Guilty Minds (10 page)

E
ntering Kayla’s apartment, I closed the door quietly behind me. The lights were off. I looked around quickly. I was in a living room. Along one wall were sliding glass doors that gave onto a shallow balcony. The curtains were halfway drawn.

Strong morning sun blazed a large oblong across the room, a short sofa, a couple of matching chairs, a glass coffee table. To the right was a kitchenette, partitioned off from the living room by a breakfast bar with three stools. On the other side of the living room was an open door to a bedroom. I crept quietly through the room, just in case she was asleep in bed.

Once I was halfway across the living room I could see straight into her bedroom. The bed was made. She wasn’t here.

I detoured to the glass sliders. The balcony looked out over the parking lot in front of the building.

No cops yet, but it was too early. I glanced at my watch again. In nine minutes it would no longer be safe to be here.

The bedroom smelled faintly of perfume. Near a window was a small wooden desk. On it were only a lamp, a textbook, a legal pad, a silver
clock, a yellow highlighter, and a small stuffed giraffe. No laptop. I scanned the legal pad. Nothing of interest. I gave the room another once-over. Looked in the adjoining bathroom. It was heartbreakingly neat. A lineup of lipsticks, a bottle of Scope mouthwash, an electric toothbrush. Nothing there.

I went back out into the living room, glanced outside again and saw no police cars. Not yet. When I turned around, I noticed a laptop on an end table next to the couch, a well-used Lenovo with stickers all over its case.

There it was. What I was hoping to find.

I opened it and attached a small, preconfigured USB drive. When it mounted, I double-clicked on it. This little device was pre-programmed to plant something called a key logger on her laptop. The key logger would secretly record every keystroke Kayla made on that machine and transmit it wirelessly to Dorothy.

I entered the commands she’d given me.

As I finished typing, I heard the siren.

I leaped up and went to the balcony. A police cruiser was pulling into the parking lot and the siren growled to a stop. The neighbor had called 911, just as I expected. But the police had responded more quickly than I would have thought. Three cheers for the Arlington Police Department.

Not good for me.

There was a lot more I needed to do.

I went to the front door and put my ear against it and listened. Nothing yet. Everything now depended on how quickly the police gained entry to the apartment building. Once they were buzzed in, they’d be up here within a minute or two. By the time I heard the elevator arrive on the seventh floor, by the time I heard it
bing,
it would be too late.

Now it was a matter of calculation.

I returned to her laptop and opened her Safari browser. I selected History. And there it was: days, maybe even weeks, of her browsing history. Every website she’d visited. Like most people, she didn’t clear her browser’s history.

My eye was quickly caught by one entry:

American Express Credit Cards . . . Travel and Business Services

She’d gone online to look at her American Express statement, maybe pay the bill. I found another entry in her history:

American Express Login

So I pulled that one up and clicked on it, and her login page came up. The username field was already filled in: KPitts. And the password field was filled with a series of dots for her password. I clicked “Log In,” and her American Express card statement came up.

I found the list of posted transactions. Charges for
CVS/PHARMACY
. A bunch for
GIANT
, a supermarket. Charges for
AMAZON
and “
VZWRLSS
,” which meant Verizon Wireless, her mobile phone company. A lot of taxi and Uber charges. A lot for
ITUNES.COM/BILLIT
UNCUPERTINO CA
, which I assumed were iTunes purchases or rentals. A lot of
STARB
UCKS
charges.
GRUBHUB SEAMLES
S
, which was probably food delivery.

Then I noticed an entry:
US AIRWAYS PHOENIX
. I clicked on it, and it expanded into a separate window.
FLIGHT DETAILS
, it said on the right. Washington, DC, to Jackson, Mississippi. It gave a ticket number, passenger name (Pitts/Kayla), and date of departure. June 6.

The day before the first alleged rendezvous with Justice Claflin, she’d flown to Jackson, Mississippi. The return date was June 8. I jotted down the flight information on the little field notebook I always carry with me.

I had to leave. The longer I spent here, the more likely it was that I’d be caught.

And that couldn’t happen.

Theoretically, the police could be waiting in the lobby of the building for ten, fifteen minutes while dispatch tried to reach the building superintendent to let them in.

Or the super could have been waiting for them downstairs.

The elevator could arrive on the seventh floor any second.

It was a game of chance. But I had one more thing to do. Dorothy had brought from Boston a couple of mini real-time GPS trackers. I wanted to plant it somewhere where we could keep track of her movements, somewhere where she wouldn’t find it. Her car was the obvious target. Was there something in her apartment that she was likely to take with her? Her Chanel purse wasn’t here; she’d probably taken it with her. A coat or jacket? The tracker would likely end up sitting in the closet. The only place that seemed to make any sense was her laptop case, even though she obviously didn’t take it with her very often. Maybe she took her laptop out of her apartment on certain occasions, for long trips and so on.

I slipped the tracker in one of the many compartments and pressed down on the Velcro closure. Most people don’t look through all the compartments in their laptop bags. It wasn’t likely to be detected there.

Then I went back to the front door, looked out the peephole, saw nothing in the hall. The neighbor across the hall was probably hiding in her apartment, awaiting the cops. I listened, heard nothing. No elevator chime.

I’d already located the stairwell. It was off to the right of Kayla’s apartment, whereas the elevator was on the left. Taking the elevator meant far too great a risk of running right into the cops. They wouldn’t climb the stairs to the seventh floor. So the stairwell was the safer exit.

My heart was thudding. Everything had been reduced to one crystal clear choice. Stay here and continue to capture more of her browser history and risk being caught. Or call it enough and leave the apartment before the police arrived.

It was time to go. I ejected the USB drive and pocketed it, closed the laptop, returned it to the end table. Glanced around quickly to make sure I hadn’t left anything. Went back to the front door, looked out the peephole, listened for a moment.

Heard the elevator chime.

The escape route was simple: a right out of the doorway, down the hall about two hundred feet to the door that led to the stairs.

I heard voices in the hallway coming closer. The police, it had to be. I’d stalled too long.

If I left the apartment now, they’d see me emerge. They’d see me in the hall.

Now it seemed to me there were only two choices. To hide somewhere in the apartment, probably in the bedroom closet, and hope that the police didn’t do a very thorough search. Not a risk I wanted to take.

Or . . .

I opened the sliding glass doors and stepped out onto the balcony. I did a quick calculation. Eight-foot ceilings meant approximately ten or eleven feet per story. Seven stories up was about seventy-five feet off the ground. Directly below was a narrow strip of grass and shrubs. Theoretically I could drop from the balcony and survive.

Or not.

Assuming I dropped onto the grass, I could sustain a broken ankle, which would be extremely inconvenient.

The adjacent balcony was twelve or fourteen feet away. Too far to swing and realistically hope to make it.

The balcony railing was about four feet high, a little less. The
balcony directly below was a drop of ten or eleven feet. I’m six foot four, and with an arm extended, I can span around eight feet. That meant a drop of only a couple feet to the balcony below.

As long as no one was watching the front of the building, I could—

And at that moment I heard muffled voices outside the front door.

I couldn’t risk any more time thinking; I had to move.

Clutching the top of the railing, I pulled myself up, then lifted first one leg and then, with a quick readjustment of my hands, a second leg, and I was over the side. Hanging by my arms. Doing a pull-up. I felt a cool breeze in my hair. I could smell cut grass and hot asphalt. I lowered myself, my feet dangling in midair, the railing below just out of reach.

From the apartment I could hear the metallic scrape of a key turning in the lock.

I had to
move
.

Drop straight down and hit the dirt, maybe the asphalt. Likely injury, even death.

No, I had to swing my feet inward. Toward the interior of the apartment below. With one big swing I let go of my hands, and I dropped to the floor of the balcony below, relaxing my stance, knees bent, hands protecting my head, the impact hard and shuddering through my knees and thighs, my back thumping hard against the glass of the sliding door.

I craned my head and looked around and saw, through the parted floor-length curtains, the light on in the sixth-floor apartment.

Someone was home.

T
he floor-length curtains were half open. I didn’t see anyone, which probably meant that nobody had seen me. But almost certainly someone was there.

I did a quick survey of my limbs. I hadn’t broken or sprained anything. My legs were a little wobbly from the fall.

Then I had a disturbing thought:
Is it locked?

It wasn’t out of the question that the sliding doors to this apartment were locked. That would mean I was stuck out here. I’d have to make my way down to the balcony below and try there.

Another thought:
Who’d lock a sliding door to a sixth-floor balcony? Who could possibly come in?

I tried the door, gripping the recessed handle, pulling with my fingers, and the glass door scraped open a few inches, moaning as it went. It was unlocked, but apparently seldom used.

I stopped pulling it. I didn’t want to alert whoever was there, presumably in the adjoining room. Maybe in bed. Maybe in the bathroom.

I inhaled deeply.

A tendon in my right calf went
twoingg
.

Waiting out here on the balcony for the right moment was a bad idea. What if he or she chose at some point to look out through the glass doors? I’d be spotted immediately. The balcony was shallow and not very big; there was no place on it to hide.

I had to enter while I could and hope I wasn’t seen.

So I edged the door along its track slowly and steadily and as quietly as possible until it was open just wide enough for me to slip in. I parted the curtains, slid the door closed behind me, and entered. I was in what looked like a living room.

I heard the loud mumble of a TV in the next room, booming and vibrating in the walls.

This was good.

Whoever lived here was watching TV in the adjoining bedroom.

At first glance, the layout of this apartment appeared identical to Kayla’s, one flight up. That meant that, depending on where in the bedroom the bed was positioned, the occupant either did or did not have a sightline into the living room.

I had to proceed on the assumption that he or she did. Even if only peripherally.

Given my height and build, I probably wasn’t going to slip by unseen. Neither moving slowly nor sprinting by.

I’d be seen.

Standing there in the living room of a stranger’s apartment, hoping the resident didn’t see me here, I looked around and noticed a walker and a spare cane. So she was elderly. An old woman or an old man. Maybe both. Only one walker, so probably just one person.

Let’s assume it’s an old lady. If she saw me in her apartment, she would almost certainly scream and then call the police, and I couldn’t have that.

Since the lights in the apartment were on, I also assumed that she’d
awakened for the morning, turned on the lights, maybe had a little breakfast, and then got back into bed to watch TV.

Based on the volume of the TV, I assumed also that she was hard of hearing. But not necessarily blind. It was fifteen or twenty feet from where I was standing to the front door, with an open bedroom door in between.

I didn’t know what to do.

So I began to game out my options.

One: I brazen it out, just walk boldly to the front door, open it, and leave. She’d probably see me and panic. Scream and call 911. The police dispatcher would immediately notify the police on the scene. I wouldn’t have time to run down six flights of stairs, or take the elevators.

This seemed like a bad option.

Two: I glanced at the light, lacy curtains that hung next to the glass sliders. There were six panels of curtains, each curtain about six feet long.

Knotted together, losing about a foot in length for each knot, that was thirty feet.

I could sustain a drop of around thirty feet to the grass or bushes below, if I had to. If I fell right.

Quickly I thought it through. I couldn’t do it without making noise. Plus it would take me at least ten minutes to remove the curtains, then remove the hooks from the fabric, and turn the curtains into a long rope and climb down from the balcony. Since this apartment, like Kayla’s, faced the front of the building, I’d risk being seen by anyone driving up—and by the police, if they happened to be leaving at the time.

Not a feasible option. I was stuck with the bad option.

Brazen it out.

Walk across the living room, as quietly as possible, and just hope that somehow I wasn’t spotted.

I took a breath, exhaled, and then began moving slowly, as light on my feet as I could be, toward the front door. One foot in front of the other.

When I took a third step I was able to see into the bedroom. I saw a slice of a bed, a brown bedspread or coverlet. A lump in the bed. Someone’s legs, presumably. The pallid blue-gray wash of the TV, just out of sight.

I took another careful step. Now I would see her head and shoulders, and she’d be able to see me. Unless her attention was riveted on the TV. Maybe her head was turned at such an angle that she wouldn’t see me in her peripheral vision. The door was about ten feet away from me. The TV chattered and blared and barked and reverberated.

The floor creaked audibly underfoot.

My insides clenched.

Would she hear the squeak over the clamor of the TV? Maybe. Maybe not.

Then I saw that the bed was empty.

What had, a moment ago, looked like someone’s torso or legs under the coverlet was in fact just a heap of bedding.

So if she wasn’t in the bed, and the TV was on, where—?

A toilet flushed.

I thought quickly. He? She? Was in the bathroom, off the bedroom, and she was probably about to emerge.

For a split-second I froze.

Stop or advance? When she came out of the bathroom, the odds would greatly increase of her spotting me in her peripheral vision.

Decided, then.

I took three quick steps and reached the front door.

The door locks here were identical to Kayla’s, upstairs. Two thumb latches that turned counterclockwise to unlock the dead bolt.

I turned the top one, and it made a loud clunking sound, audible everywhere in the apartment, no question about it.

I turned the second thumb latch and yanked the door open.

Without waiting another second, I vaulted through the door, and leaving it open behind me, ran down the corridor toward the stairwell.