Vindicator

by Denney Clements

  Man, that’s cold, Emery thought he listened to that part of the audio clip. Was Swindle going to be the patsy for the scandal? Interesting question, but it was time to move on. His main interest now was getting at the why of the hyenas' attacks on innocent Kansans. If he could figure that out, The Story would crack wide open.

  So: As interview requests from his fellow reporters piled up unanswered in his e-mail inbox, Emery located and conversed with four of the five victims mentioned in the police reports that Aaron Renke had unearthed. The fifth Kansan who’d reported unpleasant encounters with hooded men, Ferdinand Cannon of Colby, had apparently dropped off the grid.

  Victim one was Emil Buittoni of Cherokee in southeast Kansas. On a Saturday afternoon in April 2007, he and his wife were hosting his daughter’s ninth birthday party in their back yard. The men grabbed Buittoni when he re-entered his house to replenish the girls’ refreshments. As one of the men held his arms, the other, almost lovingly, had worked over his torso, inflicting terrible pain.

  Buittoni said, in a shaky voice, “The one who had my arms was whispering in my ear. I had better drop my plans to invest in new technology for my Internet business or they’d come back with guns and take out my family. They left me puking blood on the floor in the family room. I spent a week in the hospital in Joplin.”

  “Did you do what they wanted?”

  “At first I was defiant. The Cherokee police chief promised to protect me from them. But he had only two officers, down to one now.

  “I was the only Internet service provider in our town. We got by fine with dial-up for years, but I was planning to upgrade to broadband, and had already borrowed $100,000 for new servers and digital subscriber line equipment. The town leaders really wanted me to do it, as the only other available ISPs were regional or out-of-state. But I returned the money to the bank and folded my business. I didn’t believe the chief and his men could protect my family and me.”

  “So did the town ever get high-speed broadband?” Emery asked.

  “Yep, from Kan-Tel, the company that bought out the independent local phone co-op I was working with. Broadband access is ridiculously expensive, but people sign up for it because they have no other choices.

  “I’ve got a Gambino’s Pizza franchise and I’m making enough to support my family and save for college for my daughter. But I’d be lying if I said it was as much fun as being in the Internet business. Main reason I’m talking to you is I’m sorry I wimped out. And you can quote me on that.”

  Emery’s next call was to Arlen Goodsen in Washington, a town just south of the Nebraska line. His story made Emery’s stomach churn. Three hooded men had burst into his house north of town on a hot July night in 2007. As his wife and teen-age sons looked on in horror, two men beat him up, leaving him with cracked rib. It had taken him weeks to recover.

  “What did they want from you?”

  “They told me to cancel the business deal I was working on. I had a contract with a Chinese company to import these cheap but sturdy aluminum towers for cell phones, wind turbines and a variety of other purposes. They came in a variety of sizes. I had an option on a vacant 12,000-foot factory building here in town. I was working with several cell phone providers to modify the towers to meet their needs. They were expanding rapidly across northern Kansas and southern Nebraska, throwing up new towers as quickly as they could to catch up with demand. My plan would have cut their expansion costs dramatically.”

  “Was Kan-Tel one of the companies?”

  “No. Not much is known about that company, but they’re not in the cell phone business. But they are in the Internet and land line phone businesses. Why?”

  “The name came up in connection with another victim of the hooded men. Could they have benefited by spoiling your business plan?”

  “Sure, I guess. I dropped my plans. Cost Washington at least a dozen new jobs, maybe a lot more if things had gone well. My decision to quit meant slower expansion of mobile wireless opportunities, including mobile Internet, across the area. Kan-Tel could have benefited from that. But I don’t know that it did.”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Regional sales rep for a communications software company in Omaha” Goodsen said. “Commissions plus benefits. I’m doing OK, but I hate being on the road so much and I miss being an entrepreneur. Those men ripped out my heart.”

  Emery’s next interviewee was Sara Nguyen of Holcomb, the daughter, she said proudly, of South Vietnamese refugees who’d settled in nearby Garden City in the late 1970s and taken jobs in the meatpacking plants. Her father had been a major in the South Vietnamese Army. He and Nguyen’s mother had been on one of the last planes out before the fall of Saigon in 1975. “I was born here, in 1981. They managed to send me to Fort Hays State, where I majored in business administration. For awhile I was living the American dream.”

  In November 2007, Nguyen and a friend from Fort Hays State who'd gone into software engineering pitched a wireless intranet inventory system to several of the region’s meatpacking companies. They had attracted interest from plant managers in Garden City, Dodge City and Liberal and lined up some investors. Their concept would have allowed employees with hand-held microprocessors to track every aspect of the plants’ operations from the time cattle arrived at feedlots for fattening until they were slaughtered and processed for sale to grocery companies.

  Nguyen’s proposal was backed by two agreements in principle: one with a Kansas City company that made inventory software compatible with Microsoft’s latest performance management system, the other with a Silicon Valley start-up that manufactured low-cost hand-held devices that could read radio-frequency identification tags. Her plan would have saved the meatpackers hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

  “But one night in December 2007, as I was leaving my office and getting into my car,” she said, “a man in a hood jumped out of the shadows and sprayed my face with pepper spray. The pain was intense. I was coughing and my eyes were stinging.

  “The man took hold of my right hand and bent my index finger back, slowly, until it snapped. He felt me up with his other hand, the creep. The pain was excruciating. He left me there after telling me he and some friends would be back to gang-rape me unless I abandoned my plan.”

  “So you did?”

  “Sure. I was terrified.”

  “So did the meatpackers find some other option for inventory control? From Kan-Tel, for example?”

  “Maybe. They have the Internet business sewed up around here. Maybe the meatpackers did a net-based solution for their performance-management problems. I really don’t know.

  “I’ve got a little convenience store in Holcomb now and I'm negotiating to buy another one in Garden City. I have a sawed-off shotgun, double barrel, behind the counter. Put that in your story. I’m armed and dangerous. It would give me great pleasure to blow their heads off.”

  He reached the final victim, Viviana Stephens, at her home in Coffeyville. But she would talk only off the record. After he agreed, reluctantly, she said, “I used to be a local elected official but I got railroaded out of office and dragged through the dirt. The bully boys who kidnapped me and let me go after a couple of hours were only part of the story. It’s complicated, it upsets me to this day and I just don’t want to talk about it. I’m too bitter. Understand?”

  “I guess,” Emery said. “But the best way to get even with the people who hurt you is to tell your story on The Vindicator. I’m working on smoking them out.”

  “You sound like a determined man,” she said. “But after they drove me out of office, I kind of went to ground and I like it that way. I’m going to get me some payback, believe you me. I’ve been working on that for almost two years. But I don’t want to do it on your blog. It’s too way personal for that.”

  “OK. I’ll respect your privacy and leave you alone. But could you at least write down my phone number in case you change your mind? You can call me anytime.”

  “Sure,
it’s right here on my Caller ID. I’ll make a note of it.”

  “Also, I do have a copy of the police report on your encounter with the goons back in 2008. It’s a public record and I might quote from it in pulling together my story.”

  “Well, I can’t stop you from doing that, but please don’t mention that we talked today. OK?”

  “OK.”

  Now, as Emery set about writing his post, under the headline VICTIMS OF TAX-SUPPORTED THUGS SPEAK OUT, he decided to withhold mention of Stephens – and of Kan-Tel. He needed to do more research into the company and the people who ran it. It was news enough that the hooded goons had been active in Kansas for a long time. He invited readers who knew of similar assaults, or who knew what had happened to Ferdinand Cannon, to get in touch with him.

  Writing the piece took longer than it should. The little Dell laptop he'd extorted from the Examiner kept locking up on him, especially when he was toggling among his blog dashboard, his photo editor and his word processor. But Emery slogged through to the final phase: clicking the “publish” button. He re-read his post online and corrected some typos. He e-mailed the link to the new piece to Schmidt at the Spotlight and Sarantos at the Examiner. The e-mail hung up for nearly a minute before going through.

  Then he dressed in black jeans, a black shirt, his black watch cap and a black pullover and packed his tech bag and gear, including pistol and shotgun, into the Dodge pickup. He had traded vehicles with Stiggy for four or five days. He drove to the turnpike and headed toward Wichita through snow flurries. He’d spend the night in his own bed for the first time in nearly two weeks, and head down to the Black Mesa on Saturday. He was aching to spend some time with Carol.

  Chapter 31: Paranoia Payoff

  December 3, 7:30 p.m.

  Emery left the turnpike 15 miles northeast of Wichita and headed toward the north side of town on a two-lane highway. Traffic was scant, and he’d driven out of the snow flurries that slowed his drive from Lawrence. The night was clear, cold, still and starry. Enjoying the thrumming of the Dodge’s big engine, he was ruminating over his recent phone conversation with Terry Conklin. He’d asked his friend what information, if any, the Kansas Public Life Foundation had on Kan-Tel.

  There came the clicking of computer keys. “We don’t have much information on that company,” Conklin said. “Apparently it’s privately held. But Kan-Tel did get a venture capital infusion from KanTech, which the Legislature established in the early 1990s. The purpose of that agency, you may recall, was to turn I-70 from Kansas City through Lawrence, Topeka and Manhattan and on out to Hays into another North Carolina Research Triangle.”

  “Ah, yes, the Kansas Technology Corridor Corporation,” Emery said, mimicking the voice of a TV announcer. “Greased by public money, pure research moves seamlessly from the four universities along I-70 into high-tech start-ups, spitting out thousands of high-pay new jobs in the process. What twaddle. I’d completely forgotten about it.”

  Conklin chuckled. “Well you might. KanTech never made any measurable progress toward turning I-70 into a research corridor. Instead, the agency degenerated into a slush fund for politically connected corporations that did anything remotely technical in nature.”

  “How much did Kan-Tel get?”

  “They got $750K in 2007 to bring high-speed broadband and better telephone service to rural towns across the state, using off-the-shelf technology. At the time, Kan-Tel, which started as a proprietary phone exchange in Garden City, was snapping up independent Internet providers and phone co-ops and companies around the state as fast as it could.

  “According to the one KanTech document we have on the transaction, a report to its legislative oversight committee 18 months ago, Kan-Tel developed a cash-flow problem because some of the phone exchanges they acquired served towns with no hope of economic revival.”

  “Kan-Tel must have had a public face or two to get public money.”

  “You’re right,” Conklin said. “Their CEO at the time, it says here, was Albert V. Spritzer from Garden City. And their lobbyist/fixer here in Topeka was and is our friend Gloria Munday. They made the requisite appearances before the KanTech board to bag the money. KanTech never got its money back.”

  “Gloria,” Emery said. “She was a marvelous source of statehouse gossip, easy for a hard-working reporter to talk to.”

  “Well built and good looking, too, though that has no effect on me, of course.”

  “Anything else you can tell me, Terry? I should get off the phone. The snow is coming down harder and I need to concentrate on driving.”

  “There’s a lot more information about the deal in the report. Want me to e-mail it to you?”

  “Not now, Terry. If I need the full report, I’ll get it from you later. Thanks.”

  Now, as Emery reached Wichita’s outer subdivisions, he wondered whether he could persuade Munday to tell him the identities of Kan-Tel’s top managers and directors. Likely not but it couldn’t hurt to try. He made a mental note to call her from Oklahoma, assuming he could get one of his phones to work.

  Emery wasn’t about to waltz into his home and turn on the lights without scouting the area first. He parked the truck a half block east of the condo complex. He could see the front door of his unit in the middle of the building, on the second floor. He got out J-3’s night-vision binoculars and scanned the cars along the curbs. All appeared to be unoccupied. He then studied the doorways along the first and second floors. Then he scanned the grounds, concentrating on trees and bushes. No one was lurking in the shadows.

  He got out of the truck, pulling his watch cap down around his ears, and scurried to the east wall of the condo building, thence down toward the parking lot. He ran across the east edge of the lot, protected by shadows most of the way. He was beginning to feel silly.

  Pressed against the trunk of a cottonwood, Emery scanned the garage doors along the ground floor of the building with the binoculars, then the balconies along the first and second floors. No one. He then scanned the parking lot, where maybe a dozen cars were parked. Just as he was ready to conclude that he could safely retrieve the Dodge and park it in his garage, his eye fell upon a dark car at the far west end of the lot, along a hedge of tall red cedars. It was a dark blue Crown Vic, one man at the wheel. He fought down a wave of fear.

  He ran downhill and followed the bank of the Kiowa west about 50 yards. He crept back uphill toward the Crown Vic. When he got within 20 yards, he dropped onto his belly beside a tree and looked at the license tag through the binoculars, hoping to see the tell-tale “ADU” letters. His heart sank. The Crown Vic bore a white and red cardboard temporary tag.

  Of course. The hyenas probably had a stack of temporary blanks for use in emergencies. No one, not even the cops, paid attention to temporary tags. The hyenas could move at will anywhere in the state. Except for the rifleman he'd outed in his first Thursday post, no one knew what they looked like.

  Emery worked his way back to the truck and called Harmon.

  “Emery,” the AG answered. “What’s up?”

  “I may be paranoid but I think one of the ARC men is watching my condo complex. I’m in Wichita. The address is 3147 W. Kiowa River Boulevard. My unit is 2C. He’s in a dark blue Crown Vic at the west end of the parking lot at the rear of the building. The vehicle has a temporary tag. Sounds crazy, right?”

  “Not really. That whole group must be seriously pissed off at you. I’ll call this into the Wichita police and ask them to check it out. Where can they contact you?”

  “I'd rather not be part of it,” Emery said.

  “OK. We’ll handle it. Just stay out of the line of fire.” He broke the connection.

  Emery hunkered down to wait.

  About 12 minutes later, a police helicopter swooped down over the building as four Chevy Tahoe SUVs with police markings zoomed up, two from the east, two from the west. As two of the SUVs entered the parking lot exits and disappeared behind the building, the helicopter’s spotlight click
ed on, illuminating the rear of the building. The other two Tahoes, red and blue lights flashing, blocked the east and west exits. The Dodge was maybe 20 yards behind the easternmost SUV.

  His eye detected movement to his upper left. His heart lurched as the front door of his unit opened. A big man in jeans and a blue windbreaker slipped out and scurried east along the walkway. As the man entered the building’s center stairwell, Emery fumbled for his phone and punched in 911. When the dispatcher answered, he said, “One of the men Wichita police are looking for at 3147 W. Kiowa River Boulevard is at the front of the building in the center stairwell.” He turned the phone off.

  Less than a minute later, one uniformed officer emerged from each of the cars, pistols drawn. They walked warily toward the center stairwell. They wore helmets and Kevlar vests. Good thing, too. From the darkness at the bottom of the stairwell there came a crack and the blaze of a muzzle flash, aimed at the officer to the west. Both officers returned fire. The big man fell into the light, clutching his chest. As one of the officers spoke into his shoulder mike, no doubt summoning an ambulance, Emery heard more shots from behind the building.

  He started the Dodge, backed it into a driveway and drove off to the east, turning the headlights on after traveling several blocks. About two miles from the condo complex, he parked at a restaurant. He got out his other throwaway phone, retrieved his black book of phone numbers from his tech bag, and called Kendra Wendell’s mobile phone.

  “Hey, it’s Emery,” he said when she answered.

  “Joe,” she exclaimed. “It’s good to hear from you. How are you?”

  “Stressed, but that doesn’t matter right now. I wanted to tip you that the Wichita police are in the middle of a raid at my condo complex. Two of those ARC fugitives had the place staked out. I hate to be this way, but I'm able only to talk to you about it on background. You can describe me as a witness to the event. OK?”