Guilty Minds

“He was sort of the ringleader. Well, not sort of. He was the ringleader of the fake overtime pay scam. When he was on the force, he surrounded himself with a small group of alpha dogs, including your boy Curtis Schmidt.”

“He get forced retirement, too?”

Garvin nodded. “He was a legend in the department, Vogel was. Thought he was smarter than everybody else, and he probably was. Did undercover work in narcotics and made some prominent busts. After he was forced out, he started this interesting kind of high-end VIP protection service, called Centurions. They’re more like fixers than plain old security guards.”

“‘Fixer’ can mean anything. What do they do?”

“They make scandals go away.”

“For politicians?”

“Sure, and movie stars and rich people.”

“You know this for sure?”

“All I know is gossip. A celebrity is found with a body in his bed, they make the body disappear. Some movie star has a problem with a stalker, they take care of the problem. No restraining order needed. A call girl threatens a congressman with blackmail, they handle it. They resolve the situation without involving the courts. They make problems vanish. They don’t advertise, and they’re not in the phone book. I doubt they have a website. I don’t even think they have an office.”

“How do they get clients?”

“Word of mouth. People just know about them.”

“So,” I said, “they’re probably the ones who staged Kayla’s suicide.”

“Could be. Wouldn’t surprise me. Question is, who hired them? That’s what you really want to know.”

I looked out the window at the perfect emerald lawn, the polished ebony of the driveway. I smelled the coal tar, astringent and medicinal. There were any number of directions I could have gone from there. But it was becoming clear, at least to me, that the answer might lie in the connection between the Centurions and Slander Sheet.

And that connection, if there was a connection, would require some serious digging. It wasn’t going to be easy to find.

But I had an idea.

51

Thank you for making time to see us, Mr. Troy.”

I nodded, avoided eye contact, looked uncomfortable. Simon Troy was said to be uncomfortable around people.

The woman appeared to be in her midthirties and had glossy black hair. She was attractive, in a matronly way.

“Do you come to town often?”

“As little as possible.” Simon Troy lived in Jenks, Oklahoma, outside of Tulsa, and rarely traveled. He was also a billionaire and one of the largest landowners in the United States and was known to be mostly a recluse. Very few photos of him could be found on the Internet. In truth, I didn’t look very much like him, except for the gray hair and mustache I was wearing, and the black horn-rimmed glasses. But no one here at Norcross and McKenna was going to question whether I was Simon Troy or not. They wanted to believe.

We’d considered creating a false identity, but backstopping it-largely, seeding the Internet with enough plausible appearances-was time-consuming, and we didn’t have the time. Whereas a billionaire like Simon Troy, seldom photographed and never interviewed, seemed relatively easy to impersonate. Mandy Seeger provided me with a download of what little information on him existed, and I studied it, hard. Dorothy then called the law firm from a spoofed Tulsa phone number to arrange this last-minute meeting.

“Well, Mr. Norcross was happy to clear some time in his schedule to meet with you.”

We didn’t talk again as she led me along a corridor to a corner office. A rotund man with a red face and silver hair bounded from behind his desk, his hand extended.

“A great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Troy. I’m Ash Norcross.”

I gave him a limp, diffident shake, took note of the keycard clipped to his belt.

“Can we get you a cup of tea? I understand you don’t drink coffee.”

“Nothing for me, thanks.”

“Thanks, Val,” Ashton Norcross said, dismissing his admin. To me he said, “I understand you got my name-”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” I said languidly. “I have to get back to Capitol Hill. A few senators I need to see.”

“Well, then, let’s get right to it.” He half-bowed and indicated a seating area with two brocade sofas. I sat, and then he sat across from me. I set down my briefcase to my left, close to him, a few feet away from his keycard. Close enough, I hoped.

“As you may or may not know, I tend to stay out of politics,” I said. “In any public way, I mean. You won’t find my name on any FEC databases, or at least not in a long while. But I’ve come to believe our republic is under assault.”

“And so it is, Mr. Troy. And so it is. No argument here. In fact, we at Norcross-”

“But as you may know, I don’t like to see my name in the paper.”

“Absolutely.”

“I stay as low profile as possible.”

“Understood. You’ve come to the right place.”

“Now, I’ve had a bad experience with one of our local law firms in Tulsa. Turned out that their security was lax. I want to know what precautions you take.”

“Well, our security is state-of-the-art.”

“If I were to become a client, where would you be storing the files you’d keep on me?”