Discretion (5 page)

Nicole sank down on the edge of the tub. She tried to think of someone she could call, anyone who could help her, advise her, or just tell her everything was going to be all right. There was no one. She pulled her knees tight to her bare chest and hugged herself. She was shaking.

What had she done?

5

A
nna had been at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for almost two years, which in USAO time made her a relatively senior prosecutor. She had her own office on the tenth floor, a step up from the little room she’d shared with Grace in the beginning. Compared to the offices of law firms, it was shabby—tired blue carpet, scuffed walls, a row of battered filing cabinets. But it was hers. Behind her desk, a window overlooked the homeless shelter at 2nd and D streets. A few blocks behind the shelter, the U.S. Capitol glowed white against the black sky.

She’d perked up her office with plants on the windowsill and colorful Romare Bearden posters on the walls. An array of colorful toys lined her desk: a squishy yellow stress ball, painted turtles with bobbing heads, a game where you tried to catch little plastic fish with a little plastic rod. Children liked to hold something when talking about difficult subjects. During countless interviews, Anna had watched the stress ball being squeezed by little hands as their owner described what Mommy’s new boyfriend had done.

Anna grabbed a Clif Bar—she still hadn’t had dinner—and hurried down the hall toward the red exit sign. She walked down two flights of stairs and emerged into the Law Library. It was quiet except for the hum and blink of fluorescent lights. Most legal research was done online, from lawyers’ desks, these days. But sex-crime prosecutors used this library more than anyone else in the office.

Two computers sat against the far wall—the only computers in the office that weren’t blocked from viewing sexually explicit websites. In Anna’s line of work, she frequently had to go to such sites. A few idiotic federal employees had surfed porn from their work computers, and now the whole federal government was blocked with filtering software.

She logged on to the network and went to www.TrickAdviser.com. She’d been to this site for a few cases. It was the nation’s leading customer ratings site for prostitution, and she’d convinced the office to pay for a VIP membership. It had proved invaluable in a number of investigations. Anna didn’t prosecute prostitution itself but had handled many cases where prostitutes were raped or assaulted. From ten-dollar prostitutes to thousand-dollar escorts, the sex trade was a dangerous business.

If she’d been gathering evidence to use in a later prosecution, she would have partnered with a police officer so he could testify about it later. But right now she just wanted to check out an idea.

The home page popped up. Today it was a picture of a young woman wearing only a string thong, lying on her stomach on satin sheets, arching up and looking at the camera through her eyelashes. Her breasts were bare; her buttocks made a heart-shaped silhouette behind her head. She was the “featured provider” of the week.

A loud thump behind her made Anna flinch. She looked back. A janitor was pushing a big garbage can through the library door.

“Oh, hey, Marcus,” Anna said.

Marcus stared at her computer and froze. “Um, I’ll come back later.”

The janitor clanked the garbage can against the doorjamb and tripped in his haste to back himself out of there. She suppressed a laugh and turned back to the screen.

TrickAdviser.com was like a sleazy
Consumer Reports
for the high-end sex trade. Men who frequented escorts used the website to describe their experiences and rate the women on a scale from 1 to 10. They could also check out what other people had said about different women. Users took it seriously, leaving incredibly detailed descriptions of their sessions. The women who were rated took it even more seriously. It was a matter of compensation. If a woman got consistently good ratings, she could charge more for her services. If she got bad ratings, it could destroy her career. High rollers would only hire women who got the best reviews on TrickAdviser.

Anna ran a search for escorts in D.C. named Sasha—the name she’d seen on the necklace around Caroline McBride’s neck. A professional girl wouldn’t be listed under her real name. TrickAdviser listed four Sashas in D.C. Their profiles had no photographs, only text. But there was one whose vital statistics seemed to match the woman who’d fallen from the Capitol tonight.

SASHA

General Information

City: Washington, D.C.

Agency: Discretion

Phone: n/a

Website: n/a

E-mail: n/a

In/out: Outcall

Delivered as promised: Yes

On time: Yes

Porn star: No

Appearance

Build: Skinny

Ethnicity: White

Age: 21–25

Height: 5’6”

Transsexual: No

Breast size: 35–36

Breast cup: C

Implants: No

Breast appearance: Youthful

Hair color: Blond

Hair type: Straight

Hair length: Below shoulders

Piercings: None

Bikini line: Shaved

Tattoos: Egyptian eye, lower back

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There was a section called “Services Offered” which listed a variety of sex acts and combinations of people the prostitute might service. They ranged from the traditional to the I-didn’t-know-that-was-possible. Sasha was a “yes” for everything. She did it all.

Anna had cringed when she first read these profiles, where women were reduced to a sheet of specs like a car for sale. She’d wondered whether all men thought of women this way. She had long since gotten over that sensitivity. Now she read the macro with an eye toward finding evidence.

Anna had never seen a profile like this. The consecutive 10s were rare. And Sasha’s prices were off the charts. A nightly fee of five thousand dollars was the highest Anna had ever seen in D.C., although top New York escorts charged that much. The monthly
option was also something new. Most prostitutes had hourly or nightly sessions.

From an investigative standpoint, the most notable thing about Sasha’s profile was that it didn’t include a phone number, e-mail, or website for her agency. Despite the obvious illegality, most reviews posted that information. How would a potential john get an appointment with Sasha? How did this agency, Discretion, work?

Anna ran a quick search, ranking all of the D.C. escorts by price. When she saw the results, she picked up the phone and dialed Jack.

“Bailey,” he answered.

“Hey, it’s Anna. I assume you ordered a sex kit on the victim?”

“Sure. The medicolegal investigator just got here. The body will be transported to the ME’s office soon.”

“Good,” Anna said. “Can you ask them to check on something? See if there’s an Egyptian-eye tattoo on the victim’s lower back.”

“Will do. Why?”

“I’m on TrickAdviser. I think our victim is the most expensive call girl in D.C.”

6

J
ack hoped that Anna was wrong. He stood on the Capitol terrace with his cell phone pressed to his ear, watching the medicolegal investigator probe the victim where she lay. The crowd had thinned, since McGee had shooed away nonessential personnel. The perimeter around the body was now staked out with yellow tape, and two large portable lights were set up, adding a stark glare to the scene. In the middle of the bright, empty marble circle, the MLI knelt next to the woman’s body, taking her temperature by pressing an electronic thermometer to the forehead.

Jack knew that if the dead woman were an expensive prostitute, the public interest and media coverage would multiply. And every extra ounce of publicity made his investigation more difficult. Crank calls; rumors and speculation; fake witnesses concocting stories to get attention; real witnesses clamming up to avoid it. Elected prosecutors sometimes pounced on high-publicity cases, which raised their profile with the electorate. Federal prosecutors, who were appointed, had less to gain from publicity. Personally, Jack just wanted a clean case. He wanted to find out who had done this and hold that person responsible. If the woman were an escort, he wouldn’t be able to turn around without bumping into
The National Enquirer.

Still, if Anna said something was true, it probably was. One of the things he loved about her was how bright and intuitive she was. He cupped his hand over his phone so the officers wouldn’t hear their conversation. You never knew who might leak something to the press.

“What is TrickAdviser?” he asked. “And why do you think our victim was a call girl?”

As Anna explained, Jack watched the MLI work. Checking for rigor mortis, the stiffness of the body; and livor mortis, its color. This would help determine when and how the woman died. In many
cases, that was a mystery. Jack once prosecuted a mother who killed her three children, then left the bodies to disintegrate in their beds for several months. The remains were barely recognizable as people. It was a human nightmare and also a forensics nightmare. The Medical Examiner—D.C.’s coroner—could only speculate on the cause and time of death for those victims.

Here, however, the authorities knew exactly how and when the victim had died. The guards at the senate carriage entrance had written down the time she’d checked in. The Capitol Police officer who’d seen her fall had noted the time. The authorities knew the how, when, and where. They just needed to find out the who and why.

The most useful thing the Medical Examiner would do was run a sex kit. They would swab the victim’s orifices with long Q-tip-like implements, take samples from her panties and under her fingernails, and comb her body for foreign hairs and fibers. If there was any foreign DNA on her, it could be of tremendous evidentiary value. Semen lasted only seventy-two hours before it degraded to the point where no DNA profile could be determined, so the ME would do it as soon as her body arrived at the morgue. But for now Jack had a simpler question.

He ducked under the yellow police tape and walked over to the medicolegal investigator. He placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder.

“Can I take a look at her lower back?” Jack asked.

The man nodded. The victim was on her side, where she’d landed. With gloved hands, the MLI pulled her suit jacket up and her skirt waistband down, revealing the small of her back.

In the center, where her flesh undulated around her lower spine, was a black-and-white Egyptian-eye tattoo. Whatever protection it was supposed to provide hadn’t worked.

Like the sky
above, the house was dark at one
A.M
. Detective Tavon McGee stood on the front porch of the modest split-level house and braced himself. In a job full of heart-wrenching tasks, this was one of the hardest. He exhaled through pursed lips and rang the doorbell.
After a moment, a light in an upstairs window went on. McGee could hear shuffling at the front door and a frightened female voice on the other side.

“Who is it?”

“Metropolitan Police Department.”

A curtain was pulled back, and a middle-aged woman stared at him from behind the glass. The curtain dropped back into place. “A big black man,” murmured the female voice. Now a boy, maybe fifteen years old, came to the window. Must be her son. McGee held his MPD badge closer to the windowpane.

Columbia was a quiet bedroom community in Maryland, halfway between D.C. and Baltimore. McGee expected they didn’t get many police visits to this neatly mowed patch of suburbia. He held his badge steadily, giving the homeowners plenty of time to check it out.

More shuffling, lights, soft voices. Finally, the door swung open. The boy wore checkered pajamas and stood a step in front of his mother, as if to protect her. The woman wore a terry-cloth bathrobe and an expression of dread. McGee had seen that look on hundreds of parents’ faces when he’d made similar house calls. Everyone knew that a midnight visit from the police meant something had gone horribly wrong.