“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.