“I’m here to tell you there are holes in your story. Let’s take one little detail. If Kayla really saw Jeremiah Claflin on three occasions, where do you think they met?”
“The Monroe. He stayed there on three different dates.”
“Sure, because you have records from the hotel guest registry.”
She smiled, nodded.
“Which tells you that someone with a credit card in Jeremiah Claflin’s name checked into the hotel.”
“And Claflin’s driver’s license.” She took a long swig of her Diet Coke, finished it off.
Something in the back of my mind bothered me, but I couldn’t quite grab hold of it. “Sure,” I said. “But whoever they were, they never entered the room. Not one time.”
“And you know this how?”
I paused. Ordinarily I wouldn’t give away operational details like that. But this wasn’t an ordinary circumstance. She had to be convinced I was right so she’d back off the story.
“The Monroe uses software that keeps track of room keys electronically. How many keys are issued. When keys are used. Every time a hotel room is opened from the outside, the system records it. So someone posing as Claflin checked into the hotel but never, not once, entered the room.”
There was a spark of something in her eyes. “Oh, and of course a hotel’s computers can’t be tampered with, right? You’re going to have to do a lot better than that. Kayla told me about your little ruse. Tricking her into thinking she was meeting me. You people, you’ll stop at nothing.”
“I’ve only been at this a couple of hours, and already I’ve punched a serious hole in your story.”
“Look, uh, Nick, I’ve got a heap of evidence, and the best you can come up with is some easily manipulated piece of computer data? I don’t think so. You’re going to have to do better than that. This isn’t going to move my editor at all.”
“Your editor is...?”
“His name is Julian Gunn. And he’s as battle-hardened as they come. He’d laugh in my face if I brought this to him.”
“You know, I think you’re missing the real story. It’s right in front of your face.”
She was starting to look annoyed now. “And what’s that?”
“The fact that someone’s setting Jeremiah Claflin up to damage him, to discredit him. Who would do something like that? You see, I think you’re being used. The question is, by who?”
“By whom.”
“If you prefer.” I waited.
“Well, Nick Heller. Nice try. Thanks for playing.”
There didn’t seem to be much more to say, so I put down some cash and said, “Drinks on me.”
“You can expense it,” Mandy said.
19
The hotel that Jillian, my office manager, had booked for us was nicer than the hotels I normally stay in. When I’m traveling on my own dime, I’m partial to the kind of budget hotel that has a coffeemaker and refrigerator in the room and a waffle iron in the breakfast area off the lobby. When someone else is paying for it, though, I like to live well. I work hard for my clients; why shouldn’t I enjoy the perks? This hotel had sumptuous décor and five-hundred-thread-count bed linens. My suite had a separate living room and an ergonomic desk chair. It was a nice hotel. No in-room coffee machine, though.
I unpacked quickly, changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, and called Dorothy. Her room was directly across the hall. She said she was in her bedtime attire but would quickly change and knock on my door. I ordered a steak from room service. Dorothy said she’d already had her dinner.
A few years back I’d hired Dorothy away from the private intelligence firm in DC where we both worked, Stoddard Associates. Jay Stoddard had hired her out of the National Security Agency. She was skilled at cyber investigations, and digital forensics, and she was unshakably loyal to me. I was loyal right back — there were certainly better digital forensics people around but no one as persistent and determined as Dorothy. I’d uprooted her from a comfortable life in Washington, and, though she never reminded me, I never forgot it.
She knocked on the door long before room service arrived. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. She always wore her hair short, but recently she’d been wearing it practically buzzed, to go with the complicated arrangement of piercings on the helixes of her ears. (I was the only one in our office whose ears weren’t pierced.) She was barefoot. Her toenails were painted the same bright shade of pink as her fingernails.
“How’s your brother?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Too late, I just did.”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you some other time.”
“Tell me now.”
She surveyed the room as she entered. “How come you got the executive suite, with the separate living room and everything? You probably have two bathrooms, too.”
“Just one. All I need.” I ignored her question. “Are you going to tell me about your brother?”
“Some other time.”
“Okay.” I usually knew when to stop pushing.
“Internet’s blazing fast for a hotel, by the way.”
She took a glass from atop the minibar and filled it with water from the bathroom sink. Then she sat down in the big wingback chair in the corner of the living room.
“Did you see Representative Compton’s member?”
“I didn’t click through. But I saw the piece.”
“Why are we worried about a trashy online gossip site that runs pictures of congressmen’s dicks? Who’s going to pay any attention to what they report?”
I poured myself a Scotch from the minibar. I wanted ice but didn’t feel like going out to the ice machine or calling room service again, and neat was fine anyway. “It’s all about the life cycle of scandal,” I said. “Everyone pays attention to Slander Sheet, whether they admit it or not, but the serious news establishments, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, aren’t going to report any scandal that comes out on Slander Sheet until it becomes just too big to ignore. And when they do, they’ll report it at a slant. They’ll report on the existence of a scandal, a controversy. Holding their noses. Meanwhile, they’ll send their own reporters to reweave the case. Pretty soon they’ve done their own wave of stories. Then come the ancillary stories, the featurettes on the principals. You can just see the piece on Kayla Pitts, can’t you? Young college girl from rural Mississippi comes to the nation’s capital and gets corrupted. Innocence meets the dubious morality of DC. Very House of Cards.”
“You know it.”
“By then they own the story. They’ve got an equity stake in the narrative.”
“But if you’ve got the proof it couldn’t have happened...?”
“Remember the Duke University lacrosse case? These three poor college guys, members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team, were accused of rape. Their lives were turned inside out. Turns out it was a false accusation. Totally made up, by someone with a history of that kind of thing. Yet it took the mainstream media eight months before they acknowledged the whole story was just a hunk of pulp fiction.”
“I know. I remember.”
“So a false allegation like Slander Sheet’s about to run could do Claflin some serious damage. Once the mainstream media picks it up.”
“You think Slander Sheet’s really going to run with it?”
“For now, that’s what it looks like.” I told her about getting a beer with Mandy Seeger and how badly the meeting had ended. “Can you do a little digging into her?” I said.
“What about?”
“Why in the world she left The Washington Post for Slander Sheet, of all places. I don’t get it.”