Guilty Minds

I thought for a moment. I’d escorted her to her room and used her keycard to open the door to her room. I’d considered withholding the key from her so she didn’t get any ideas about leaving the room and going someplace where I couldn’t protect her. But in the end I left the card on the desk in the room. I’d asked her to stay in the room, and she did.

“What about the door?” I said.

He nodded again. “It was opened, let me see, five times. Once at 7:16, of course.”

“And then around eight or so?” When Dorothy had returned bearing clothes for Kayla. That had been the second time.

“Yes. At 8:07 and then at 8:11.”

I closed my eyes, nodded. Dorothy entered at 8:07. A few minutes later, I’d opened the door again and hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside handle. Then I’d stuffed a towel under the inside handle.

“Then at 9:36, and again at 10:25.”

I was gone by nine. I didn’t return until after midnight. At nine thirty-six I was probably in Curtis Schmidt’s garage.

“But no keycard was used?”

“Correct.”

“Which means the door was opened from the inside.”

“That’s right.”

It had to have been Kayla who opened the door. But for whom?

“Can you tell if the room phone was used?”

“Yes, one moment.”

He tapped some more and opened a different database. “Yes, just once. An outgoing call was placed at 8:47.”

“Can you see the number that was called?”

“No, for that you need to go to the phone company. AT &T. We don’t have that capability.”

“I’d like to take a look at your surveillance video.”

He smiled, a pained smile, and shook his head. “Only for law enforcement. I’m very sorry.”

I thanked him, and he expressed his condolences again, and as soon as I left his office I called Detective Balakian.

46

What can I do for you, Mr. Heller?” Balakian said.

“I have some information for you about Kayla Pitts.”

“Information?” Balakian sounded distracted. He was drinking something. Probably kombucha. I could hear the crinkle of paper, a cough in the background.

“A couple of facts that raise some interesting questions.”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s a splotch of blood on the back of the water faucet in the bathroom. Not very big, not easy to see. I’m pretty sure your guys missed it. If it’s Kayla’s blood, you have an interesting situation.”

“How do you figure?”

“You have to wonder how it got there.” I didn’t want to spell it out for him. That would be insulting. “And there’s more.”

“Okay.” More crinkling of paper. Balakian took another sip.

“According to the hotel’s security director, she placed an outgoing phone call at 8:47 P.M. Then at 9:36 P.M. and 10:25 her door was opened. From the inside.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That may have been when she let someone in. Her killer.”

“That’s a pretty big leap. She let someone into her room, so it’s homicide, not suicide, is that what you’re telling me?”

“It’s a piece of evidence you need to know.”

“There could be a thousand reasons why she opened her room door. She went out to get ice. She went out for a cigarette break. She went down to the lobby.”

“If she left the room for some reason, she had to have come back in. Which means the door would have been opened from the outside with the keycard after that. But it wasn’t.”

“Anything else?”

“Sure. See if there’s any security footage. They won’t let me view it. And you might want to check for drugs in her system like ketamine. Something that was used to knock her out.”

“That’ll come from toxicology in a couple weeks. But if they find evidence of drugs in a prostitute’s body, well, that’s not exactly going to be front-page news.”

Balakian was not going to be moved from his theory that Kayla was a suicide. It was infuriating, but I was just wasting my time trying to convince him. I knew the girl had been murdered. I didn’t need him to confirm it for me.

There were far more pressing questions to answer.

I said good-bye and hung up, and within seconds my phone rang. It was Mandy Seeger.

“I think I have something,” she said.

47

We met for breakfast at a no-frills diner a few blocks from the hotel. She ordered waffles, the house specialty, and I ordered eggs over medium and a half-smoke. They brought coffee without being asked, and I downed half a mug right away, nearly scalding my esophagus.

She looked surprisingly fresh, for someone who’d gotten hardly any sleep. Her skin was dewy and she smelled like soap. For the first time I noticed that she had freckles across her nose. It was cute. Her hair was pulled back. She was wearing an old, faded pair of jeans and a black T-shirt.

She took a few tentative sips of the hot coffee, and I told her what I’d found out from the hotel security guy.

“You think she let her killer into the room?” she asked.

I nodded.

“So it was someone she knew and trusted.”

“Seems that way. Unless she thought it was someone from the hotel, room service, or security, or a manager. Even though I told her not to open the door for anyone.”

“Oh, man. You know these homicide detectives are supposed to treat every suicide as a homicide until it’s proven different.”

“That’s right.”