Guilty Minds

“He’s despondent, as you can well imagine. His office is directing people to the court’s public affairs office, and they’re giving out a statement that I crafted. What do you have?”

“Enough to go to Slander Sheet and demand a retraction,” I said. I told him what we had.

“Do we know she actually took those flights?”

I smiled. The same question I’d asked. And I wasn’t even a lawyer. “Not without getting the flight manifest from US Airways, and that’s something only law enforcement can do.”

“That seems like a hole, don’t you think? She might have bought tickets and not flown.”

“It’s a hole, but a minor one. We have less than six hours, and I think the smart play is to go to Slander Sheet with what we have. It’s enough.”

“Not yet,” Gideon said. “We need proof she was in Mississippi and not in DC at the time.”

“I think we’re in a strong enough position now.”

He shook his head. “I want that accusation discredited once and for all, no ambiguity about it, no games, no waffling.”

“I understand, but I think we can work with what we have.” I found myself in an unusual position. Normally I’m on the other side, pushing for more evidence, a more conclusive case. “They’d be idiots not to issue a retraction.”

“I’m the client,” Gideon said firmly. “And I’m asking you for more.”

“The problem is, for me to get anything more definitive could take a few days, and by then it’s too late. We have less than six-”

My phone rang. I glanced at it: Frank Montello. “Excuse me,” I said, and I answered the call. “Frank.”

“You’re not answering your e-mail.”

“You have something?”

“Check your in-box,” he said. “You owe me a chunk of change.”

When I explained to Gideon what call-detail records were, he broke out in a broad grin.

28

Gideon inhaled deeply, then exhaled slowly.

“Thank God. And thank you.” His chin tipped up ever so slightly. “It’s time we paid Slander Sheet a visit.”

“Not you,” I said.

“Not me? And why the hell not?”

“It paints a big target on your back. Draws their attention to you. I think you should remain behind the scenes and let me be the up-front guy. The flak catcher. That’s what you pay me for.”

After a long moment of silence he said, “You’re right.”

On my phone I forwarded the call records to Dorothy-I was surprised at how big the file was-and then spent ten minutes with Gideon as he suggested to me some legal language to use with Slander Sheet.

When I got back to the conference room, Dorothy got up and threw her arms around me. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that.

“You did it,” she said.

“We can celebrate when Slander Sheet issues a retraction. Why is the file so big?”

“It’s a whole lot of data. A lot of the time she was using a navigation app on her phone that kept pinging the cell towers. Communicating, broadcasting nonstop. So the data is almost continuous, back-to-back. We can see where she went for hours at a time. Showing an almost perfect path of travel.”

“And where’d she go?”

“When she arrived in Jackson, she traveled from the airport to a Budget Rent a Car agency on the airport grounds. Then she drove about four miles to a town called Pearl, Mississippi, on the outskirts of Jackson. That’s where she spent most of her time. In the town of Pearl.”

“What’s there?”

“The Central Mississippi Correctional Facility.”

“Who’d she visit?”

She nodded. “I searched the Vinelink inmate locator under the name of Pitts, and I found a Raelyn Pitts, twenty-seven years old.”

“Her big sister.”

“Right. She was visiting her sister in prison. She stayed at a Comfort Inn near the prison both nights, June 6 and 7, and went to visit her sister twice.”

“You got all this from the latitude and the longitude of the cell towers?”

She shook her head. “They also give you street addresses. So I did some cross-referencing.”

“That just leaves one night unaccounted for. June 12.”

“Wrong. We got that, too.”

“How so?”

“They sent a month’s worth of call records, a full billing cycle. On June 12, she spent the evening at a sports bar in Arlington, Virginia, for most of the night. Never left Arlington.”

That meant that all three nights were accounted for. All three nights when she was supposedly with the chief justice she was provably somewhere else.

I called Slander Sheet and tried to get an appointment with the founder and editor in chief, Julian Gunn. I was told he was tied up. But once they heard I represented Gideon Parnell, Gunn freed up some time. He probably wanted to dance a victory jig in front of me.

I felt good. We had evidence that was rock solid, even better than I’d expected to come up with.

But there was something about this case that still bothered me, that had begun to nag at me, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

29

In the hour before my meeting with Julian Gunn, I got on the phone while Dorothy combed the Internet, and fairly quickly I had a decent working profile of the guy.