The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) (20 page)

“Yeah, the porn file is on her laptop.”

Ryan said, “Where was it?”

“Just sitting on the desktop.”

“Had she renamed it?”

“No, the name’s the same: just a string of
characters.”

I said, “All right, had she gone to the porno site
to view it?”

“What’s the name of the site again?” Jorge asked.

Ryan answered. “
CollegeGirlsXXX
.”

Jorge needed two seconds. “Yeah. You got any hard
questions?”

“All right, wiseass,” I said. “Did she upload the
file to that site from this computer?”

Jorge smiled. “Oh, that’s good.” He paused, his
eyes narrowing. He tapped a few keys, and up came the porn site. It was a black
background, with boxes about two inches square with frames of the videos lined
up neatly in rows. Along the right side of the screen were ads for sex toys and
meet-and-fuck sites. He scrolled to the bottom of the screen and leaned in to
read the small text. He hovered over a text link, then pulled the sticky note off
the back of his hand and wrote a few more characters on it. Then he hit the
text link, pulling up the submissions page, which was big box full of legal
text like you see all the time when you want to use a service on the Web.

He turned to me. “I know she’s viewed the file on
the site, but she didn’t upload it to the site—at least, not from this laptop.”
He paused. “Wait a second.”

“What is it?”

“I need to check whether she used any other
browsers.” He went back to the desktop. “No, good, all she uses is Firefox.”

“Did she look at other videos on
CollegeGirls
?” Ryan said.

He pulled down the History window. “A few dozen.”

“Straight or les?”

“Les.”

“Anything else on the laptop before we go to the
phone?”

“No. You want to know who she talked to?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Jorge inserted a card into the side of his
computer and pulled up a long spreadsheet. “What do you want to know about the
phone?”

“Any calls to or from a Daryl Sorenson or Cletis
Williams?”

The spreadsheet jumped up and down on the wall. “A
few with Daryl Sorenson.” Jorge highlighted them. None from the last two weeks.
“Three to Cletis Williams, about three weeks ago. Five days in a row, all at
nine in the morning.”

I turned to Ryan. “That would be when she was
threatening him, right?”

Ryan looked down at the notebook in his lap.
“Yeah.”

I turned back to Jorge. “Any calls to or from an
Elena Moranu?” I spelled the last name.

“No.”

“Abby Demarest?”

He searched. A blue box jumped around on the
screen. “About fifteen.”

“When was the last one?”

“Sunday afternoon.”

I looked at Ryan. “That’s an odd time to be
talking with your professor.”

Ryan shrugged, a maybe-so, maybe-not gesture.

“Any record of a Martin Hunt?”

“No.”

I turned to Ryan. “Did I leave anyone out?”

Ryan said to Jorge, “You see a Robert Rinaldi?”

Jorge searched. “Seven in the week up to her
murder.”

“When was the last one?” Ryan said.

He looked at the screen. “The afternoon she was
killed. At 3:16.”

I said, “Can you tell where he was when they
talked?”

Jorge looked up at me. “Not from this. But Verizon’s
got a map that shows the cell towers, which will tell you, more or less.”

“Make it more.”

He hit the keys. A map of the U.S., with a big red
dot on Rawlings, Montana, appeared on the wall.

“That’s interesting,” Ryan said.

“You think?”

Chapter 22

“What did Robert Rinaldi’s
roommate say he was doing when he left Portland?” Ryan and I were sitting at
our desks.

He looked down at his notebook, flipped a few
pages. “‘Cleaning up some shit his mother was into.’”

“That shit would be his mother screwing a
prostitute?”

“I’d phrase it that she was in a relationship with
a prostitute who had moved into her house.”

“So as he’s driving here from Portland, he’s
calling her. He arrives in Rawlings Monday, the day of her class.”

“Or Sunday.”

“But he didn’t stay in his bedroom, right?” I
said. “The bed didn’t have sheets on it.”

“The night of the class, is he upstairs at his
mother’s house?”

“I say no. The students reported hearing two women
arguing, then Krista storms out.”

“He could have said all he had to say before the
students arrived,” Ryan said. “Then he just watched his mother and Krista
arguing.”

“It’s nine-thirty,” I said. “The class is over,
the students have left. Krista’s gone, too. Robert comes back to his mother’s
place. Or he never left. They get into an argument—”

“She tells him she doesn’t care what he thinks;
she’s not going to break it off with Krista.”

I was silent a moment. “How do we figure out if
he’s the kind of guy who goes
apeshit
because his
mother’s moved a hooker into the spare bedroom?”

Now it was Ryan’s turn to be silent. “We can’t
figure it out. He’s got a gay roommate. He could be gay himself. So maybe that
makes him more tolerant.”

“Yeah, but it’s Mom with a hooker.”

Ryan put up his palms. “It’s not possible to know
how he would react. Maybe he was fine with it—I mean, her relationship with a
prostitute. It could be something else.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Krista was stealing things or
taking his mother’s money. The only way we can even guess would be to interview
him.” Ryan picked up his phone and dialed. Nothing. “Voicemail.”

“Contact Oregon Department of Transportation. Get
the specs on his car. Put out an APB on it.”

Ryan wrote in his notebook. “Done.”

“While we wait on that, the only person who can
help us understand what happened upstairs that night is Krista.”

“We have no phone for her. Want to go over to her
place?”

“No, I’m tired of that. We
gotta
move faster. Punch in the pimp’s number.”

Ryan did it. Line 1 on my phone lit up. I picked
up the receiver. The phone rang three times. Christopher James Barlow picked
up. I put it on Speaker.

“Mr. Barlow, this is Detective Seagate. We need to
talk to Elena Moranu. Could you give me her number?”

“Like I said the other day, I don’t know that
person.” His voice was patient but weary.

“Mr. Barlow, give me her phone number. And tell me
which hotel you use.”

“I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

“Mr. Barlow, this is the last time I’m gonna ask.
Give me her phone, tell me what hotel you use, and tell me the name she’s using
for the room. If you don’t give me that information in the next ten seconds,
I’m gonna contact all four networks and the newspaper, give them your address,
and tell them we’ve broken a major prostitution ring here in town. Then, once
they set up their satellite trucks outside your house, I’ll send over three
squad cars. Lights and sirens.”

“That’s absurd. You wouldn’t—”

“Nine, eight, seven, six—”

“All right. Stop. Let me look up her number.” He
put me on Hold, then picked up again and read me her phone number.

“If I phone her now, is she gonna pick up?”

“She might be working now.”

“Where?”

“Comstock Hotel.”

“What name will she be using?”

“Crandall. Helen Crandall.”

“All right, Mr. Barlow. Thank you. One more thing:
if you contact her and she’s not there when we get there, I’m coming for you,
and I’m bringing Vice. Do you understand me?”

He hung up, which I took to mean yes.

Ryan and I headed out to the Charger and drove to
the hotel. The Comstock, built almost a hundred years ago, was a four-story
brick and wood-framed building with gingerbread ornamentation on the outside.
Back then, it was a tourist attraction because it had the first elevator in the
city. It’s on some kind of historic register because Teddy Roosevelt and a
couple other presidents stayed there on their way to someplace else. Otherwise,
it would have been torn down decades ago.

We walked into the drafty,
echoey
lobby full of ugly dark wood lit only by dim chandeliers hung from the carved
box ceiling. I showed my shield to the middle-aged, doughy guy at the desk and
asked what room Helen Crandall was in. He said it’s against their policy. I
said I need to speak to the manager. After a tedious but relatively quick
back-and-forth with a woman in a dark grey suit who agreed with me that a story
about hookers using her hotel would interest the local TV stations, we learned
Krista was working in room 306.

We took the elevator to the third floor. Even
through the thick wool floral carpeting, our feet squeaked on the wooden floors
in the hallway. I knocked on the door of room 306. There was some sort of a
commotion inside, then a man’s voice, muffled, said, “What the fuck?”

I knocked again. “Rawlings Police Department. Open
the door.”

A few seconds later, the door opened. A fifty-year
old man, bald, wearing a sleeveless undershirt and black socks, was gripping a
towel that didn’t quite make it around his super-sized waist. “What do you
want?”

“Good afternoon,” I said. “We need to speak with
Ms. Moranu.”

“Who?”

“The red-headed woman in there. The one you’re
paying to screw you.”

“I’m not paying her.”

Sometimes I wish I knew how to persuade people to
do what I want without threatening them. Other times, like now, I don’t give a
shit. “My partner and I are gonna stand in the hall for sixty seconds. Then
we’re gonna go into the room and arrest anyone who’s still inside. How many of
those sixty seconds you want to spend discussing this issue?”

Watching him drop the towel, turn, and scurry back
into the hotel room, I thought, as I think several times on a typical day, they
don’t pay me enough money to have to see things like that.

After fifty-two seconds, he emerged, wearing his
slacks and the sleeveless undershirt but carrying his shirt and shoes. Krista
had used the time to put on matching translucent black panties and bra and
plant herself in a sun-bleached armchair next to a small end table with a copy
of
Montana!
magazine on it.

The heavy, dingy bedspread had been tossed off to
the side. I found a relatively undisturbed section of the bed, near the foot,
and sat down. Ryan remained standing, near the door, looking down at his shoes.
“We can wait while you put on some more clothing, Ms. Moranu.”

She waved off the suggestion with a flutter of her
hand. “I did not take money.”

“Yeah, we know that. You’re not a prostitute.”

“Why you come here? What you want?”

“We need to talk about some things.”

“I tell you everything already.”

“Well, you know how cops are. We want to talk to
you some more.”

“Then talk.”

“Tell us about Robert Rinaldi.”

“Who?”

“You want to talk at headquarters? We can hold you
for twenty-four hours before we charge you or release you.”

Her gaze drifted off toward the white painted door
with the glass knob that led to the bathroom.

“Tell us about Robert Rinaldi. Have you ever met
him?”

She looked at me. “No.”

“What I think is, he was upstairs Monday night. I
think you and Virginia were arguing because he had come to town to tell his
mother she couldn’t have you living in her house. Is that right?”

She sat there in her underwear, trying hard to
look like she hadn’t even heard me.

I stood. “Elena Moranu, you’re under arrest for
prostitution.”

“He was not there then.”

“But he had been there.”

She nodded.

“And that was why he was in town, right? To tell
his mother she had to get rid of you.”

“Yes.”

“And Virginia told you
you
had to go?”

“Yes.”

“You agreed?”

“Yes.”

“You told her you would come back to get your
things?”

“Yes.”

“Did you come back after the class that night?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Too upset.”

“So you didn’t see her again before you learned
she was dead.”

She lowered her head and began to sob quietly, her
hand coming up and covering her eyes.

“Where were you that night? After nine.”

“My apartment.”

“Were you alone?”

She looked up, scowling, as if I was asking
whether she did a guy that night. “I was alone.”

“We need to talk about a few other things. Tell us
about the guy with the beard and the baseball hat, the guy who videoed you and
Abby.”

She looked confused. “Beard and baseball hat? No
guy like that.”

“Ms. Moranu. We’ve been very patient with you. You
say you’re not a prostitute? Fine, you’re not a prostitute. We don’t arrest you
for doing that fat guy who just ran out of the room. But you
gotta
work with us. You can’t just deny everything we say.
There are a bunch of people who told us about the fight at Virginia’s house,
about the porn video, about a lot of things. If you don’t tell us a better
story, guess who we’re gonna arrest for killing Virginia?” I paused, but she
wouldn’t make eye contact. “One more time: tell us about the guy with the beard
and the baseball hat.”

“No guy like that.”

“The guy you brought to Abby’s place? That wasn’t
what he looked like?”

“Didn’t bring guy to Abby’s place. Guy already
there.”

“You’re saying you went to Abby’s place alone, and
the guy who shot the video was already there?”

She nodded.

“What did he look like?”

“Average.” She pointed to Ryan. “Smaller than
him.”

“How old was he?”

“Twenty-five maybe. Blonde hair. Little …” She
rubbed her fingertips on her cheeks.

“A little stubble? Like he hadn’t shaved in a day
or two?”

She nodded. “Stubble.”

“Did Abby use his name when she talked to him?”

“Didn’t say much to him. No name.”

Ryan reached into his briefcase, which was sitting
on the floor at his feet. He pulled out the photo roster from Virginia’s porn
course. “Do you see him here?”

She glanced at it for a moment. “No.”

“Look again,” Ryan said, his tone low and stern. “Look
harder.”

She furrowed her brows to make a show of looking
harder. “Still no.”

“The guy,” I said. “Was he Abby’s boyfriend or
something? Did they look like they knew each other well?”

“Not that I see. He didn’t say anything. He was
excited to be filming. Two women sex.”

“After the sex, Abby gave you money and you left,
right?”

“Yes.”

“The guy stayed there?”

“Yes.”

“Ms. Moranu, tell us about the party at Alpha Phi
Sigma.”

“What party?”

“We have witnesses putting you there. And a couple
of selfies with you in them. You don’t look too good. What were you doing
there?”

She looked down at her hands. “Working.” She
raised her eyes. “You arrest me?”

“We’re investigating the murder of Virginia
Rinaldi. That’s all we’re interested in.” I turned to Ryan. “Would you show Ms.
Moranu the chart?”

Ryan walked over to her and handed her the paper
with the numbers crossed out and “$/Fuck” at the top.

She looked at it, frowning. “What is?”

“This was taped to the wall in a room at Alpha Phi
Sigma. It shows that somebody paid a woman—you—five-hundred dollars. Ten people
had sex with that woman. With you.” I pointed to the number at the bottom. “So
the price per fuck was fifty dollars.”

She seemed to be preoccupied, as if her mind was
someplace else. Or like it wasn’t her at the fraternity.

“Ms. Moranu, did you hear what I said?”

“I heard.”

“Was that you? Was that you at the fraternity
party?”

“Yes, think so.”

“You agreed to have sex with ten guys?”

“Agreed to five-hundred dollars.”

“You don’t remember ten guys?”

She shook her head. “Don’t remember.”

“Were you drunk?”

“One drink. But don’t remember.”

“That’s rape.”

She laughed softly. “What you do about that?”

“Can you identify any of them? The ten guys?”

She looked at me. “No.”

“Ms. Moranu, did you know it was a ‘Bye, Bye
Virginia’ party?”

Ryan held up the banner, and she stared at it.

She looked at me, puzzled. “I don’t understand.
What do words mean?”

“It means that the boys in the fraternity were
happy that Virginia was dead.”

“Why that?”

“They’re idiots. Virginia wanted people to
understand what life was like for sex workers. That it was a business run by
people who own the websites and the magazines. And the people who run the
girls, like Christopher James Barlow.”

“Happy that Virginia was dead?”

“That’s what I said.”

Elena Moranu started to shake. She shifted in her
chair. Tears started to roll down her cheeks. She wiped them away with her
fingers but soon she couldn’t stop them. She bowed her head and covered her
face with both hands. She began to groan in frightening, low tones.

Ryan started to move toward her. I waved him back.
She moaned and wept for a good minute. Then, she lifted her head, her cheeks
stained with mascara and eye shadow, her red lipstick smeared all over her
chin.

She pointed to Ryan. “Give me pictures.”

Ryan retrieved the photo roster from his briefcase
and walked over to her.