Guilty Minds

“So I created a query in code, thirty characters long, and put that query into the username field. It dumped me into the back end of the website-the index.”

“I thought you were uncomfortable doing hacker stuff like that.”

“I am. But time is really short, and I was desperate. Also, it’s Gideon Parnell. I’d do anything for that guy. You know he marched with Martin Luther King?”

“Yep. I appreciate it.”

“I’ll e-mail you when I have something useful.”

“Oh, that reminds me. I don’t have a phone or a laptop anymore.”

“Anymore?”

“I’m temporarily back in the Dark Ages, and I don’t like it as much as I thought I would.”

I explained.

“Well, they’re both password-protected, the phone and the MacBook Air,” she said, “so you’re not at risk of losing information. More interesting…” I heard her tapping away at her keyboard. She seemed to be talking to herself.

Dorothy had set up both my phone and my laptop and given them to me plug-and-play. I’m no computer savant, but in my business you can no longer be ignorant about technology, unfortunately. At the very least you need to hire people who are good at it and let them do their thing. She insisted that Macs are extremely secure devices, and that the iPhone is the most secure phone you can get. I do what she recommends.

“Hold on one second,” she said. There we are. You have Find My iPhone turned on, very nice, and… oh, crap.”

“Now what?”

“They just turned it off.”

“How do you know this?”

“I see you had it at the Supreme Court building, but then it goes dark. That tells me they turned the phone off as soon as they stole it, and probably the laptop, too, to defeat the tracker. Someone knows what they’re doing. That’s too bad.”

“I’m going to need my phone and computer replaced.”

“Stop in at an Apple Store. There’s a couple in the district. Or else I can bring them to you.”

“How’s that?”

“You’re going to be in DC for at least a couple of days. My brother’s in the hospital in Prince George’s and I want to pay him a visit.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your brother.” I wasn’t aware that she had a brother. She was extremely private when it came to her personal business. “Ask Jillian to book us a couple of hotel rooms in DC,” I said. “It’s being billed to Shays Abbott, so make it a high-end place, something nice. Would you mind taking a piece of luggage for me?”

“Your go-bag?”

“Right.” In my office I always keep a packed carry-on case with a few days’ clothing and a shaving kit and miscellaneous necessities. Just in case I have to go somewhere out of town at the last minute.

“Sure. Nick, how did they know it was you?”

“The guy who stole my laptop, you mean?”

“Right.”

“I haven’t figured that out yet, but I will.” I told her I’d check back in with the office a little later on, since I was no longer reachable anywhere, and I hung up.

I summoned a mental image of the fake cop who’d guided me to my locker at the Supreme Court. I concentrated, did a mental inventory and download. I remembered him being about my height but broader and heavier. He had a blond buzz cut and his face looked flushed. Eye color? Gray, maybe, or light blue, but light in any case. Age? Somewhere in his thirties. I was putting together what birdwatchers and military types call the GISS, which stands for “general impression of size and shape.” For birders, it’s a way to make a field identification when you don’t know a bird’s species.

I turned away just when the pay phone rang. I picked it up.

“Nick Heller’s line.”

“Nick?” It was Dorothy.

“Yup.”

“Oh, good. As long as you stay by that pay phone all day, we should be fine. I’ve found our girl.”

10

Her real name is Kayla Pitts. Kayla spelled with a K. She’s twenty-two, and she comes from Tupelo, Mississippi.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Employee records on their server.”

“You find a phone number?”

She read it to me. It had a 571 area code, for Virginia. I wrote it down in my little black notebook.

“Address?”

She read that aloud, too, and I wrote it down.

“Now what?”

“Now I go to see her.”

“How?”

“I’ll think of something.”

– 

Three hours later I was sitting in a rented black Chevy Suburban parked outside Kayla Pitts’s apartment building on Glebe Road in Arlington. It was a huge crablike complex built of white brick that belonged on the outskirts of Moscow: like late Soviet-era public housing built on the cheap, almost defiantly so.

I had with me my new phone and MacBook Air-I didn’t want to wait for Dorothy, so I made a stop at the Apple Store-and I was browsing LilySchuyler.com’s website, piggybacking on someone’s Wi-Fi signal, probably one of her neighbors’.