Vindicator

by Denney Clements

  They were in the barn-wood paneled study at Carol’s house on Courthouse Street in Ouimet. Sadie sat at a scarred oaken library table behind which, on the wall, arose four shelves of books; her fingers were poised over the keys of her big Mac laptop. He was sitting behind her right shoulder so he could see the screen.

  “So why use the name of some dead newspaper instead of something more contemporary?”

  “I want to revive the brand and infuse my blog with that same scrappy spirit.”

  Carol strode into the room and pulled up a chair next to Emery. “Is this girl giving you grief?”

  Emery smiled. “Not at all. She asks questions until her curiosity is satisfied. She’d make a terrific reporter – um, forget I said that. Not a good career choice right now.”

  Sadie was ignoring them. She’d typed “The Vindicator” into a text box on her screen. As her slender fingers flew over the keys, the right occasionally gravitating to the mouse, the text grew big, then orange, then red, then burnt gold. Then she transformed the logo into a truncated wedge, energizing it by making it seem three-dimensional.

  “That’s perfect, Sadie,” Emery said. “Did you learn web design up at Fort Hays State?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Right here at Ouimet High School. Junior year. I’m in advanced computer science classes at FHSU. I'll probably get into coding after I graduate.”

  “Well, I'm honored to have your help.”

  “No problem,” she said. “What next?”

  “Underneath the Vindicator logo, write ‘Spotlighting the Slugs Sliming the Sunflower State’ in smaller type with the S’s all capitalized. Maybe it could be in italics?”

  As she was typing the phrase into a text box, Carol rapped him gently on the temple. “Where have you hidden the real Joe Emery?”

  “Is it too much?”

  “No, I really like it. It’s so in-your-face. It just doesn’t sound like you – my conception of you, I mean, based on our brief acquaintance.”

  “This is the real me you’re seeing, freed from his corporate cage.”

  “Well, I like the real you,” she said, squeezing his arm. “It’s refreshing.”

  Sadie twisted in her chair, rolling her eyes. “Get a room, guys.” She turned back to her Mac.

  Emery took a chance. He whispered, “Not a bad idea,” into Carol’s ear.

  Her eyes widened. She let go of his arm.

  Crap. Too bold. He had never been good at interpreting women’s signals. Wishing he’d kept his feelings to himself, he forced his attention back to Sadie.

  Her completed design for The Vindicator banner was more polished and eye-catching than most of the blog banners he’d seen. To the left of the gold-on-black logo, she inserted a painting of a blue pot of sagging gold sunflowers. She’d found the image in an open source clip art file. It was the perfect symbol of the sour spirit pervading Kansas in this time of recession and culture war.

  Then he directed Sadie to the dashboard behind his new blog site. She clicked on the “design” tab. Within minutes, she’d set up a template and dropped in his new banner. Asking him to make choices along the way, they then established the look of his new publication – headline style, body-type font, an organizational scheme for the posts he’d be making, color scheme and information about himself. When this was done, she saved it all down.

  He was in business. Still embarrassed by his gaffe with Carol, he thanked Sadie, asked daughter and mother to excuse him and, picking up his tech bag, retreated to his room.

  There he began blocking out his first post for The Vindicator, an interview, conducted yesterday, with former FBI captive Ted Brody. The post would include several minutes of video. It promised to be a bombshell. After nearly two weeks away from the story, Emery was finally ready to advance it.

  Later, after midnight, he lay in bed reading Haruki Murakami’s “A Wild Sheep Chase” by the dim light of a bedside lamp. Carol and her mom, Rose Brody, had ensconced him in the guest room over the garage, accessible by a two-story walkway from the house. The other three bedrooms were on the second floor of the house.

  His room, which included a bathroom with a stall shower, was cozy, thanks to electric baseboard heating and, Carol had told him, heavy insulation in the floor, walls and ceiling. Her dead husband Mike, she said, transformed a falling-down house – purchased for peanuts and, thank God, fully owned – into one of the nicest houses in town.

  The floor creaked and the door edged open. In crept Carol in slippers and a long flannel nightgown.

  “Good. You’re awake. I want to know why you said that down in the study. You’ve made it impossible for me to sleep.”

  Heart pounding, Emery decided to push ahead rather than apologize. “It’s simple,” he replied as he sat up. He looked her in the eye. “I’m in love with you. I can’t keep my feelings in check any longer.”

  “So you want more from me than sex?”

  “Yes, Carol. I want all of you, including, frankly, sex. There’s never a moment when you’re not in my mind.”

  She looked him in the eye, trembling. “You really, really mean that?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve been trying to work up the courage to talk to you about my feelings, too. I love you, Joe. But I wasn’t sure how you felt about me.” She peeled off her nightgown. “Move over. I’m getting in with you.”

  On Friday morning, Sadie and Rose were seated at the kitchen table, sipping coffee, when Carol and Emery came down in their nightclothes and bathrobes. Carol, who was clutching his arm, had insisted they make a joint entrance rather than try to hide their enhanced relationship. It was a little after 7.

  Neither daughter nor mother seemed surprised to see them together in such intimate fashion. Rose, a handsome, stocky woman in her seventies, appraised the couple for a tense moment, then nodded. “Good. It’s about time.” To Emery she said, “She’s been mooning over you since the day she came home from Los Llanos. And I could tell you wanted her. That you got my Teddy sprung from jail is all I need to know about you. You’re a good man.

  “As for you, young lady,” she said to Carol, “I’m relieved you finally allowed a man into your life. I’ve been thinking about fixing you up with Marlon the widower over at the Chambers feedlot.”

  “God, Mom,” Carol exclaimed. She was blushing. “I’d rather die a spinster than be with Marlon. He always smells like cow flop.” To Sadie she said, “Are you all right with, Joe and me as a couple?”

  “He seems like an OK guy, Mom, but he’s a little old for you and I wish he had a steady job.”

  “He has his own business,” Carol retorted, “and it’s going to be a success. And, believe me, he is not too old.”

  “God, Mom. I was kidding. I like him and I’m glad you care what I think.”

  Embarrassed but pleased, Emery thought, I could get used to this.

  Chapter 12: White Van

  October 29, 9 a.m.

  While previewing the Ted Brody video, Emery realized that the young man came off as wild-eyed and unreliable. Prior to the recording of the interview Wednesday in Carol’s front parlor, Ted had rebuffed pleas from his sister, his mother and Emery that he change into a collared shirt and shave the stubble off his face. During the recording, Carol’s “baby brother,” now 31, seemed a disheveled paranoid nutcase – an impression intensified by the computer’s small proscenium arch.

  Emery briefly considered publishing only a text report on the big scoop that Ted had handed him. He decided, however, that (a) the video gave the story a wallop that text alone could not provide, (b) no one expects environmentalists to look neat, and (c) if anyone had a right to seem unhinged on camera, it was Ted.

  After all, as Ted recounted during the interview, the FBI had burst into this very room during Rose’s 73rd birthday party. As family and friends looked on in horror, they jerked him to his feet and cranked handcuffs so tightly onto his wrists that he’d bled. He showed the mostly healed circular wounds to the camera.


  Then, Ted continued, the FBI agents, Lorca and Barlucci, shackled his ankles and frog marched him out the front door under the porch light, in view of a throng of curious neighbors, pushed him into the back of a Suburban and carted him off to jail for almost three days – without bothering to obtain an arrest warrant.

  Emery glided in when Ted paused to take a breath. “My former newspaper and other media have covered those aspects of your experience. But while you were in the Los Llanos jail, you learned something that the media haven’t reported. Can you tell us about it?”

  “The white van,” Ted said, clenching and unclenching his fists. “They asked us about a big white late-model Dodge van. What did we carry in the van? Did we transport the depth charges in the van? Did we work with Middle Eastern terrorist bomb-makers who might have used the van to get the explosives to the Gunderson Reservoir? Where did we hide the van? And on and on with ridiculous questions like that, for hours.

  “Well, we told them over and over that the Plains Keepers can’t afford a van of any kind. But those jackboot thugs kept asking us about it over and over the night we arrived at the jail and throughout our first full day there. The bastards.”

  “Did the interrogators later return to the subject of this van?” Emery interjected.

  “Yeah, on the third day, a few hours before they let Mr. Bernier take us home, they brought it up again. At this point, thanks to your newspaper story exposing their abuse of our constitutional rights, they seemed to believe the Keepers didn’t blow up the dam and we were innocent.”

  “And they asked?”

  “They asked if we’d seen this white Dodge van during our trips to the reservoir. One reason they pulled us in is that we’d been over at the lake, below the dam, 10 days before the dam blew up and again two days before that poor kid and his dad got killed. The second time, we were over there with cameras shooting stills and video on the damage that damming the Kiowa has done to native ecosystems. We were working on a documentary.”

  “What was your response?”

  “Why didn’t you morons ask me that in the first place, before dragging us over here? Hell yeah, I saw a van like that early in the morning at the campground below the dam, two days before the dam blew up. There were four guys with it keeping to themselves. No one else was there that early in the day. These guys were looking at the dam and the earthworks on either side of it. One guy had binoculars and another was snapping pictures.”

  “Anything else you can tell us about that van?”

  “Yeah. I saw that the van had a Kansas tag on it.”

  “A Kansas tag. Were you able to get the tag number or read the two-letter county code?”

  Ted shook his head. “I wasn’t close enough to read that stuff, and I didn’t think to take pictures of the van. But I could tell it was a Kansas tag, you know, the light blue background with the dark blue letters and numbers, the same kind of tags we have on our cars.”

  Emery leaned in close to his subject. “Now, some folks are bound to ask why you and apparently only you were able to see this. They're bound to be skeptical.”

  Ted pushed his face closer to Emery’s and declared, “I did see that tag.”

  “Close enough to see what kind of tag it was but not to read the number.”

  “Yeah, maybe 20 or 30 yards away. It was parked facing upstream at the edge of the campground parking lot, so I could see its rear end. The men with it were in front of it looking up at the dam, like I said.”

  “How did you happen to be in that position? Where were your friends Craig and Harry?”

  “They were farther downstream, trying to get video showing how alluvial silt from the dam’s spillway had smothered plants and breeding pools for darters and other small endangered water creatures. I was heading to where my car was parked to get some coffee. When I saw the men with the van, I waited in the brush along the bank until they'd finished whatever they were doing and drove off.”

  “About how long was that?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe 10 or 15 minutes.”

  “Why didn’t you just go get your coffee?”

  “Something about those men. I got this feeling it wouldn’t be wise to let them see me.”

  “What about them made you feel this way?”

  “They were big and looked, well, like the kind of people who hassle conservationists. I felt intimidated.”

  “So,” Emery said, “to summarize, the van was from Kansas, out there in Colorado, with its occupants taking a powerful interest in the structure of the dam. And the FBI, having apparently decided you were innocent, was trying to figure out who brought the van to the lake. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  After finishing with Ted, Emery had called Craig Ledbetter and Harry Percy and, without revealing what Ted had said, asked them the same questions. They had seen the big Dodge drive in and park that morning, as they were working their way down the riverbank but hadn’t noticed much more about it. Neither had seen the license tag.

  He called the FBI’s Denver office for verification and comment but got stonewalled. When he asked to speak to Dan Deal, he was given a Washington, D.C., number that turned out to be the FBI’s main switchboard. The operator there professed not to know who Deal was.

  Emery also called the Los Llanos Sheriff’s Office and asked for Cowan, but was told he was out of the office until Monday, and that no one else was available to talk to him about white vans or any other aspect of the investigation. He included local and federal law enforcement’s refusal to verify or refute Ted’s account in the post.

  With Sadie’s help, Emery, still wearing robe and pajamas, uploaded the video to his blog and posted it, along with a text lead-in, at about 9 a.m. The headline: “DID DAM EXPLOSION ORIGINATE IN KANSAS?” He called Cushing to alert him that the story, with video, has been posted. Within moments, The Vindicator banner appeared on the Spotlight home page with a hyperlink to the story beneath.

  Then, figuring what the heck, he e-mailed the link to Pete Sarantos, adding, “Pete: I know you probably can’t use this but wanted you to see that I’ve advanced ‘The Story’, which appears to be a Kansas story after all. Best, Joe.”

  To his pleasant surprise, the link appeared soon after on the WichitaOnline.com home page, under a small two-line headline: “Kiowa River Dam Explosion: Kansas-tagged van at crime scene.”

  He called Sarantos, who answered on the first ring. “You’re probably wondering why we posted the link. Nice work, by the way.”

  “Thanks. Yes, I was wondering that.”

  “You can’t see it, but I’m shrugging. We don’t have enough boots on the ground to cover the news, so we’re relying on what our friend Angela Brun calls ‘credible outside sources’ to supplement the daily report. I decided, on my own, that you're a credible outside source. Hope that’s OK.”

  “You know it is. Thanks, Pete.”

  Later that afternoon, Cushing called while Emery and Carol, who had left work early, were necking on the couch. Giddy as a teenager, he reported that the Vindicator link on the Spotlight site had gotten hundreds of hits with more coming in by the minute. Emery logged onto his blog provider’s web site and checked his page views: 838 after only six hours. About half had watched the entire video.

  “The Vindicator is off to a good start,” Carol murmured, nuzzling his neck.

  “Yes, it is,” he said, “but that’s not important right now.” He kissed her.

  Chapter 13: The Comment

  November 1, 12 p.m.

  Back in his condo, the drive home having been mercifully uneventful, Emery went to the community mailbox, stepping carefully past a smashed jack-o-lantern on the walkway beside his front door. He sorted through the envelopes, mostly junk, and culled out his power and gas invoices. The way things were looking, bills should soon no longer be a source of anxiety.

  Upstairs, he set the bills on his kitchen counter. Then he picked up the pumpkin chunks
on the front walkway and put them in the trash.

  After a quick bite of leftover spinach quiche, he booted up his laptop and opened his blog. He was pleasantly surprised that his post on the Ouimet City Council’s high speed broadband venture had generated 213 page views and more than two dozen comments.

  When he’d completed and posted the piece on Sunday, along with a photo of one of the town’s two WiMax towers, he had low expectations it would generate much traffic. A small town’s quest to provide residents subsidized, powerful web access didn’t fit The Vindicator’s snarky “Spotlighting Slimy Slugs” theme. And urban dwellers, his target audience, seemed unlikely to care about a western Kansas town’s high-tech initiative to stanch economic decline.

  The comments showed how wrong he was. Some decried Wichita’s lack of a wireless cloud and angrily blamed the phone and cable companies for conspiring to restrict city netizens to Wi-Fi hotspots or to paying ridiculously expensive rates for high-speed home Internet service. Others deemed the Ouimet council “socialists” for subsidizing cheap, high-speed interest for residents and nearby rural folks. Several western Kansas readers complained that the WiMax provider, Kan-Tel, had extorted too much money for the service from Ouimet’s government leaders.

  In hope of triggering more comments, Emery chimed in with his own comment: Small towns like Ouimet would have no Internet service – or dial-up at best – if public governing bodies hadn’t worked with rural telephone companies to “correct” the market. This engendered a storm of replies, many agreeing with Emery. Some called him a socialist.

  Emery crafted an edgy rebuttal: Those who thought market forces alone could save declining towns from extinction “must be smoking something that addles their critical faculties.” There ensued a flurry of new comments, among which appeared this one, from “murraygunderson”: “Emery. You’re back online. Good. Google Lazlo Harrelson.”