She would get herself together, she vowed. Earn a few hundred dollars tonight, go back to Christophe Salon, get everything done right. Then she could hire out again for the kind of cash she’d need to pay back T-Rex. Having a plan made her feel better.
She dragged herself to the kitchen, purposely ignoring Caroline’s neat, empty bedroom. The drugs canceled out hunger most of the time, but she might feel better if she could force herself to eat something. As she passed through the apartment’s living room, she
glanced out the window, which was six stories up and had a fabulous view of the National Cathedral across the street. A flash of blue and red down on Massachusetts Avenue caught her eye. She peered out.
A police cruiser and an unmarked Crown Vic pulled into her building’s circular drive and parked illegally. Two uniformed cops got out of the squad car, while a huge black man in a ridiculous light blue suit and fedora emerged from the unmarked Crown Vic. They strode up the walk to her apartment building.
Holy shit. She couldn’t be here.
Nicole ran into her bedroom and threw on brown cowboy boots and a denim jacket, hoping to make her tiny black dress look like street clothes. The rush of movement made her head feel like it would explode. She forced herself to think through the pain.
What do you need to do?
She yanked open her nightstand drawer. There was little left to hide. The cellophane wrapper and a few empty zips went down the toilet. Her glass pipe went into her oversize Hermès bag. What else? The Vaio laptop, her most essential asset. It was the only way she could keep her business going. She stuffed it into the carrying case. She would’ve raided Caroline’s room for money, but Caroline had stopped leaving cash around the apartment.
She slung the bag over her shoulder and rushed into the hallway. As she closed the door behind her, the elevator dinged. She bolted in the other direction. Pushing through the stairwell door, she glanced back. The big guy in the fedora strode toward her apartment with the building manager, the uniforms behind them.
Nicole flew down the concrete steps and emerged into the tony Cathedral Heights neighborhood. She flagged down a passing cab and threw herself into the backseat. As the taxi took off, she rested her head on the seat back.
“Where to, sweetheart?”
She raised her head and opened her mouth, but no words came out. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in years, not since their blowup about Larry. Her friends had dwindled recently, too, as she’d
burned through their goodwill. Caroline was pretty much the only friend she had left—and look what she’d done to her. Nicole choked back a sob.
The driver looked at her in the rearview mirror as they cruised past the Cathedral. When the silence stretched to the breaking point, she gave him an address. She shouldn’t go there—it was just asking for trouble. But it was the only place she could think of.
14
Y
ou’re right,” Sam explained into the phone for the third time that day. “A faxed subpoena isn’t valid service. You don’t have to respond to it. Technically, I should send a pair of armed FBI agents to serve you in person. At your place of business, in front of your customers and neighbors. And then you’ll have to respond in person in front of a D.C. grand jury next Monday. It should only take six or seven hours of your day. But let me make a suggestion. How about we skip the formalities and you e-mail me the information now?”
Anna’s attention was split between her computer and listening to Samantha. The agent was getting results.
“Sure, I’ll hold.” A few seconds later, Sam jotted something down on a legal pad. “I agree, that’s a wise choice. Thank you very much for your cooperation.” She hung up and grinned at Anna. “Trick-Adviser captures its users’ IP addresses, probably sells them to other sex sites. That information might be more valuable than the yearly subscriptions.”
Sam’s fingers flew over her computer, then she made some friendly phone calls to her ISP contacts. When she hung up, Sam looked at Anna triumphantly. “BigBoy89 is Brian Stringer. He posted his most recent reviews from 1312 L Street, Northwest.”
“Great!” Anna was impressed that the agent had been able to find him this quickly. “You want me to draft an affidavit for a warrant to seize the computer and we can interview him together?”
“I don’t need a chaperone. You do the lawyering, I’ll do the interviewing.”
“Interviewing witnesses is lawyering. It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Anna lied. She remembered Sam’s musing at the Capitol about whether to arrest the congressional staffers as material witnesses.
This FBI agent played a lot more aggressively than Anna would, and Anna didn’t want to have vital parts of her case suppressed on account of mistakes. “But whatever this guy’s story is, I’ll want to hear it myself. There’s no time for you to do the interview, write it up in a 302, then drag the guy in here for me to interview him again. I usually go with my officers to interview witnesses.”
“Look, maybe it’s important for you to babysit the MPD, but I’m an FBI agent. I went to law school. I know how to build my case.”
“I’m sure you do. But when we’re in court, it’s my case. I’ll have to defend how we did things. I’m coming on the interviews.”
Sam didn’t respond, just started typing. Anna finished up her subpoenas, then logged on to Facebook. For a prosecutor, social-networking sites were a treasure trove of information. There were a bunch of Caroline McBrides on Facebook, but one showed a profile picture of the woman at the center of this case. Anna clicked on it. Caroline’s privacy settings were more restricted than the public setting, so Anna couldn’t see much. She’d subpoena Facebook to get the information. For now she sent friend requests to a bunch of Caroline’s friends. One of them accepted within a few minutes, allowing Anna to see much of Caroline’s profile, apparently set to the friends-of-friends privacy setting.
Caroline had a typical college-student profile: 354 friends, she liked
American Idol
and Lady Gaga, she had posted some pictures of herself and friends at a bar. Anna scrolled through Caroline’s daily posts. Campus activities, inside jokes, happy birthdays. Then something more relevant. Three months ago, Caroline had written: “Signing up for StrikeBack self-defense class. Anyone want to join me?” Many people liked that post, and a few responded that they couldn’t come. It was the same self-defense class that Anna was taking upstairs with Eva Youngblood.
“Hard at work on FarmVille?” Sam smirked behind her.
“It’s Caroline.” Anna pointed to the profile. “She took Eva Young-blood’s self-defense course.”
“And she still got killed? That’s not much of a class.”
“I’m taking it now. Seems pretty good, actually.”
“Buy a dog. That’s the best self-defense.”
“We should interview Eva and see if Caroline said why she was taking the class.”
“Eventually,” Sam said. “There are a hundred other things that take priority.”
“This could be important. A lot of students take a class like that after a traumatic incident—and a lot of them share that at the first class.”
“Okay, Sherlock. We’ll get to it. First this.” Sam tossed down the affidavit supporting a search-warrant application for BigBoy’s computer. Every search warrant request in D.C. had to have a prosecutor’s signature before it could be presented to a judge. Anna picked up a pen and read the papers. She typically edited these heavily—officers tended to be action guys, not word guys. But Sam’s affidavit was perfect. Anna didn’t have to use her pen except to initial the bottom.
The warrant described how the computer’s owner was engaged in the crime of soliciting for a lewd and indecent purpose. Then it described the premises in which the computer was located and how Sam had obtained the location. It said that 1312 L Street was a historic landmark registered to an all-men’s organization called the Hunt Club.
Anna looked up. “What’s the Hunt Club?”
“Once I get this signed by the duty judge,” Sam said, “we’ll go find out.”
15
N
icole tried to suppress her envy as she walked up the steps to Belinda’s townhouse on O Street. The tree-lined street was just two blocks from the high-end shops and restaurants on M Street, prime Georgetown real estate. Three stories on this cobblestone stretch probably cost over five thousand dollars a month, but Belinda lived here by herself. It was a sign of how well she was doing.
Nicole rang the bell, waited a moment, then rang it two more times. Finally, Belinda opened the door. The beautiful Asian woman never left the house without a full-body armor of couture. Now Belinda wore a T-shirt and boxers, and her long black hair radiated a cloud of static electricity. Nicole had obviously woken her up. Belinda greeted her with naked fury. “What the hell, Nicole?”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah, you are! I heard you fell on hard times, but I gave you a chance. And what do you do? Walk out in the middle of a
service
! Right as the guy was about to pop! I’ve heard of bad sessions, but that sets a new record.”
“Did someone finish him off?”
“Oh yeah,
that’s
a true girlfriend experience. ‘Sorry that chick just flipped out, but let me administer the last few strokes to get you there.’ Do you have any idea how pissed Bill was? He was one of my best clients. I ended up giving him the whole night for free, and I still had to pay the other girls. I
lost
two thousand dollars from that booking.”
“Caroline died last night.”
“What?”
“She’s the one who fell at the Capitol.”
“Oh my God.” Belinda put her hand to her mouth and stared. Finally, she opened the door and stepped back, allowing Nicole in.
Belinda led her to the living room, a modern space with shiny wood floors and lavender walls. She sat on the white couch and gestured for Nicole to sit in the zebra-skin chair.
“What happened?” Belinda asked.
“I have no idea,” Nicole lied. “She was going to meet a client at the Capitol. Next thing I know, she ends up dead.”
“Oh, Nicole, I’m so sorry. I know how close you two were.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Does Madeleine know?”
“I haven’t talked to her in a while. Have you?”
“Madeleine’s not exactly my biggest fan, either.”
Nicole nodded. That was what had bonded her and Belinda more than anything else, although they’d each reached Madeleine’s bad side via different routes. They’d both worked for Discretion, Madeleine’s exclusive escort agency. Madeleine had recently fired Nicole. Belinda had recently quit to start her own agency. Madeleine didn’t take kindly to competition. The last girl who tried it got a visit from one of Madeleine’s enforcers, who stabbed the girl through the hand. Nicole gave Belinda points for the sheer courage of striking out on her own.
“Are you worried about her coming after you?” Nicole asked.
“Yeah. I’m gonna have to do something. Get aggressive.”
Nicole nodded absently. She didn’t really care how the two rival madams hashed out their differences. She had a more immediate concern. “Can I crash here for a few days?” she asked. “The police asked me to vacate my apartment for a while so they can, like, process the crime scene.”
“But your apartment’s not the crime scene, right? The Capitol was.”
“Yeah, I dunno, whatever. They just needed me out, okay? Can I stay here? Just for a little bit?”
Belinda studied her suspiciously. Nicole was suddenly aware of her rumpled dress, her mussed hair, the bruises that appeared on her legs after a night of partying. She didn’t look like the most responsible houseguest. She wished she’d taken a moment in the taxi to wipe the mascara from her cheeks. The only thing she could do now
was look anguished. She was, after all, a woman mourning the death of her best friend. And Belinda had always been a sucker for puppy-dog eyes.
“Okay,” Belinda said. “Just for tonight.”
Nicole exhaled. “Thank you!”
“I need some coffee.” Belinda led the way to the sleek modern kitchen at the back of the townhouse. Nicole followed, her eyes skimming the well-appointed interior, identifying small valuable items she could carry away later.
“Do you have any jobs I can help with this week?” Nicole said.
“Don’t even ask.”
Belinda started making the coffee, and Nicole set up her laptop on the kitchen counter. If Belinda wouldn’t hook her up with a job, Nicole needed to set things up for tonight. She logged on to Backpage and paid for another week of running her ad there. Now that the feds had shut down the Adult-Services section of craigslist, most girls advertised on Backpage. Nicole used to scoff at the Backpage girls. Madeleine had taken care of all her bookings, and she never needed anything as gauche as online advertising. But now that Nicole was on her own, this was the only way to do it.
She had a standard advertisement. These things all were in code. “Fresh,” “innocent,” and “new faces” meant underage girls. “Sophisticated,” “experienced,” and “mature” meant geezers. Nicole’s headline read “College Cutie Will Make Your Dreams Come True.” Inside, she gave her age, vital stats, working name, and phone number and posted a body shot of herself stretched out on a couch, wearing a bra and thong. The photo cut off at her chin. She didn’t want anyone she knew to recognize her. She’d been asking three hundred an hour, but at that rate, she hadn’t gotten many calls. She lowered it to two hundred. She couldn’t charge even close to what she used to. Damn TrickAdviser.com.
At first she’d been getting good ratings on TrickAdviser: 8s, 9s, even the occasional 10. Those were in the glory days, three years ago, when she’d first started at Discretion. Back then she’d used drugs recreationally and as part of the job. So many of her dates wanted to party, and sharing was part of the experience. But then
the drugs became more of a lifestyle. She’d always known she could walk away at any time—until she couldn’t. As she became more addicted, her numbers started to drop. First it was in little increments in the performance category, for things like showing up late or spacing out during conversations. Eventually, her performance really suffered. Sometimes she got so high, in order to get through a hideous date, that she turned into a total zombie and could do little more than lie there. There was even a rating for that: “4—She Just Lay There.”