Let me guess. He works for Centurion Associates.”

  He scratched his little beard and sipped his drink. He said nothing. My phone vibrated in my pocket.

  “You have a print on what could be the murder weapon,” I said. “Isn’t that enough? Did you bring him in for questioning yet?”

  “I think it’s enough. I wrote out an affidavit. It’s on my lieutenant’s desk.”

  “When does it become an arrest warrant?”

  “The lieutenant has to approve it, then it goes to the US attorney’s office, then it goes before a judge.”

  “So you might not get an arrest warrant after all.”

  “Might not. Anyway, I’m still circling. Part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “What do you want to know? I mean, I don’t know the guy—never heard his name before.”

  “You’re doing sort of a parallel investigation. What’s your take on how it went down?”

  “My take? The girl was paid to make a false accusation against Justice Jeremiah Claflin. To claim they had a sexual relationship.”

  “Paid by the Centurions?”

  “That I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Then paid by whom?”

  “I’m working on that. She said it was an ‘organization of businessmen’ that paid her, that’s all she knew.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I think the Centurions were brought in at first to protect her, to keep her from talking to anyone. Then to deal with her. First they tried to get her out of Washingt
on, but I got in the way. They were afraid she’d start talking to me, I assume. She’d become a problem that had to be eliminated.”

  “So why did she start talking in the first place?”

  “I asked her questions. That was how it started. And she was scared. Maybe she felt bad about what she’d done. She had a conscience. Or maybe it wasn’t conscience at all. Maybe she was just scared she’d been caught in a falsehood. Whatever the reason, she started talking, and she had to be silenced.”

  “And they staged it to look like a suicide.”

  “Not too badly either. It convinced you for a while, right?” My phone kept vibrating. “Any luck on the call she placed from the room phone?”

  “Yeah. She called a friend. I guess she just wanted to talk. She was scared.”

  “And when she opened the door, at nine thirty-six?”

  “Who knows. Rasmussen, probably. Maybe he said it was hotel security. Or the night manager. Or any of a number of things he could have said to get her to open the door. But open it she did. Then he left at ten twenty-five, when he was done.”

  He took another sip of the vile brew. I pulled out the phone and glanced at it. Mandy.

  “If you have Rasmussen’s print,” I said, “why are you still circling? Why not at least bring the guy in for questioning?”

  “Frankly, because I’m getting heat.”

  “From . . . ?”

  “My bosses. My sergeant wants this case closed—he doesn’t want me to keep stirring it up. He doesn’t want another murder on the books. I’m facing a lot of ridicule for persisting.”

  “So why are you?”

  “It’s . . . something just doesn’t feel right about this case.”

  “Is that why you wanted to meet outside police headquarters?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know how . . . extensive the Centurions’ reach is.”

  “Within homicide branch.”

  He nodded, looked away for a beat. “There’s a reason why I caught this case. And just me, solo.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I’m a novice. They didn’t expect me to push too hard. They knew I wouldn’t make waves. And they could hang me out to dry if it came to that.”

  “And who’s ‘they’?”

  He shook his head. “I know how it sounds. Paranoid or something. But . . . here’s the thing. Somewhere between the lab and evidence control at the property division, the evidence got ‘misplaced.’”

  “The shards of glass?”

  “Right.” He opened both his hands, turned them up. “No one can locate it.”

  “How often does that happen—that crucial evidence gets ‘lost’?”

  “Once in a while.”

  “Not very often, I expect. Does that screw the case?”

  “It’s a problem, but not devastating. The shards were photographed on the scene and the fingerprints were recovered and kept separately. If it goes to court, the defense will probably raise a stink, but it shouldn’t make a difference.”

  “So why are you still pushing? Didn’t you get the memo? The case is closed. It was a suicide.”

  He shrugged, shook his head. “It’s not right.”

  “You know the name Thomas Vogel?”

  “Of course. The Centurions.”

  My phone vibrated again. I took it out. It was Mandy. “Do you mind?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I answered it. “Hey, Mandy.”

  “Heller,” she said. “I’ve got something.”

  I heard traffic noise in the background. “Where are you?”

  “Southeast. Anacostia. I just talked to that old cop.”

  “Mandy, I told you, I don’t want you out there—”

  But she spoke right over me. “Remember the retired police detective in Southeast? This old guy who says he covered up a homicide years ago?” I remembered: the story she was investigating just before the Kayla story broke, about some big-name Washington player. “Well, you were right. And now I understand why I had to be discredited. With that phony Claflin story.”

  “The homicide—who was it?”

  She told me.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said, her voice suddenly loud and sharp. “Excuse me, what do you think you’re—?”

  “Mandy, you okay?”

  “Hey!” she shouted. The phone made funny jumbled, crunchy sounds, as if it was hitting the ground.

  “Mandy? Hello?”

  But there was no reply.

  70

  I called Mandy back repeatedly, but each time it went right to voice mail, as if the phone had been shut off.

  Something had happened to her.

  Balakian was looking at me, alarmed. “Huh?” he said. “What’s going on, Heller?”

  I explained. “I’m going to need your help,” I said. “I need you to ping her phone. I don’t have the resources to do that.”

  “Man,” he said. He shook his head, looked rattled. “I can do that, sure. But what if the phone’s off? Or smashed?”

  “That’s possible. So at least we’ll find out where it was last located. Which tells us where she was abducted.”

  “Right.”

  “If we can get a fix on where she was grabbed, traffic cams or other CCTVs might have captured a license plate or a face or something.”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “This is the best lead we have at the moment. But you’ve got to do it now.”

  He nodded. He took out his phone and dialed a number and asked for a Detective Ryan. After identifying himself, he read off Mandy’s cell phone number. A minute later they had the name of her carrier, AT&T.

  In the meantime I called Dorothy and filled her in. By the time I ended the call, Balakian had something.

  “AT&T says the phone’s not active. They can’t ping it.”

  “Like you said, it was probably shut off or smashed. Do you have a last known location, at least?”

  “The last call—when she was talking to you—hit a tower near the Anacostia metro station. Martin Luther King Junior Avenue and Howard Road, Southeast.”

  I nodded. “Good. Now, I have another number for you to ping, if possible.” I took out the metal business card.

  “Whose?”

  “Thomas Vogel’s,” I said. I looked at the card and dialed the phone number.

  It rang four or five times. Then: “Vogel.”

  “It’s Heller. Your guys have Mandy Seeger. If anything happens to her, you know what I’m capable of.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Heller.”

  There was a click and the line went dead.

  I thought a moment. It was possible that his guys had grabbed Mandy and hadn’t yet had the opportunity to inform the boss. But he’d hung up so quickly that I couldn’t help but wonder. If he really didn’t know what I was talking about, he would have pursued the matter. Asked me some questions. So it didn’t make sense. He had to know they’d taken Mandy.

  The answer came about a minute later. Balakian was talking to his contact in the department about Vogel’s phone when I got a text message. It was a link, a URL. The sender was a phone number, not a name, and I was sure the number was spoofed. I clicked on the link, and it took me to a website called Disappearing Ink. In the middle of a blank white page was a red button that said DOWNLOAD DISAPPEARING INK. It was an app. I clicked the red button, which took me to an iTunes page and another button, and soon I’d installed it on my phone. It appeared to be an encrypted text messaging service of some kind. I signed in using my e-mail address, and the number 1 popped up on top of the Disappearing Ink button on my phone. I had a message. I clicked on it. It was from “ShepherdBoy.” I thought again of Vogel’s remark: Guys like us, we’re the shepherds. We take care of
the sheep.

  The message said:

  We had a covenant, and you know the terms. Ms. Seeger was in violation. You stand down, including your friends, and you’ll see her again.

  I stared at it. Vogel wasn’t going to admit on a phone call to having kidnapped Mandy. That could be used against him, legally. So why was he sending an incriminating text?

  After about five seconds, the message disappeared, and I understood why he wanted to communicate this way. His messages were sent securely and disappeared as soon as they were read. I typed back:

  Deal. Release her now or I’ll come after you.

  Then I hit send. I looked at Balakian. He was still talking on the phone, shaking his head and saying, “Is there another way to try?”

  Another text message appeared in the Disappearing Ink app:

  MS will be released when you return home, to Boston. Not before.

  I tried to take a screenshot, but that message disappeared as well. No wonder Vogel was being this explicit. Screenshots didn’t work. Even if I managed to take a picture of my iPhone’s screen, there’d be no way to pin it on him.

  I looked up at Balakian. “Did you ping him?”

  He shook his head. “That’s not his cell phone number.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a VOIP software-based number. Like Google Voice.”

  “Not entirely following you.”

  “It’s . . . we can only ping real cell phone numbers. This is a software-generated number.”

  “But you can trace it, right?”

  “Not this one. It tracks to a Tor-sponsored service.”

  “Tor, the anonymous network?”

  He nodded.

  My understanding of Tor was pretty limited. I knew it was a network that lets you be anonymous on the Internet. Much beyond that, and I’m useless.

  “He’s also using a VPN service with it, which further complicates our ability to track that number. So as far as we can tell, it’s a black box. No luck.”

  “You know technology. That’s unusual for a cop.”

  He shrugged modestly. “A decent basic working knowledge, that’s all. I’m no hacker, trust me. What’d you find out?”

  “They have Mandy Seeger, and they’re not releasing her until I go back to Boston.”