Vindicator

by Denney Clements

  “Sounds like he parlayed his fame as a crime fighter into a great new job,” Carol said after they watched the video on the kitchen computer.

  “Yeah, the slimier they are, the better they do,” Emery growled. “I’m half tempted to let that e-mail to Jung go through.”

  “Don’t you dare. Can’t we please just have a long period of peace and boredom? You can’t imagine how much I crave boredom.”

  Emery smiled. “Of course we can, sweetheart. I didn’t mean it. It’s enough to have altered the course of Kansas history.”

  He went into the study. He deleted the Jung message from his e-mail servers. After storing the post on the blog server, he deleted it from his hard drive. He uploaded the Harmon audio to the blog server and saved it down. He e-mailed a warning to Kendra Wendell to leave both files in storage. It would be safer to keep these damning materials in Cyberspace, he figured, than to leave them on the laptop.

  After a moment of reflection, he searched for the website of Brown and O’Shea, a Topeka law firm. He found the e-mail address of Thaddeus Brown, Mabel Hodge’s lead attorney, and wrote it down. He turned on his anonymizer and opened the Clarion web site. He located the Wofford story, clicked the “e-mail this story” widget, filled in Brown’s e-mail address, wrote “Wofford was Wolfowitz” in the message box and, after another moment of reflection, clicked the “send” button. This was all he owed to the woman who’d tried to have him killed.

  Then he shut down the laptop. He was already feeling bored. It didn’t seem so bad.

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