Vindicator

by Denney Clements

  As they finished reading, Carol said, “Joe, this is powerful and chilling. People need to read it.”

  “It’s powerful all right. That’s what worries me.”

  “For someone to come after us after we publish this would be foolish. The best way for them to make you look paranoid and delusional is to do nothing.”

  “Yeah, you're right. But that assumes the thugs are thinking rationally.”

  She kissed his cheek. “Well, the men at the top, the men who run the goons, would be thinking rationally. Couldn’t they keep the goons in check?”

  He kissed her back. “Probably. This shadow organization, if there is one, seems highly disciplined. And publishing this could bring us new leads.”

  “Put it onto The Vindicator.”

  “I'm thinking the same thing.” He moved the cursor over the “Publish” button beside his post and clicked it with the mouse. Then he clicked the “View Blog” button, opening The Vindicator. There was the post at the top of the “Spotlighting Slugs Sliming the Sunflower State” cell that Sadie had built for him the day before. “Done, God help us.”

  They had a late breakfast. Then they began organizing the files and notebooks piled on Emery’s desk and the floor adjacent to it. Early that afternoon, as the faux rosewood desktop emerged into view, she said, “I found something strange in the second of your four Los Llanos notebooks. It looks like code of some sort: ‘2171 ADU dash GR’.”

  He peered at the scrawl. “Good grief. It’s a license tag number from the night Natascha Schroeder accosted me at the High Plains Inn – the night you and I met.”

  “Yes, the cute redhead whose body language said she likes you.”

  “She does that with all the men she deals with, to get them to do what she wants. This is the tag number from the car she was riding in, a white Impala driven by a big man. I thought it odd that she was riding around in a private car while on state business.”

  “Well, the 'GR' means it’s a Garfield County tag. The county is northwest of Ouimet, out in the middle of nowhere. I doubt a thousand folks live there.”

  “I forgot all about that note in that excitement during the trip home. I’d stashed those notebooks in my tech bag and threw them onto the desk when I got home.”

  “Want me to check the number in the Department of Revenue database?”

  “Sure. I’m still curious to know whose car it was.”

  She tore out the tag notation page and set it on the corner of his desk as she booted up Emery’s old desktop computer.

  “You need a better machine,” she said a few minutes later. “This thing’s slower than molasses.”

  “That’s why I snagged the laptop from the Examiner. Any luck on that license tag?”

  Her brow furrowed. “No, and I don’t think it’s because this machine is so ancient. Unless my query was wrong, that license tag doesn’t exist. And I didn’t mess up the query. What do you think is going on?”

  He thought about it. “Assuming I copied it correctly, it’s a bureaucratic snafu or it’s not there for a reason. And it’s hard to imagine it’s a snafu.”

  “So someone counterfeited a license tag?”

  “Or the tag was expunged from the database for some reason.”

  “Or,” she said, “it was never in the database.”

  “Right. But at least we have another lead. What was a highly placed state official doing riding around in a secret car? I'll go to Topeka Tuesday to see if I can find out. Then I can swing over to Lawrence and pick up Jay Three for Thanksgiving.”

  “Are you going to ask Schroeder about the tag?”

  “I have a friend in the Department of Revenue. First I'll see whether she can help me find out more about that tag. If there’s no reasonable explanation why the Impala tag isn’t in the public record, then I'll ask Natascha about it.”

  “Don’t let her seduce you.” Carol did not smile as she said this.

  Chapter 20: Feedback

  November 20, 7 p.m.

  “You’re in the doghouse, asshole.” Natascha Schroeder hissed after Emery answered his phone. She was calling from an unfamiliar number.

  “Nice to hear from you, Natascha,” Emery replied with all the insolence he could muster. “How can I help you?” He was sitting at his desk reading the dozens of comments on his post – none of them, sadly, helpful in advancing The Story. He turned on his new smartphone’s record function. He'd bought the phone, along with a new laptop for Carol, a few hours earlier.

  “You can take down that libelous post. I warned you earlier not to publish it.”

  “Please, Ms. Schroeder, moderate your tone. I need to let you know I’m recording this conversation.”

  “You sneaky bastard. Don’t you dare record this.”

  “Why not? You’re recording what I say to you, right?”

  A pause. Then, in a lowered voice, she said, “We’re recording this conversation for our own protection because you’re a loose-cannon reporter.”

  “We? Who else is there with you?”

  “Um ...”

  “Some other person or persons are with you, right? I’m getting this echo that suggests you’ve got your phone on speaker.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Roughly 30 seconds elapsed before she said, “Ernest Complet’s here with me along with his assistant and my assistant. We’re in Ernest’s office.”

  “Hi, folks,” Emery said, working some cheer into his voice.

  “They’re too pissed at you to respond.”

  “Calm down, please, Ms. Schroeder, and tell me what the problem is. “

  She drew and exhaled a few breaths, then said, “The problem is that you defamed the governor and her administration by stating, on the basis of one interview with an unreliable source, that we forced you out of your job.”

  “My source, Ms. Hutcherson, told me that someone in Topeka with enough clout to scare Ms. Brun demanded she get rid of me. If she refused, the newspaper would lose its state and local legal notices. You're denying that the threat came from anyone in the administration, right?”

  “Like I told you earlier, we’re not going to dignify your bogus report by playing the denial game, Emery,” Schroeder said. “You’re not worthy of being taken seriously.”

  “If you can’t deny it, perhaps you or Mr. Complet could confirm that someone up there brought Ms. Brun under pressure to fire me, and tell me why. That’s what I really want to know.”

  “Damn it, Emery,” Schroeder said. “Shut up while I tell you what we want from you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “We want you to take down that post.”

  “I will take down that part of the post referring to the loss of my former job if you, or better yet, Mr. Complet, will assert, on the record, that no one in or connected to the Hodge administration pressured my former publisher to lay me off and threatened the loss of the legal notices, a substantial source of revenue for the newspaper, if she refused to comply. As you consider my offer, keep in mind that Ms. Brun well may relent and tell us what really happened. You cannot count on her silence.”

  “I told you: We’re not playing that game. We want the entire post taken down and will sue you for libel if you don’t.”

  “Libel is published defamation of an identifiable individual. No individual was identified in the report.”

  Emery could hear muffled conversation at the other end of the line. Then Schroeder said, “We’re hanging up. Leave that post up on your shitty blog at your own peril.”

  “So now you’re threatening to hurt me?”

  Another muffled conversation. “We mean peril in civil court, Emery, not peril to your person. It’s a legal word.”

  “I’m posting the audio of this conversation as soon as we hang up, Ms. Schroeder. Was there anything more?”

  “You’d better not post …” she shouted. The phone clicked dead in mid-sentence.

  “You’re going to make me an even richer man if you keep poking a
t nests of vipers,” Tom Bernier said the following morning. It was a little before noon.

  Bernier was a tall, barrel-chested man wearing a salmon shirt, gold cuff links, a burnt umber necktie, brown leather galluses, pleated tan wool trousers and brown tassled loafers with gold trim. His long gray locks were carefully arranged to seem windswept but not unkempt.

  He and Emery were sitting in brown suede armchairs in the attorney’s suburban-edge fourth-floor office. The window beside the chairs afforded a westward view over a large oval lake, around which were arrayed shops, upscale eateries and office buildings. In the distance, Emery could see a sleety wall cloud approaching downtown Wichita. The prospect of icy roads had delayed Carol’s departure.

  “I was hoping I could qualify for your special rates for beleaguered small businesses,” Emery said.

  “You know I have a soft spot for First Amendment cases. But I have to charge you something. It won’t be too much. Angela Brun’s playing a weak hand. She may be right, as her Schmittlapp corporate attorney told me yesterday, that we can’t prove she came under pressure to lay you off. But in your post, you didn’t make her out to be a monster, only weak – and human.”

  “I didn’t think she would follow through on her threat to sue me.”

  “At this point, they’re just demanding a retraction with the understanding a suit could follow.”

  Emery shrugged. “I’ve got Hutcherson’s word backing me up, as well as Marcus Tyler’s assurance she’s a credible source. It’s thinner than I'd like but I still can’t retract that part of the piece. I know in my bones it’s true.”

  “Proving you’re in the right could cost you a bundle. But you’ve got shallow pockets, which they know. So I’m thinking this is an attempt to bluff you into a retraction.”

  “Does it help that The Vindicator is a limited liability corporation? And that I have insurance against libel claims?”

  Bernier spread his hands. “You bet. They can’t touch you personally. If they did succeed in shutting down The Vindicator by bankrupting the LLC, you could start another web site under a different name right away. The insurance diminishes their leverage against you considerably. I'll let them know you have it.

  “Finally, as you told Brun last week, discovery will be their worst nightmare if they do sue you. We’ll go after their phone records – land line and mobile – to determine whether there really was a threat and who it came from. Unless your source is lying – or just plain mistaken – they won’t want to risk that.”

  Remembering Tyler’s sermonizing on blogs as a new journalistic art form, Emery said, “What if I offer Angela space on the blog to reply – verbatim?”

  “You’d do that? What if she trashes you?”

  “I’m not afraid to let readers decide who’s credible and who’s not?”

  “Good idea,” Bernier said. “Tell you what. I’ll convey the offer to her attorney today in writing, via fax, while also telling them we can’t honor their demand for a retraction.”

  Emery was back in his condo eating lunch with Carol when Bernier called. Brun’s corporate attorney had accepted Emery’s offer to publish her rebuttal on The Vindicator.

  “They’ll e-mail you the document later this afternoon,” Bernier said. “You’re not to shorten or otherwise edit the statement or they’ll redouble their legal assault on the blog and put you out of business, to quote this jerk. They warn you to write a fair headline. If you agree to those restrictions, they'll promise, in writing, not to sue you for this post.”

  “No problem. If she distorts the truth – or lies – I can always point that out in a comment.”

  “Right,” Bernier said. “Everyone’s a publisher now.”

  Brun’s rebuttal essay, which arrived at dinnertime, two hours after Carol’s departure, was a disappointment. The nut paragraph, buried in the middle of the piece, deemed Emery “a yellow journalist” for reporting Hutcherson’s allegation without corroborating evidence. Emery doubted that most of his readers would recognize “yellow” as an insult. Moreover, cautious legalisms choked the life out of most of her sentences, making the piece, only about 250 words in length, an eye-glazing read. His followers with low thresholds for boredom (most of them, he imagined) wouldn’t make it as far as the “yellow” part. Nowhere in her piece did she deny dismissing him in response to a governmental threat. Interesting.

  He wrote this headline above her piece: “EXAMINER PUBLISHER SLAMS EMERY AS IRRESPONSIBLE JOURNALIST.” He felt a little funny about jazzing up the headline at his own expense. But doggone it, he mused as he clicked the “Publish” button, I've got a business to build.

  Chapter 21: Superior Algorithm

  November 23, 12:05 p.m.

  Emery had a source at the Kansas Department of Revenue, Wanda Willets, who could run down the white Impala’s license tag for him. She’d helped him with such requests many times before.

  He sensed it might be a bad idea to call or e-mail her at her office. So at 9:30, as he was leaving for Topeka, he texted her: “Hi, Wanda. Hope you’re well. Can you run KS tag 2171 ADU for me? Lunch at noon at RM’s Coffee House Burlington Rd? My treat. OK?” He had the mobile numbers and personal e-mail addresses of more than 100 sources written down in a little black notebook.

  “OK Joe,” she texted back a few minutes later.

  But now, as she walked into the crowded café, looking back over her shoulder, he could tell she was upset. He waved at her. She made her way to his table, looking back at the parking lot twice.

  She was a tall woman with gray hair, cut short, perhaps 60, now an assistant director in the department’s motor vehicles division. Under her charcoal wool topcoat, she wore a gray pinstripe pantsuit and a white blouse. Emery had befriended her early in his tenure as the Examiner’s man at the Statehouse, when she was a senior clerk. He stood and hugged her, receiving a warm hug in return.

  As she sat down across from him, facing away from the door and front windows, Emery asked, “What’s wrong, Wanda?”

  “Joe,” she replied, looking him in the eye, “you know I love you but this tag request is pure poison.”

  They paused while the waiter took their order for sandwiches and iced tea.

  After the waiter left, he asked, “So the number I gave you is in your database?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but it’s classified. As soon as I typed it into our internal search engine, Farley Watts, our security officer, came into my office and asked why I wanted that particular number. I improvised and said I’d gotten the middle letter wrong, that I meant to type ‘B’ instead of ‘D.’”

  “Now I’m worried about you. Did this Watts accept your explanation?”

  “I think so. He muttered something about being more careful at the keyboard and wandered off. And I’m an assistant director, way above him in the departmental pecking order. He talked to me like I was a peon. I complained about it to Ursula, she’s the division director, but she said something about sweating these things out until we get better management. Good heavens, that’s four more years now that the governor has been re-elected.”

  “So things have gotten quinky at the DOR under Hodge’s appointee?”

  She nodded, more relaxed now. “Secretary Ramsey. The security part is especially stressful. Sure, we’ve had to tighten up security on the driver’s license side since the feds imposed Real ID on us …”

  “That was the mandate that turns driver’s licenses into de facto national ID cards, right?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Hogwash is what it is. Now we’re responsible for enforcing federal immigration and anti-terrorism laws.”

  “How do these other security measures work?”

  “The Hodge people and Mr. Ramsey’s friends go way beyond the federal mandate. About two years ago, he hired Farley and another mouth breather to protect the privacy of Kansans, as he put it. But they're really there to keep an eye on us.”

  “Were there any classified license tags before the Hodge administration?�
�

  “Sure, we’ve always cooperated with the feds on witness protection and stuff like that, on an as-needed basis. You’d be amazed how many protected witnesses live in this state.” She smiled. “I guess Kansas is the last place the mob would think to look for them.”

  He grinned. “What can you tell me about these more recent tag classifications?”

  “I’m out of the loop on that. They handle all that stuff at the top, you know, the secretary and his appointees, the political people. Supposedly they report to Ernest Complet. We only find out about classified tags in instances like today, when we stumble onto them.”

  Thinking about Carol’s query the previous Saturday, he asked, “What happens when the public requests a classified tag number?”

  She took two bites of her BLT. After swallowing and quaffing some iced tea, she said, “I’m sorry, Joe. I’m famished. To answer your question, I don’t know what happens with walk-ins. I guess those doing the asking just get rebuffed. As for the Internet, our software records their IP addresses for future reference.”

  Emery thanked heaven his old computer had been traded in for recycling soon after Carol used it Saturday. He made a mental note to subscribe to an ISP anonymizer service. “Can you tell me anything about the tag I asked about?”

  “The entry, which came up in red, was only on my screen about 30 seconds, and Farley Watts was harassing me for part of that time. But I do remember seeing something about ‘ARC.’”

  “ARC? What’s that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, Joe, and don’t want to know.”

  “I understand.”

  They finished their lunch in silence. As he gave the waiter cash for their tab, she asked, “Do me a favor?”

  “Sure, Wanda, anything.”

  “Wait about two minutes after I leave and go out the back?”