Guilty Minds

The hotel that Jillian, my office manager, had booked for us was nicer than the hotels I normally stay in. When I’m traveling on my own dime, I’m partial to the kind of budget hotel that has a coffeemaker and refrigerator in the room and a waffle iron in the breakfast area off the lobby. When someone else is paying for it, though, I like to live well. I work hard for my clients; why shouldn’t I enjoy the perks? This hotel had sumptuous décor and five-hundred-thread-count bed linens. My suite had a separate living room and an ergonomic desk chair. It was a nice hotel. No in-room coffee machine, though.

I unpacked quickly, changed into sweatpants and a T-shirt, and called Dorothy. Her room was directly across the hall. She said she was in her bedtime attire but would quickly change and knock on my door. I ordered a steak from room service. Dorothy said she’d already had her dinner.

A few years back I’d hired Dorothy away from the private intelligence firm in DC where we both worked, Stoddard Associates. Jay Stoddard had hired her out of the National Security Agency. She was skilled at cyber investigations, and digital forensics, and she was unshakably loyal to me. I was loyal right back-there were certainly better digital forensics people around but no one as persistent and determined as Dorothy. I’d uprooted her from a comfortable life in Washington, and, though she never reminded me, I never forgot it.

She knocked on the door long before room service arrived. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. She always wore her hair short, but recently she’d been wearing it practically buzzed, to go with the complicated arrangement of piercings on the helixes of her ears. (I was the only one in our office whose ears weren’t pierced.) She was barefoot. Her toenails were painted the same bright shade of pink as her fingernails.

“How’s your brother?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Too late, I just did.”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you some other time.”

“Tell me now.”

She surveyed the room as she entered. “How come you got the executive suite, with the separate living room and everything? You probably have two bathrooms, too.”

“Just one. All I need.” I ignored her question. “Are you going to tell me about your brother?”

“Some other time.”

“Okay.” I usually knew when to stop pushing.

“Internet’s blazing fast for a hotel, by the way.”

She took a glass from atop the minibar and filled it with water from the bathroom sink. Then she sat down in the big wingback chair in the corner of the living room.

“Did you see Representative Compton’s member?”

“I didn’t click through. But I saw the piece.”

“Why are we worried about a trashy online gossip site that runs pictures of congressmen’s dicks? Who’s going to pay any attention to what they report?”

I poured myself a Scotch from the minibar. I wanted ice but didn’t feel like going out to the ice machine or calling room service again, and neat was fine anyway. “It’s all about the life cycle of scandal,” I said. “Everyone pays attention to Slander Sheet, whether they admit it or not, but the serious news establishments, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, aren’t going to report any scandal that comes out on Slander Sheet until it becomes just too big to ignore. And when they do, they’ll report it at a slant. They’ll report on the existence of a scandal, a controversy. Holding their noses. Meanwhile, they’ll send their own reporters to reweave the case. Pretty soon they’ve done their own wave of stories. Then come the ancillary stories, the featurettes on the principals. You can just see the piece on Kayla Pitts, can’t you? Young college girl from rural Mississippi comes to the nation’s capital and gets corrupted. Innocence meets the dubious morality of DC. Very House of Cards.”

“You know it.”

“By then they own the story. They’ve got an equity stake in the narrative.”

“But if you’ve got the proof it couldn’t have happened…?”

“Remember the Duke University lacrosse case? These three poor college guys, members of the Duke men’s lacrosse team, were accused of rape. Their lives were turned inside out. Turns out it was a false accusation. Totally made up, by someone with a history of that kind of thing. Yet it took the mainstream media eight months before they acknowledged the whole story was just a hunk of pulp fiction.”

“I know. I remember.”

“So a false allegation like Slander Sheet’s about to run could do Claflin some serious damage. Once the mainstream media picks it up.”

“You think Slander Sheet’s really going to run with it?”

“For now, that’s what it looks like.” I told her about getting a beer with Mandy Seeger and how badly the meeting had ended. “Can you do a little digging into her?” I said.

“What about?”

“Why in the world she left The Washington Post for Slander Sheet, of all places. I don’t get it.”

She nodded. “You told her about the evidence you found, right?”

“She doesn’t believe it. But I get a feeling it’s not up to her.”