Vindicator

by Denney Clements

  For instance, it is now a matter of record that money appropriated to the Agriculture Department’s discretionary budget somehow reached the hooded thugs who assaulted innocent Kansans over the past four years and who may also be connected to the destruction of the Gunderson dam in Colorado in October. The disaster, which sent billions of gallons of water coursing eastward into Kansas, killed three and caused billions in property damage.

  Some of that money appears to have come from a million-dollar appropriation to the state-owned Agricultural Research Center in western Kansas, the state-owned 25,000 square-foot facility that the men who carried out the attacks used as a base of operations. Earlier this month, Mrs. Hodge told the Wichita Examiner that she didn’t realize the million dollars was in the agriculture appropriations bill when she signed it.

  She said if she’d known the money was in the budget, she’d have vetoed it. She promised to follow up on her mistake and explain publicly how and why it was made. Now, Mrs. Hodge seems to expect Kansans to forget she ever made that promise.

  Swindle’s ouster as agriculture secretary, if anything, increases chances Kansans will never learn who directed the movement of the thugs’ money through the Agriculture Department’s pipeline. Ms. Swindle is a commodities trader by profession and the departmental board that actually makes discretionary spending decisions is made up of farmers and ranchers from around the state. These are not the kind of people well suited to telling hooded thugs what to do. Directing bad men to do bad things required a tactical mind-set unimpeded by conscience.

  Mrs. Hodge’s decision to change agriculture secretaries, then, will further obscure the thugs’ command structure. Nor will this change do anything to address the oversight malfeasance that allowed public money to flow to the hooded thugs – whose crimes Mrs. Hodge has never acknowledged, let alone explained. Moreover, Ms. Swindle's Agriculture Department for weeks has resisted The Vindicator's request for an accounting of how the money was spent. The governor bears ultimate responsibility for this violation of the state’s Open Records Act.

  It’s even harder to see the Mr. Ramsey’s exit from the Revenue Department as a reform move. Not to be unkind, but Mr. Ramsey was, by all accounts, a strutting martinet of limited imagination. It’s impossible to believe that he alone assigned secret license tags to the vehicles used by the hooded thugs. Mr. Ramsey was a chicanery-deficient bully who could function only if someone smarter told him what to do.

  Mrs. Hodge still owes the public an explanation how the license-tag database came into being, whose idea it was and, now that the thugs have been exposed, whether it has been dismantled. And she needs to explain how the thugs obtained the temporary license tags that now adorn their vehicles, making it harder for law enforcement officers to capture and jail them. Until such time as the governor clears up these issues, the scandal dogging her administration will not be over.

  After publishing the piece, re-reading it online and correcting one grammar bust, Emery e-mailed the link to Schmidt at the Spotlight and Sarantos at the Examiner. He checked his e-mail a few minutes later. There was the usual clutter of responses from readers who subscribed his blog’s feed, Tyler’s “Hey, glad you’re back” note, for instance. But there, toward the bottom of the inbox, shimmered a message from none other than Eunice Swindle. It had come in at 8 a.m., before he'd begun working. Figuring he’d done enough to promote complacency at the FBI, he shut down the Dell, booted up the HP and clicked on Swindle’s message.

  “Mr. Emery: Please find attached our response to the open records request you filed with my office earlier this month. My attorney strongly advised me to comply with your request before I leave office, as failure to do so could create another avenue of legal liability against me. I do regret that we did not fulfill your request within the three-day legal time limit and hope you will forgive me for that. For your convenience, I have asked my assistant to copy the records into PDF files, which I trust your computer can open.

  “I regret that I can be of no further service, as I leave the state’s employ Wednesday. My attorney has advised me not to discuss my activities as Kansas Secretary of Agriculture, particularly as regards the department’s discretionary research program and its outsourced activities, while the criminal investigation, of which I am apparently a target, is in process. Yours cordially, Eunice Howard Swindle.”

  “Outsourced activities?” Whoa. Was she telling him the hyenas were private contractors? He saved down her PDF file and opened it. The first page was a cover sheet summarizing his open records request and listing the documents included in the package. At the bottom of the page were her name, title and signature, beneath which was a list of phone numbers. One of the numbers was a mobile number. Did she want him to contact her back-channel? Possibly. He got out his black notebook and copied the number down. It couldn’t hurt to call her, but he'd wait until she left office to do it. He considered whether to remove the Open Records segment from the commentary he’d just posted but decided he didn’t owe Swindle that. What he wrote was true and fair.

  He stocked Sadie’s printer with paper, hooked it up to the HP and printed out the PDF file. As the printer did its work, he pulled pages from the collection tray and began to read.

  He immediately regretted that he’d formulated his open records request in such broad terms. The file included a lot of information on discretionary programs having nothing to do with the ARC – research grants to agronomists and plant geneticists at the state’s two agricultural universities, for instance. But toward the middle of the document, he came upon a brief list of construction projects – construction projects? – charged against the ARC’s budget, consuming all but $90,000 of the money over the past four fiscal years, about $1.3 million in all. The invoices for most of the contracts – totaling $940,000 – had been paid between July 1 and October 31 of the current year. The earlier payments were close to $100,000 for each of the previous three years. The contractor for all of them was the Alpha-Omega Construction of Sadorus, Okla.

  The Ag Board had hired Alpha-Omega for “certain capital improvements at the Kansas Agricultural Research Center at Eminence, Kansas.” None of the documents Swindle had supplied spelled out what those improvements were. Nor were the contracts themselves included.

  He conducted a Dogpile.com search on the company. Nada. The company was not represented in Cyberspace. How on Earth had Alpha-Omega managed that?

  He shuffled through the rest of the printout in search of supplemental details on the company. Nothing. He opened the secretary of state’s web site. The company had filed no annual reports in Kansas. Nor, according to the Department of Revenue web site, had the company paid Kansas taxes.

  Carol walked into the study, looking glorious in tight jeans and a baggy black sweater, face pink and hair tousled by the winter wind. She kissed him and asked, “What’re you working on so intently?”

  “The thugs may be private contractors,” he said. “But I’m having trouble nailing it down.”

  After he explained the problem to her, she said, “Try a white-pages search of Sadorus business listings.”

  He did as she suggested. Sadorus, an outer-edge suburb of Oklahoma City, was apparently a small place. Up popped a list of maybe two dozen businesses, including two lawyers, an insurance agent, a dentist, a chiropractor, a security company, a real estate firm and two motels. Alpha-Omega was nowhere on the list.

  “Try a yellow pages search of the area for construction firms,” she suggested. He did. Nada.

  “Wait a minute, Joe,” she exclaimed. “Go back to the white pages listing. Something there caught my eye.” When he’d clicked back to the requested page, she pointed to the security company listing. “There, Richards Security. Dogpile that company.”

  His web search turned up an innocuous-looking web site extolling Richards as “a professional company focusing on the defense, training, logistics and intelligence needs of our discriminating clients.”

  “Richards?” Emery said. �
�That’s the same name …”

  “As the man Wichita police took down at our condo,” his wife interjected. “Could that be a coincidence?”

  “I doubt it. Can you impersonate a professional secretary?”

  “I guess. What do you have in mind?”

  He dug out his No. 2 throwaway cell phone, opened the settings menu and turned off the GPS signal. “This phone has a Topeka-area phone number. Call the Richards main number and ask to be connected to Alpha-Omega Construction. Tell them you’re from the Kansas Agriculture Department. See how they react.”

  “Good idea,” she said. After turning on the phone’s speaker, she keyed in the security company’s main number, and navigated the automated answering system to a real person, a woman, who said, “Yes?”

  “Alpha-Omega Construction, please,” Carol said in a perfunctory voice. “Susan Eskridge calling from the Kansas Department of Agriculture.”

  “Just a moment, please.” Then: “Susan Eskridge doesn’t appear on our list of authorized contacts for Alpha-Omega.” Click.

  “My God,” Emery said. “Now we know that Alpha-Omega is Richards Security. You were brilliant.”

  “Thank you, sweetie. Now what?”

  “First, we take a rudimentary security measure of our own.” Standing beside her, he gently pulled the throwaway out of her hand, cracked it open and extracted its SIM card. He snapped the wafer in half and dropped the pieces in the trash basket. “Second, we try to figure out what to do with this new information.”

  “Put it up on The Vindicator?”

  “Premature. We need someone in the know to break this down for us, and no one I can think of would do so willingly.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Maybe it’s finally time for you to confront your cute little redheaded friend. You've got leverage over her.”

  “Yeah, Natascha might be well enough informed to fill in some of the gaps. But she’s a conniver. The more gaps I can fill in … Whoa.” He reeled, putting a hand on her shoulder to steady himself.

  “What’s wrong, sweetie? You’re pale as a snowdrift.”

  Overcome by a wave of dizziness, he mumbled, “I’m woozy and my head is throbbing right where that asshole hit it with the shotgun butt. God, I'm glad he’s dead.”

  Three minutes later, with Rose at the wheel of the Grand Marquis and Emery semi-conscious in the back seat, his head in Carol’s lap, they were on the road toward the medical center in Garden City.

  Chapter 36: Semi-Incapacitated

  December 15, 4:30 p.m.

  There followed two lost days. At the hospital, Dr. Jayaraman took one look at Emery and ordered an immediate CT scan of his head. The nurses bullied him onto a gurney and wheeled him to the lab.

  A half hour later, wearing only a hospital gown, Emery was lying in an emergency room bed with an intravenous tube and needle stuck into his wrist. Two or three bags of fluid were dripping into the tube. He felt ineffably weary, but something in one of the bags had taken away his head pain.

  When the doctor reappeared, he announced he had already admitted Emery to the hospital. This loss of control shattered what remained of Emery’s composure. “I don’t want to stay here,” he whined. “I’ve got work to do.”

  “You are suffering from post-concussion syndrome,” the doctor said. “This could be very serious. You would be foolish to leave the hospital today.”

  “Listen to the man, sonny boy,” Rose said. Holding his non-IV hand, she was standing beside the bed between Jayaraman and Carol. Their worried but increasingly bossy faces irked him no end.

  “The CT scan indicated extreme swelling where the butt of the gun struck your head,” Jayaraman said. “At the very least, we need to reduce the swelling. We also would like to conduct more tests to determine the full extent of your brain damage.”

  The term made Emery angry. “I don’t want to know the full extent of my brain damage. If a head injury is going to make me a vegetable, I want it to be a surprise. Let me go home.”

  The doctor turned to Carol. “You are his wife?”

  She nodded. “For two days now.”

  “He is obviously not capable of making informed decisions about his medical care. You must decide for him.”

  “Hey,” Emery said, trying to rise but falling back against the bed, head pounding. “I’m rational. I’m just being grouchy. I can decide … “

  “Get me the paperwork to sign,” Carol said. “He stays here until you’ve cleared him medically.”

  “Traitor. I want to go home with you.”

  She smiled at him, stroked his face and kissed his lips. “I know you do, sweetie, but if I was lying there hurting, you’d make me stay.”

  “You’re right. OK,” he murmured.

  Now, two afternoons later, Angela Brun was saying, into his ear, “I was worried you didn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Sorry I’ve been so long in getting back to you,” Emery said. “I was in the hospital in Garden City for two days. Just got home an hour ago. Brain swelling from the beating I took earlier this month.”

  “How terrible. Head injuries … my son … let’s just say they can be tricky.”

  “I’m semi-incapacitated, as the doctor puts it, at least through Christmas. I can work, but no more than four hours a day. I’m hyped up on steroids and having trouble sleeping. And no driving, which limits what I can do with The Vindicator. For now, I’m confined to western Kansas.”

  “I’m sorry for your trouble,” Brun said. She paused. Then: “I can’t tell you how much I regret caving into pressure to lay you off. It was the worst moment of what had been a reasonably honest career.”

  Wow. So Hutcherson was telling the truth – not that he’d doubted it. Let Brun tell this her own way, he warned himself. So he said nothing.

  After a long pause, she said, “I’ve decided I must tell you what happened, even if it means the end of my career. You can do what you wish with it.”

  “Whatever you say will be on background,” Emery said. “I want only to tell the rest of The Story, and I don’t need you to be part of it. I just need to know what your part of it was.”

  “You’re kinder to me than I was to you, Mr. Emery.”

  “Like I told you last month, you did me a favor laying me off. I’m an independent businessman with the best story in years all to himself.”

  She cleared her throat. “Well, that’s not quite true. Our Kendra Wendell broke the story of the police shootout at your condo complex. That was huge. I’m so proud of her.”

  He thought about setting her straight, but said, “Quite right.”

  Another pause. Then Brun said, “I’d better get to it, then. The person who bullied me into laying you off is a man named Ernest Complet, who works for the governor. Even though Gov. Hodge lacks direct authority over most of the state and local legal notices, he persuaded me that they could get the state and local courts and the school districts and city and county governments to move the notices to a suburban weekly, and to do so right away. He knew, almost to the penny, what the loss of those notices would cost the Examiner – a little over $351,000 a year at current rates, enough to pay for four reporters. He knew that, too. It chilled and terrified me.”

  “That’s a lot of jack. What did Complet say about me, if anything?”

  “Only – and this is the part I’m most ashamed of – that you had become an annoyance to Mrs. Hodge, as he calls her. He said you’d got the Los Llanos story all wrong, and I’d be doing myself a favor getting rid of a reporter who had, in his words, a chip on his shoulder. That is exactly the kind of reporter we need on the big stories. That’s the kind of reporter readers deserve to have serving them, not lapdogs whom the governor likes.”

  “Ms. Brun, you’ve scourged yourself enough. I don’t hold it against you, which is why I invited you to my wedding. As one publisher to another, we’re cool.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Emery. If you ever want to work for us again, I would love that and would make it happen.”r />
  “That’s very kind,” he said. “But I’ve so moved on. I’m a more entrepreneurial person than I realized. But I’d be honored to be your friend.”

  “The honor would be mine, Mr. Emery. Goodbye.”

  He’d sensed Carol in the background as he was finishing up with Brun. He swiveled around in Sadie’s desk chair and, sure enough, there she was standing in the doorway. “Are you hovering?”

  She smiled, warming his heart. “I am. Someone has to make sure you don’t overtax yourself. Was that Angela Brun?”

  He nodded and told her the true story of his dismissal from the newspaper.

  She wrinkled her brow as he spoke. “What, exactly, is the relationship between Complet and Natascha Schroeder?”

  “Schroeder reports to the governor, as does he. So they're parallel. Of course, that’s just the formal command structure. Informally, he could very well be her boss. His role in the administration is shadowy. Why?”

  “She was with Complet last month when she called to complain about the post that broke The Story wide open – the one in which you told how someone in Topeka killed off your job with the Examiner. Right?”

  “Right. They were in his office.”

  “I think he’s behind all of this – running the goons, assaulting innocent Kansans, manipulating Cabinet members, destroying newspaper careers, all of it. I think she works for him and knows all about it. I think they overplayed their hand back in November, when she called you from his office. We just didn’t realize it. But his name keeps coming up. There has to be a reason for that.”

  Struggling against the steroids whirring in his head, he thought about it. “Right. I remember that night. I was focused mainly on getting some juicy audio for The Vindicator, which I did. I didn’t think about the significance of Schroeder being with Complet, in an apparently subordinate role. I now also remember my friend Wanda Willets at the Revenue Department, around that same period, saying she thought the revenue secretary, Harold Ramsey, was reporting back channel to Complet on that secret license tag database.”