Vindicator

by Denney Clements

  Intrigued, Emery posted a notice urging his followers to be sure to vote in Tuesday’s election and promising analysis and comment beginning Tuesday night. Then he disengaged from the discussion. Opening the blog dashboard, he pasted murraygunderson’s IP address into an IP-identification service to which he’d just subscribed. The results, a suburban Salt Lake City zip code, told him murraygunderson was using an anonymizer to hide his real location.

  Emery opened his favorite search engine, Dogpile.com, and typed “Lazlo Harrelson” into the query box. From the resultant clutter, he gleaned a 2007 Arkansas newspaper article saying someone by that name was a Stuttgart, Arkansas, police officer, age 25, who was cashiered for use of excessive force. Last month, several Arkansas newspapers reported that the parents of this same former police officer had not heard from him in awhile and were appealing to the public for information on his whereabouts.

  Emery called the Stuttgart newspaper, the Tribune, and asked for the city editor. A young-sounding woman, Grace Mercer, came on the line. “The reporter who wrote the Harrelson piece is no longer with us thanks to cutbacks.” she said.

  “I can relate. Laid off from the Wichita Examiner last month. Now I’ve started a news blog, The Vindicator, at KansasVindicator.com, one word. I’ve continued working on the sabotage of the Gunderson dam out in Colorado.”

  “I saw your Examiner stories on that,” she said. “They were of interest down here. The Kiowa flows through Arkansas, too. Great work. I wasn’t aware you’d started a blog but I’ll take a look at it.” In a lowered voice, she added: “I’ve thought about starting one of my own, you know, get out ahead of the next wave of cutbacks?”

  “Look into it,” Emery said. “It’s risky but it’s exhilarating. I just got mine up last week and it’s already showing promise. Hard work but, so far, fun.”

  “As for Lazlo,” she said, “he got into trouble several years back, when I was a cub reporter out of the U. of A. Beat up on a black kid who was no angel and who, according to witnesses, some of them also black, kicked Lazlo in the groin. Really hurt him. Hard to fault a guy for losing it over something like that.”

  “So he didn’t deserve to lose his job?”

  “Some, me included, saw the firing more as political correctness than a fair outcome. You know, racial politics. But who’s to say? The best cops keep their emotions in check, no matter what happens to them. Lazlo apparently has anger-management issues.”

  “Now he’s missing?”

  “That’s what his folks said when last we talked to them, maybe three weeks ago. He took a security job somewhere out of state, they’re not sure where, and he hasn’t checked in with them in two months. Usually calls his mom once a week. They asked us to publish a story in hope he’d see it and call them. That’s about all I know.”

  Emery asked, “Does he have a military background?”

  “Don’t know,” she said, “but I can try to find out if you want.”

  “No need. I can do my own legwork. I’m sure you’re really busy.”

  “Too busy,” she replied, “on a whole bunch of hogwash. Give me your e-mail address and I’ll see what I can dig up. It’ll be fun. I miss reporting but I had to take this promotion to survive.”

  He thanked her and rang off. He thought over what he'd learned. Security job out of state? Realizing that murraygunderson, whoever that was, was trying to lead him to the next installment of The Story, he reopened his blog. He pasted the comment into a Word file and deleted it from the blog.

  Then, acting on a hunch, he picked up his land line phone, called the Los Llanos Sheriff’s Office and asked for Martinez. The chief deputy came on a minute later.

  “It’s Emery. Can you talk?”

  “Not here. Later. You know the drill.” Click.

  Crap. He had no choice but to wait.

  Using the land line again, Emery tried Martinez’s home number at about 7 that evening. A polite little girl answered and went to get her father.

  “Sweet kid,” Emery said after Martinez came on.

  “Yeah, she’s my little Adelita. What did you want?”

  “Does the name Lazlo Harrelson mean anything to you?”

  A pause. “Check your comments again in about a minute. Same procedure as earlier today.”

  “So you’re … “

  “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.” Click.

  He opened up The Vindicator and clicked on “recent comments.” Sure enough, there at the top was one from murraygunderson. He opened it, pasted the message into his text file and deleted it from the blog. Then he read the comment: “Lazlo is the 3rd dead body. Legrand (coroner) confirmed this Sun.”

  Just to make certain no one else had this new development, he did another “Lazlo Harrelson” search on Dogpile. Nada. He keyed in ColoradoMuckrakers.com to see whether they had anything more on the Los Llanos disaster. The last dam-related story they had concerned the FBI leaving Los Llanos the week before.

  He decided it was safe to wait until morning to solicit Legrand for the Harrelson forensics. He had the story to himself. Ready to stand down for the evening, he called Carol for the third time since leaving Ouimet that morning. They talked for nearly an hour.

  On Tuesday morning, Emery went to his local polling place in the meeting hall of the St. John Greek Orthodox Church. He voted for Steve Jung, Mike Harmon and the local Democratic Kansas House incumbent, Martha Reichel, who still believed, as he did, that government played a necessary role in public life.

  He got back to the condo a little after 10 and called Martin Legrand in Los Llanos, where it was an hour earlier. When the coroner came on the line, speaking with a pleasing Hispanic lilt, Emery identified himself and said, “Dr. Legrand, I understand you’ve been able to identify the third person killed in the dam explosion last month.”

  A sigh. “I cannot and will not lie to you. His name is Lazlo Harrelson.”

  “If it’s OK with you, I’d like to record this conversation.”

  Another sigh. “That is acceptable.”

  “What else can you tell me about Lazlo Harrelson, Dr. Legrand?”

  “Truthfully, not much. Mr. Harrelson was badly mangled in the explosion, so we had no fingerprints with which to work and dental records were out of the question. We recovered DNA, but found no match in any of the public databases. So we gathered skull fragments and sent them to an FBI reconstruction expert in Denver. From her good efforts we were able to generate a drawing of how he might have looked when alive.

  “At about the same time, we learned that a family in Arkansas had been trying to locate a missing son in the same age range as our subject. So we sent them the drawing. They recognized their son and came here last weekend to identify his remains. Needless to say, they were mortified.”

  “Why was he so badly mangled? Was he right below the dam when the charges went off?”

  Yet another sigh. “The FBI will not like me saying this, but it is not my custom to withhold information from the public, which pays my salary. Mr. Harrelson was in the water, near the dam, when the explosives detonated. As you can imagine, the force of the explosion, as magnified by the density of the water, crushed him. When the state troopers found his body the day after the explosion, about a half mile downstream, it was literally a bag of skin filled with scrambled tissue, organs and bone fragments. And no hands. From neoprene fragments fused to the skin, we determined that he was wearing a gray dry suit with a thickness of three-eights of an inch. Thus far, we have found no air tank, fins or diving mask. But if he were wearing such things, the force of the blast could have shorn them away.”

  “One last question, Dr. Legrand. Did Mr. Harrelson participate in the destruction of the Gunderson dam?”

  “I will not speculate on what role, if any, he played in the disaster, Mr. Emery. My job is forensics only. I can only refer you to the sheriff for that question.”

  “Sheriff Cowan is no longer answering reporters’ questions, doctor.”

 
“He seems to be in the thrall of the FBI,” Legrand said, “but I still cannot help you.”

  Emery thanked the doctor, then called the sheriff and FBI, asking for more details and getting stonewalled by both agencies. No matter. He had more than enough for a great post.

  He had the text, with audio, up on his blog by noon. He included his new friend Grace Mercer in his link e-mail, along with James Schmidt, his producer at the Spotlight, and Pete Sarantos. In response, a little after 1, Mercer e-mailed him the Lazlo Harrelson composite image that the FBI had concocted along with a snapshot provided by his family. “We got these from the family a little while ago,” she wrote. “Hope you can use them. Thanks for sharing your great scoop with us. Cheers, Grace.”

  Emery added the Harrelson composite and snapshot to his post. Then he packed up and hit the road for Ouimet, exultant that he wouldn’t be sleeping alone that night. He had plenty of time to get there before the polls closed. He would regale readers with his post-election analysis from her study.

  Chapter 14: The Mystical Power of Water

  November 5, 10 a.m.

  The Lazlo Harrelson case cried out for further investigation. But thanks to Mabel Hodge’s surprise victory in Tuesday’s election, Emery could not get back to The Story, even though he had a tantalizing new lead.

  This morning, after seeing the Harrelson photo Emery had posted on The Vindicator, Ted Brody identified the former policeman as one of the four men with the white van. Did this mean that Lazlo and his van buddies were responsible for the explosion? Did it mean that Lazlo handled – and somehow bungled – the demolition?

  Of course, Emery mused as he entered Edna’s Café in Cimarron in search of post-election interviewees, it’s possible that Lazlo’s associates had remotely detonated the underwater charges before he was out of the water.

  He pushed these thoughts out of his mind as he approached a table where four men sat over coffee and eggs. Hodge had secured her 2,700-vote victory over Steve Jung right here in western Kansas. He fought her to a draw in the vote-rich northeast, her power base, and in southeast Kansas. He had out-polled her in and around Wichita. But she had stomped him out here. It was his duty to help his readers understand why.

  Emery introduced himself to the men at the table. They were happy to talk to him and didn’t mind if he video-recorded the session. They identified themselves as Elmer Gertz, the Gray County magistrate; Henry McElroy, a farmer and Gray County commissioner; John Hendricks, manager of the local Farmers and Ranchers Bank branch, and Hargrove Pettigrew, who operated six feedlots in Gray and three adjoining counties.

  The men who lived outdoor lives, McElroy and Pettigrew, had tanned faces covered with sun-etched lines. The county commissioner was lean and the feedlot operator looked as thick as the animals he fed for slaughter. Both wore jeans and western cotton work shirts with long sleeves. The indoor men, Gertz and Hendricks, were similarly attired but sported silver-tipped string ties and were paler of face.

  “What’s The Vindicator if you don’t mind my asking?” McElroy asked. “I remember a Wichita newspaper by that name, but it perished, as I recall, about 20 years ago.”

  Pushing the camera pause button, Emery told them his story in digest: He was a former Wichita Examiner reporter turned blogger, and he had revived The Vindicator brand.

  “The Examiner exposed the FBI’s attempt to cover up the sabotage of the Gunderson dam,” Pettigrew said. “I read that story. They don’t deliver out here any more, but I still get it a day late, in the mail.”

  “Yep, that was my story. A few days after I filed it, from out in Los Llanos, they laid me off.”

  “Don’t seem right,” Gertz observed. “Piss poor reward for your good work.”

  “It’s OK,” Emery replied. “I’m my own boss now and I like it, though I’m not making much money yet.” He pressed the camera’s record button. “I wanted to ask you gentlemen how you voted this week in the governor’s race, if you don’t mind telling me, and why.”

  Hendricks snorted. “They probably voted for Hodge, even though Elmer’s the only real Democrat here. She got him his judgeship. She’s got a lot of folks around here fooled.”

  “I take it you voted for Jung?”

  “Yes sir. He’s a good Christian man, a law and order man, who debunked Hodge’s attempt to claim credit for the water flowing in the Kiowa.”

  “She didn’t claim the credit,” Gertz retorted. “She merely pointed out the odd justice of the disaster, that water is flowing reliably in the Kiowa for the first time since they built that dam, back when I was a little boy. She’s no mealy-mouthed politician. You have to love her for that, even though the disaster turned out to be terrorism.”

  “I don’t love her,” McElroy said, “I’m a Republican and won re-election that same day but I voted for her. There, I said it.” The other men were looking at him in astonishment.

  “You really did vote for her?” Hendricks demanded.

  McElroy nodded. “Jung’s little water lecture before the election showed how little he understands the psychology of western Kansas. He talked as though we were children. It pissed me off.”

  Pettigrew chortled, “Now Henry’s an expert in psychology.” More seriously, he added, “He’s got a point, though. You folks in the east can take your water for granted. Out here, out past the hundredth meridian, water is scarce and precious. Jung and Harmon telling us the dam was good for us? That was patronizing. And that additional water the AG got for us in that settlement with Colorado? It was a pittance. Damn straight I voted for her, even though she’s a socialist.”

  Hendricks said, “Well, you got the socialist part right, Harv, but the rest of your speech is bunkum.”

  “Bunkum,” Gertz snorted. “Give a man a fancy KU education and he forgets how to say bullshit.”

  Hendricks grinned. “I kept my language clean before I went to the University of Kansas, thank you very much. Mama raised me right.” To Emery he said, “I get emotional about water, too, because the water supply out here determines whether our banks have good years or bad years. Water from the river and the Ogallala Aquifer is the only reason we have more than a subsistence economy.

  “But unlike these guys, I’m rational enough to understand the importance of water management and not to throw away my vote because some fast-talking politician plays to my emotions.”

  “I like you a lot, John,” McElroy said, “so I won’t hold it against you that you despise politicians.”

  “You may hold elective office,” Hendricks rebutted, “but no one ever accused you of being fast-talking. That’s why I voted for you on Tuesday.”

  Gertz guffawed. “Why did you bother? Old Henry was unopposed.”

  Joining the ensuing laughter, Emery stopped the camera. He thanked the men for talking to him. Back at the curb, he fired up the Grand Prix and headed west toward Ouimet. This interview mirrored the nine others he’d conducted Wednesday, Thursday and today in cafes around the region. A majority of the folks he’d talked to, both women and men, admitted voting for Hodge over Jung but all agreed the election was about water. Even folks in towns outside the Kiowa Valley, where the surge from the fallen dam had exerted no visual impact, admired her for standing up for water justice. McElroy was right. Water was the foundation of public discourse, including politics, in these parts.

  Hodge’s tasteless remarks out in Los Llanos last month, Emery concluded, were anything but extemporaneous. They were a calculated campaign tactic, and they had worked.

  Back at Carol’s study, Emery spent the next several hours editing the video he’d shot that day and writing an analysis of the impact that the water surging through the Kiowa valley had exerted on the election outcome. Regardless of what group sabotaged the dam, and its reasons for doing so, Hodge had seen the opportunity that the disaster presented and seized it. By using the flowing water to leverage perhaps 1,000 western Kansas votes that would normally have gone to Jung, she had flipped the election outcome and held on
to power.

  Before he posted the package late that afternoon, he looked up the main number of the Colorado governor’s office. He wanted to double-check his conclusions. It took him 15 minutes to reach the man himself.

  “Good to hear from you, Mr. Emery,” Roy Franklin said. “I’ll instruct my press office to put you right through the next time you call. They’ll e-mail you a better phone number.”

  “I appreciate that, governor. I just wanted to follow up on one aspect of our earlier conversation.”

  “That there was a method to Mabel’s madness at that press conference, which I am still trying to live down, by the way, though we couldn’t see it at the time.”

  “Right. Do you see it now?”

  “The election results speak for themselves.” Franklin said. “She no doubt had polling data showing she was in trouble in the east and overcame that disadvantage in the west with her tasteless remarks and attack on me.”

  “Any clue how she knew it would work?”

  Carol stole into the room and kissed him on the back of the neck. He patted her bottom. She pulled up a chair next to him and placed a proprietary hand on his arm.

  “I told you not to underestimate her,” Franklin was saying. “There was a lot of residual anger in western Kansas over the water settlement. She gambled that voters would forgive her crassness in exploiting the murders and property damage for political gain. She played the water-is-justice card in Los Llanos and won the pot.”

  “OK if I quote you on that?”

  “If I had a problem being quoted, I wouldn’t have agreed to talk to you.”

  “Switching gears, you saw my posts on the white Dodge van and Lazlo Harrelson?”

  “Yes. If you want me to talk about that, we’ll need to go off the record.”

  “That’s OK. I’m just trying to figure out my next move.”

  “Fair enough. Two points on the van and the men who rode in it. One, the supposed Kansas connection relies on the recollection of a single source who has a problem with authority. Two, tags can be stolen and swapped out. I don’t know what the FBI thinks. But our state investigators are not so sure the van came from your state, though there is little question it was at the dam in the days before the disaster. Multiple witnesses confirm that, though your source seems to be the only one who noticed the tag.”