Vindicator

by Denney Clements

  “What about Eunice Swindle? Was she reporting to Complet about Alpha-Omega?”

  “Interesting you should ask that. She e-mailed me that report that led us to Richards Security on Monday. Because I got sick, I never got around to telling you that she slipped her mobile number into the report.” He found his black notebook amid the tabletop clutter and shuffled through it. “Here it is.”

  “You think she wants to talk to you?”

  “I can’t imagine why else she’d include that number in her contact information. Today’s her last day as secretary. I’ll call her tomorrow. Right now, I want to …”

  “You were about to say eat dinner, read or watch TV for awhile and then go to bed and cuddle up with me, right?”

  “Um, right. What, now you’re a mind reader?”

  Swindle, it turned out, was not happy to hear from Emery, who reached her early the following morning. But when he asked her why she’d sent him her mobile number if she didn’t want him to contact her, she admitted she’d wanted to establish a line of communication with him. “But as I’m sure you can understand, Joe, I have mixed feelings about it, given my current legal difficulties.”

  “Then let’s explore what you are and aren’t comfortable telling me,” he suggested. “No pressure. No pressure at all.”

  “Fair enough.” She rattled off a landline number, which he copied down. “Call me from a landline with a non-cordless phone and we’ll have our discussion.”

  So Emery picked up a notebook and a pen and went to the kitchen, where Rose’s old-fashioned rotary phone was mounted on the wall. He called Swindle’s landline number. “The main thing I want to know,” he said when she answered, “is how you got roped into dispensing the ARC grant money.”

  “I’m willing only to speak to you off the record,” she said. “I do not want to go to prison and do not deserve to go to prison. So, nothing on background that could feed the Harmon inquisition. Agreed?”

  “Sure.”

  “The main thing I want you to know, so you’ll stop implying otherwise on your blog, is that I had nothing to do with dispensing the ARC grant money – except, unfortunately, allowing my good name and my good offices to be used in that endeavor.”

  “At the risk of offending you, Eunice, that is hard to believe.”

  “No offense taken, Joe. I know how it looks. But my only crime – and it probably is one – was in doing nothing after it became clear that money was going to be misappropriated.”

  “When did the clarity begin, Eunice?”

  “Two years ago, after Ernest Complet joined the administration and set up his shadow government.”

  “Again, how did you get roped in?”

  She sighed. “Ernest came to me shortly after the governor appointed him and said he needed to expand the mission of the ARC, which at that point was dormant, and that he would be directing its operations and funding through the department’s board.”

  “Who had been overseeing the ARC funding up to that point?”

  “A powerful politician – not the governor. I would rather not identify him. As far as I know, his role in the ARC has ended.

  “Anyway, I told Complet I needed the governor to tell me about the new arrangement. He said he’d been given the authority to handle that and that I shouldn’t trouble her about it. So, I went along with him. I was afraid he’d have me fired. I really, really enjoyed my job and now I’ve lost it anyway, and am in legal trouble to boot.”

  Emery didn’t know what to say to that. So he asked, “What level of detail about the ARC spending did you have?”

  But she replied, “I’ve told you all I’m going to, Joe. All I ask is that you stop making me look like a criminal mastermind when I’m not. I’m just a fool.”

  Chapter 37: Murder, He Wrote

  December 17, 8:30 a.m.

  Snow flurries outside were building toward a blizzard, which, according to the Dodge City TV weatherman, would hit full force in the late afternoon. But the house was toasty warm. Emery carried his second cup of coffee into the study, made a note of the time, and settled in at the table for his four hours’ work – maybe more if he felt up to it.

  His body had adjusted to the steroids, so the whirring in his head had abated and he’d slept well the past two nights. Last night, he’d even managed to make love to Carol for the first time since their wedding night.

  The only immediate source of tension was that Sadie and Juwan were en route to Ouimet from Hays. Sadie had taken her last final Thursday and was coming home from Fort Hays State for the Christmas break. Juwan called from Scott City at about 8 to report that visibility was adequate and the roads, thus far, were dry. Carol would not stop fretting until they arrived.

  His plan for today was to dig deeper into Kan-Tel, which somehow was linked with the hyenas from Alpha-Omega. His working hypothesis was that the hyenas had removed perceived obstacles to the telecom’s relentless march toward dominance of the rural phone and Internet markets. But, as yet, he had no idea how this linkage might have been accomplished.

  The documents that Aaron Renke had furnished him, which he’d perused the day before, were of little help. Most Ouimet residents, the true owners of the former telephone co-operative, were eager to trade higher phone rates for more reliable service and town-wide Internet service. The sale of the co-op to Kan-Tel, financed with a one-mill property-tax reduction for 10 years, drew only token resistance.

  As for the Ouimet WiMax system, Carol’s friend Betty June Palmer, the town’s economic development director, had been working on a high-speed Internet plan before Kan-Tel made its bid for the co-op. The company was only too happy to step in with a proposal to handle the whole project. The politics of the deal had been purely about the size of Kan-Tel’s subsidy. As Renke had said, the council didn’t try very hard to beat Kan-Tel down on price.

  The only Kan-Tel public faces involved in the deal were the ever-popular Albert V. Spritzer and Gloria Munday. Munday had handled the “governmental relations.” Spritzer, as Kan-Tel’s CEO, had inked the contracts.

  So: The first order of business for today was to call Gloria Munday and work her over for more information. But as he was reaching for his smartphone, it chirped. He looked at the display. Mike Harmon.

  “Joe Emery. What’s up, Mr. AG?”

  “What’s up is that Eunice Swindle and her husband, Harry, have been murdered. I'm out at their house with a KCID investigative team now.”

  “My God. How? Who?”

  “What did you and she talk about yesterday?” Harmon demanded. “Her mobile phone shows that you called her.”

  “I did. Let me lay it out for you in context,” Emery said. He turned on the smartphone’s audio recorder. Then he told Harmon about Swindle’s initial stonewalling on his verbal request for information about the ARC, his subsequent open records request and her surprise reply via e-mail on Monday.

  “She sent me a PDF of 50-some pages on discretionary spending on agricultural research, including so-called construction at the Garfield County complex.”

  “So you know about Alpha-Omega.”

  “Yes, and that Alpha-Omega is really Richards Security, which I deduce, but can’t yet prove, is the company that provides the goons. I also deduce, but don’t really know yet, that Michael Richards, whom the police killed at my condo complex two weeks ago, is the son of the company’s owner, Frederick Richards.”

  Harmon let out a long, ragged sigh. “Even when you’re laid up, Emery, you’re thorough. I’ll give you that. How did you get Swindle’s mobile number?”

  “She included it on the front page of that PDF she sent me. So I called her on her first day out of office: yesterday.”

  “This could be relevant to the murders. Can I put you on speaker phone? Captain Charles Stamos of the KCID, who’s now heading up ARC investigation, including the Swindle murders, is with me.”

  “Sure. Hi, captain.”

  “Hello, Mr. Emery. Can you describe the conversation in
exact detail?”

  Emery told Stamos and Harmon the whole story blow-by-blow, including her insistence that he call her landline number from a non-cordless landline phone. “My mother-in-law has an old rotary phone in her kitchen, so I called Eunice back at the number she specified from in there.”

  He recited the number he’d called and the Ouimet house landline phone number. He then read Stamos his notes on the conversation.

  “That’s all she said?” Stamos asked.

  “We talked maybe 20 minutes. Some of that time went to switching from cells to landlines. Plus, she resisted my efforts to get her to talk about the disposition of the money or who had been funneling money to Alpha-Omega before Complet took over. All she’d say is that it was a powerful politician who isn’t Gov. Hodge. Her main interest was spinning me to make her look like an innocent victim of an evil man, Complet.

  “Now can you tell me what happened to Eunice and her husband?”

  Harmon said, “Both found dead here at their farmhouse up in Jackson County a little over hour ago, by their adult daughter, Agnes Herington, who lives nearby. Harry was in the kitchen, in a chair, slumped over the table. Shot once in the back of the head with a pistol, a .22. Eunice was in her bed, shot once between the eyes, likely the same gun, apparently in her sleep. Neither one saw it coming. No suspects at this point, though it looks like a professional hit. Medical examiner estimates times of death at about 5 a.m.”

  “That’s chilling. Someone from Alpha-Omega you figure?”

  “Could be. By the way, this is all off the record, Emery,” Harmon said.

  “Bull-shit. That has to be established in advance. You know that. I’m going to publish a post on this as soon as we hang up, which will be now unless you wanted something else. Besides, I've cooperated fully with you, held nothing back. And I’ll bet you’re planning a press conference for later this morning, right?”

  “Right, at 11 o’clock. Go ahead with your post. But please leave out any references to Alpha-Omega and Richards. OK?”

  “OK. I'll omit them for this post, as long as you don’t mention them at the press conference.”

  “I won’t. We don’t want them to know we’re onto them.”

  “I suspect they know that already. It’s a matter of public record. I'm not the only one with the wit and initiative to dig out that information. All the media are on the scandal story now, and these murders will feed the frenzy. One last question: Any idea why they were murdered?”

  Stamos said. “To shut them up, presumably. She was a loose end. Poor Harry was in the way.”

  “What about Harold Ramsey? Are you going to look out for him? They probably regard him as a loose end, too.”

  “We’re already working on that. He’s scared to death,” Stamos said, “though the fool is too stupid to tell us what he knows. On the advice of his attorney, he’s telling us nothing. Even the offer of immunity and a protected place to hide won’t budge him. But we have the Shawnee County sheriff watching over his house in Auburn anyway, even though he doesn’t deserve it.”

  Shuddering as he imagined the cold, efficient killing of the Swindles, Emery asked, “Planning to beef up security for Ernest Complet? He could be a loose end, too.”

  “No,” Harmon said, “Screw him. Off the record …”

  “No,” Emery said. “I only want information I can use.”

  A pause. “OK. Enough said. We’re done.”

  “Thanks, gentlemen,” Emery said. “Got to write.” He shut off the call.

  He then opened his cell phone directory, scrolled down to Natascha Schroeder’s mobile number and pushed the call button. She answered on the second ring, demanding, “What do you want, Emery?”

  “Why so hostile, Natascha?”

  “Well, for openers, your nasty post about poor Mrs. Hodge the other day.”

  “Why else?”

  “Because I lost someone … and it’s your … I’m sorry, Emery. I've been distraught ever since ... What did you want?”

  “Does the governor have any comment on the murders of Eunice Swindle and her husband overnight?”

  “What? They’re dead?”

  “Just got it from the AG. Up in their farmhouse in Jackson County. You haven’t heard about it?”

  “No,” she whispered vehemently. “What happened to Eunice and Harry?”

  He told her the story in digest. He said, “I take it the governor doesn’t know yet?”

  “I don’t think so, Emery. I’d know if she’d heard about it. ... Oh, my God, Emery. What is happening around here?”

  “I think you know the answer to that, Natascha.”

  She began sobbing. “I have to go, Emery. I need to find out about poor Eunice now so …” The phone clicked dead.

  It was now 9:20 and he was working against an 11 a.m. deadline. He didn’t have time to transcribe the audio of his conversation with Harmon and Stamos. So he batted out, stream of consciousness, a rough draft of a post on the murders of the Swindles. He included a sentence saying the governor was unaware of the murders as of 9:10 a.m. and had no immediate reaction. Then, as the audio of the conversation buzzed through the Bluetooth device he'd planted in his ear, he worked back through the piece, making a few additions and corrections, and posted it under the headline FORMER AG SECRETARY, SPOUSE MURDERED.

  A little before 10:30, as he was re-reading the piece online and correcting two grammar busts and a typo, Sadie and Juwan arrived home. Idea: He needed to get to the scene of the action. Perhaps he could finagle a ride to Topeka with Juwan, who was planning to spend Christmas with his family in Lawrence. He could rest on the way and rent a car once he got there. He could surprise Schroeder and maybe Complet, tomorrow, at their homes, and face them down.

  This not-so-brilliant plan died aborning. Juwan was planning to spend a day or two here with his sweetie before heading back east. Emery was not quite selfish enough to ask him to leave before he was ready.

  To boot, the blizzard was now in full sway. The north wind was howling in the eaves. Snow was banking against the vehicles in the driveway and against the garage door. At 2 p.m., the Highway Patrol had closed all east-west highways between I-70 and the Oklahoma line and between the Colorado line and just west of Wichita. They weren’t expected to reopen until midday Saturday. Travelers were advised to stay off the north-south highways as well. So Emery forced himself to relax and enjoy the company of his loved ones.

  Chapter 38: Relapse

  December 19, 4:30 a.m.

  Late Saturday afternoon, after a day of fretting, Emery told Carol he wanted to ride east with Juwan as soon as the roads were clear. The Swindle murders had broken The Story wide open. Harmon and the KCID might be moving on Complet, and Natascha Schroeder might know the link between state government and the Alpha-Omega thugs and be induced to explain it. In his conversation with Schroeder Friday, he sensed she was ripe for conversion to a prime background source – obviously she couldn’t go on the record. He had to get to the scene of the action or his competitors could – probably would – take over The Story. OK with her if he made the trip?

  “I’m not your mommy,” she said. “Do what you want. My only concern is your health – that, and having you here for our first Christmas together. That means a lot to me.”

  “I know. I’d be back well before Christmas,” he said. “I’d only need to go for two days plus travel time – three days at the most.”

  “Then you’d better talk to Juwan about hitching a ride.”

  “I’ll sleep on it and decide in the morning,” he said.

  “That’s a good idea,” she said, smiling. “As you do that, assess your physical condition as objectively as you can. I know you’re feeling a lot better but you’re a long way from being well.”

  During the night, however, the steroids kicked up, depriving him of deep, healing sleep. Now, he gave up trying to sleep, donned his robe and retrieved the book he was reading, Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time,” from the nightstand. H
e made his way downstairs to the kitchen in the dark, brewed a pot of coffee and sat down at the table to read. His head began pounding a few minutes later.

  Carol found him an hour later, head down on the table. “Oh, Joe. You’re not doing well, are you?”

  He groaned, sat up and hugged her around the hips. “I’m kidding myself if I think I can go anywhere,” he rasped.

  “Come on back up to bed,” she said, gently tugging him to his feet. She helped him up the stairs and back to their bedroom. She sat on the bed, back against the headboard. “Put your head in my lap and let me rub your temples,” she whispered. He lay there, admiring the gentle swaying of her breasts beneath her nightie, relaxing under the gentle ministrations of her fingers. The pain seeped away.

  He awoke, weary but free of pain, at 11:30. Downstairs, he found Carol, Rose and Sadie in the kitchen, preparing Sunday dinner.

  “The Highway Patrol opened the roads,” Sadie said, kissing his cheek as he sat at the table, “and Juwan is gone. I miss him like crazy. I’m going to Lawrence to see him between Christmas and New Years. He wants me to meet his family.”

  “How do you feel, sweetie?” Carol asked Emery.

  “Better, but not great. I’ve never been this sick before in my life. I hate it.”

  “We hate it, too,” Rose said. “It’s disconcerting when the man of the house is laid up and can’t provide.” She winked at him.

  “Miraculously, Mom,” Carol said, “he still is providing, even in his weakened state. Arthur deposited $2,000 into his bank account on Friday.”

  “It’s our bank account, sweetheart,” Emery said.

  “I saw this morning before church that your last post, the one on those murders near Topeka, has already gotten 8,000 page views and more than 300 comments, even though the other media are all over the story now.” Sadie said. “As your web administrator, I logged into the dashboard and tidied up the site. The Vindicator is huge. People really believe in it.”