THE FOUR SEASONS lobby was empty when Kelly and I arrived. The clerk, probably a Georgetown student, was reading a biology book. I flashed my credentials and said, “I’m Special Agent Perry—FBI. This is Agent McPherson. I’m wondering if we could see the phone records for this number.”
He looked at the number I gave him. “This number doesn’t belong to a specific room. The hotel has lots of numbers like that to accommodate the guests.”
“Well, can you print out a list of all the outgoing calls from your guests?”
“Sure, but what’s this all about?”
At times like this, when we don’t have a warrant, we could play hardball and still not get what we want. Or we could be nice and solicit his help as a patriot. I prefer the latter. The trick is not to lay it on too thick. One time I used the name of a popular president in an attempt to finesse a citizen and found out that he didn’t like the guy. I’ve learned to keep it simple.
“All I can tell you is that this could be very important to a murder investigation.”
“Okay, no problem,” he said, eager to help. “It’ll take a while though.” He hit a few buttons on his computer terminal and the printer started. Half an hour later, it stopped. “These are all the calls that went out yesterday.”
Kelly and I looked at each other, thinking this was going to take forever. But it was all we had to go on. We sat in Kelly’s Stingray trying to decide what would be the best way to tackle this in the least amount of time. I gave her half of the printout, and we started looking for a room from which someone had called the Taylor house. I noticed that the telephone logs were in numerical order by room. They were also logged in time increments. All we had to do was cross-reference the times we’d written down from the caller ID and cell phone.
“I think I got him,” I told Kelly after about a half-hour of fruitless searching. “Winston Keyes, room 961. He made four calls to the Taylors.”
We went back into the building and asked the clerk if Winston Keyes was still registered.
“No, I checked Mr. Keyes out late Wednesday night.”
“Damn!” I said. “Was he alone?”
“Yes.”
“Did he have any visitors?”
“That I don’t know.”
“How did he pay for the room? Did he use a credit card?” I asked, hoping he had so we could track him when he used it again.
“Paid in cash.”
“We’re going to need to see your security tapes,” Kelly said.