Vindicator

by Denney Clements

  “You could have alerted me off the record.”

  “I’m between a rock and a hard place here. And I’m terrified. But you can still trust me.”

  I can, he thought, just not in the way you want me to. He said, “OK, bye,” and ended the call.

  He rang up Harmon, who received his call with muted cordiality. “You want something on Complet that the other media don’t have, I presume.”

  “If there is something.”

  “There are two things. You’ll find one of them highly interesting. But I can only give it to you on background.”

  “OK.”

  “Here goes. One: We fixed the time of death at 10 p.m. Christmas Eve, plus or minus two hours. Two: The place was a charnel house. We found blood from two people. Most of it was from Complet. There were multiple cigar burns and knife wounds on his body, and one of his nipples was cut off.”

  “Good Lord. The killer was trying to extract information, you figure?”

  “That’s a big well duh on that, Emery. But he fought back until they clubbed him into submission. Being strong, he did some damage. We found blood from another person on his pajamas bottoms and under his body.”

  Emery was scribbling as fast as he could. “OK.”

  “Not done yet, Emery. Here’s the kicker: The DNA from that blood sample matched the bone and blood DNA taken from your house in Ouimet – the guy you shot in the foot.”

  “Wow,” Emery exclaimed. “So that means Alpha-Omega killed Complet?”

  “Yes. And if ballistics shows they used the same gun used on the Swindles, we'll know they're responsible there, too. Since you'd already outed Alpha-Omega as suspects, Stamos wants to ratchet up the pressure on them. The blood is the first hard evidence we have. You did good by plugging the guy in the foot during your home invasion.”

  “Thanks. So who is he?”

  “I have to go off the record here, Emery. Say yes. You won’t be sorry.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not that I don’t trust you to keep a confidence, but I'd rather not say his name. We don’t have this guy in the DNA databases but we do know who he is from Marco Polanski, the guy who began to sing the instant Aaron Renke took him into custody out in Ouimet. He’s named all his associates.”

  “You don’t want the associates still at large to know Marco is helping you.”

  “Right. Marco obviously couldn’t have known who went along on the Complet mission as he’s in lock-up. But he did know who went along on the home invasion because he was one of them. Marco was the one whose eyes you gouged, the one who was beating up on your wife. So you see why it’s important you shot the other guy that day. If you hadn’t, we couldn’t have identified him as one of the Complet killers. And we wouldn’t have Alpha-Omega cold.”

  Two hours later, under the headline OKLA. SECURITY FIRM IMPLICATED IN COMPLET KILLING, Emery posted his catch-up story. Citing an “informed source close to the investigation,” Emery reported that a blood sample found at Complet’s house matched blood and bone samples taken from the Thanksgiving Day home invasion in Ouimet.

  “As Alpha-Omega has been implicated in the home invasion,” he quoted his source as saying, “we have concluded that rogue operatives from that firm killed Mr. Complet.” He added that the source refused to divulge the name of the person who had left the blood at both crime scenes and would not speculate on the motives for Complet’s murder, “although, given the torture to which Mr. Complet was subjected, we can make the obvious speculation that he possessed information his assailants wanted. Whether Mr. Complet provided it before they killed him is anybody’s guess.” The KCID, said the source, wanted Fred Richards, head of Alpha-Omega and Richards Security, both based in Sadorus, Okla., and the remaining associates still at large for questioning.

  The story included Carol’s paragraphs reminding readers that Alpha-Omega, which masqueraded as a construction firm, had received more than $1.3 million from the state Agriculture Department over the past four years, and that its operatives, for a time, used the state-owned Agricultural Research Center building in Garfield County as a base of operations. The firm was implicated in at least five assaults on Kansas communications entrepreneurs between 2007 and 2009. The gun used to kill Complet was the same caliber as the gun that killed the Swindles; ballistics testing would reveal whether it was the same gun. Finally, authorities suspected Alpha-Omega of sabotaging the Gunderson dam in Colorado, causing the deaths of three people, one of whom likely had rigged the depth charges and died when they exploded.

  As they read the piece together online, in search of grammar busts and typos, Carol said, “We may be late, but this is better than our competitors were able to do.” She paused. “We have to go east now, don’t we?”

  “We do,” he said. “Let’s take Sadie with us and leave tomorrow. We can get Ted to stay with your mom. I’d like to stop off in Wichita at our condo, maybe stay there overnight. We need to check up on the place, pay some bills and discuss whether we should sell it. It’s been more than a month since we used it.

  “Then we can head to Lawrence Tuesday, drop the Sadie off at the Phams and operate from there awhile. We can stay at Stiggy’s house. If things work out the way I think they could, our lives will be our own again when we come home.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’d better spell that out for me, Joe.”

  Chapter 42: A Dangerous Comment

  December 27, 12:30 p.m.

  The condo was a write-off. Not content to lay calmly in wait to murder Emery on the night of Dec. 3, Michael Richards slashed the upholstery on every chair, couch and bed. He not only toppled the bookcases but also ripped every book, including Emery’s confirmation Bible, a gift from his mother, into shreds. He broke the crockery and glassware, splintered the chairs, tore Emery’s clothes from the closet and dresser and urinated and defecated on them, broke the toilet bowl, spray-painted “your dead asshole” on the living room carpet in red, ripped out the shower head, smashed the lamps, scattered the food and beverages around the kitchen, reduced the bar cart to kindling, poured out all the liquor, smashed the drinking glasses and bottles, slashed the drapes and tore them down, smashed Emery’s Martin guitar across the mantle, shattered his plaster and glass sculptures and burned his photos, notebooks, original watercolors and files in the fireplace. Left untouched were all the windows, no doubt because the noise of breaking them would have attracted outside attention.

  As Sadie and Carol stood weeping by his side, wrinkling their noses against the stench, he called the police. As they waited, Emery offered up a silent prayer of thanks that his birth certificate, insurance policies, passport, stock, the Grand Prix title, bond certificates and other important papers and artifacts were in his safety deposit box downtown, as was his grandfather’s gold pocket watch. There was little in the condo he couldn’t replace.

  He was tempted to send phone photos of the wreckage to Schroeder with a message saying “Here’s what your ‘strong and brave’ boyfriend did to my place,” but resisted the impulse. He kissed his wife and step-daughter. “It’ll be OK. It’s all insured. Only the Bible and the artwork are a real loss.”

  Two Wichita officers came up the stairs. As Emery showed them the wreckage and answered their questions, Carol and Sadie, bundled up in their coats, stood outside on the walkway. After the officers left, handing Emery a copy of their report, Emery beckoned his wife and step-daughter back inside.

  “Sadie,” he said, “would you go on down to the car? I need to talk to your mom a minute.”

  Sadie looked questioningly at Carol, who smiled and nodded. “OK, I’ll go,” she said. “But I don’t like being treated like I’m still in middle school.” She clomped down the stairs to the garage.

  “You’re tracking with me,” he said. “I can tell.”

  She nodded. “This is a sobering reminder of the stressful situation we’re going into. You’re wondering whether it’s OK to take her into it.”

  “Yes. She wouldn’t like it
, but we could take her back home. I could take the truck and go east alone. You’d both be safe in Ouimet. I can’t guarantee that would be the case in Lawrence.”

  A pause. Then she said, “No. We’ll go with you. She should be safe with the Phams. The Phams’ place is out in the country, according to Juwan.”

  “What about you? I have no idea whether we’ll encounter more violence, but it seems possible, given the plan we’ve concocted.”

  “I told you I’m in and I’m in.”

  Squeezing her hand, he indicated the wreckage before them. “I’m going to get the place cleaned out and sell it. We’ll bank the money. Richards turned it into the gateway to hell. OK with you?”

  She nodded. “I love your condo. But we’d never be able to forget this.”

  They got back into Carol’s Caprice and headed for the turnpike, Carol at the wheel. Sadie rode shotgun. From the roomy backseat, Emery called his cleaning service, explained what had happened and asked the manager to send a crew over right away to cart off the trash, gut, purify and rehab the place and send him the bill. The manager promised to make a video of the wreckage for an insurance claim.

  Then Emery called the real estate agent who’d sold him the condo. He told her to list the place for what she thought it was worth and e-mail him a sales contract. He’d sign it and send it back Tuesday.

  They rode in silence a few minutes. As they drove through the electronic turnstile onto the turnpike, Sadie blurted, “I wish we could wake Michael Richards up and kill him again.”

  “Sadie,” Carol exclaimed.

  Emery said, “These people bring out the worst in all of us, sweetie.”

  Rose reached Emery at Stiggy’s house mid-morning Tuesday. Carol was over at the Phams’ modernist house up the Wakarusa River Valley southwest of town, visiting Juwan’s mom, Monique.

  Rose reported that Aaron Renke had sent Bob Moore, said to be the most technically adept deputy, over that morning to look over the house’s phone and Internet connections. “I don’t think Bob found anything. But he said to tell you that the state Criminal Investigation Division will be calling you about it.”

  About 10 minutes later, Harmon himself called. “If Kan-Tel was monitoring your land line and Internet usage, it wasn’t through listening devices at the house. I presume you’ve checked your computers for spyware?”

  “Yes, regularly. So my Kan-Tel lead is a bust?”

  “Not at all, Emery. My peeps at KCID think the apparent monitoring of your talk with Swindle is the best explanation why the goons murdered her and maybe Complet, too. We know Richards and his goons are scared to death of The Vindicator. The knowledge she’d talked to you and implicated Complet drove them off the deep end.”

  The “know” gave Emery pause. How did the AG know that? He decided to let it go. “Who was running the goons, Mike? Who’s the big boss?”

  “I’ve got some ideas on that but I’m not about to share them with you.”

  Well, I’ve got an idea, too, Emery thought, and it could be better than yours. He asked, “What’s the next step with Kan-Tel?”

  “We don’t have enough evidence for a warrant on their switchboards and ISP gear in Ouimet and Garden City, where the listening and monitoring had to have taken place. For now, it’s a dead end. But we’ll keep working on it.”

  That evening, J-3 came over with several pages of printouts. He sat down with Emery and Carol in Stiggy’s living room. Stiggy had left earlier in the day for Ouimet. He’d fallen for Janey Gussett, Sadie’s high school friend, at the wedding and drove down to spend a few days with her.

  “I’ve got some comments you need to see, Poppy” J-3 said, handing Emery two sheets of paper. “They’re from a woman named Severine Cannon, out in Denver. She posted them earlier today in response to a piece you wrote on Dec. 3, you know, the one about the goons beating up on innocent folks in 2007 and 2008.” They read:

  “Mr. Emery. I’ve just logged onto the Internet for the first time in a month. An acquaintance told me about your blog, specifically the Dec. 3 post about the assaults on Kansas communications entrepreneurs, including my husband, Ferdy. You note that you managed to talk to three victims of the thugs from the mercenary firm you more recently identified as Alpha-Omega and Richards Security but were unable to reach Ferdy.

  “I wanted to let you know that Ferdy died this past summer from head injuries suffered in the attack on us in June of 2008. After the attack, we relocated to the mountains of Colorado, near Westcliffe, and sold our home in Colby, Kansas. We were hiding out. For awhile, he appeared to be OK, but the traumatic brain injury he suffered never healed. While undergoing treatment at a hospital in Colorado Springs this past June, he lapsed into a coma and died two weeks later. I am now living with my sister. I thought you’d want to know why your attempt to contact Ferdy was unsuccessful.”

  In reply, J-3, introducing himself as the comments editor for The Vindicator, asked Mrs. Cannon if she knew why her husband was attacked. Was her husband engaged in business activities that might have attracted their hyenas’ attention? That was a common denominator in the other attacks. Her reply was riveting:

  “Dear Mr. Emery the third: That is a question I am at last ready to answer. My husband became the northwest Kansas regional manager for a rural communications company known as Kan-Tel in 2007. At the time, the company was aggressively acquiring rural phone co-ops and privately owned exchanges around the state. Ferdy had excelled at grant-writing in his former job as manager of the former Colby phone co-op. In the mid-1990s, he obtained several federal and private-foundation rural-economic-development grant awards worth more than $150,000, for modernizing the co-op switching equipment and bringing dial-up Internet to the community for the first time. After Kan-Tel bought out the co-op in early 2007, Vernal Spritzer, the CEO, asked him to write a grant request to the Kansas Technology Corridor Corporation for a three quarter of a million dollars. Ferdy was told that Kan-Tel needed the money to keep its modernization plans on track; several of its recent acquisitions were ‘underperforming on revenue’ and they’d run short of funds for broadband servers, network switching equipment and the like. Their lobbyist and communications director, Gloria Munday, was assigned to guide the grant application through the KanTech bureaucracy. Ferdy got the grant for the company, but the following year, he found out the grant money went for such ‘modernization’ as sumptuous offices for company officers and luxury company cars for certain board members and Ms. Munday. KanTech didn’t seem to care that the money was misspent or about getting it back. When Ferdy complained to the company leadership in Garden City about the misappropriation of the money – it was a matter of personal honor for him – they attributed the problems to ‘accounting errors’ and promised to correct them. That was in late May of ’08.

  A week later, two hooded men broke into our home. One of them hit me in the face, breaking my cheekbone, and held me down as the other beat Ferdy with an aluminum baseball bat, hitting him mainly in the kidneys and abdomen. But Ferdy fought back so the man hit him once in the head, the injury that ultimately killed him. Ferdy was knocked senseless. As they left, they told me to make him shut up about the grant or they would come back to kill both of us. The company fired him the next day. We got some medical attention, filed a police report and fled to Colorado. That’s all I can say now, as I’m in tears and my hands are shaking as I write this. The memory, as I’m sure you can understand, is terribly painful. Thank you, Mr. Emery.”

  “Oh, my God,” Carol moaned. “That’s the saddest thing I ever read.” Emery put an arm around her and pulled her close.

  J-3 said, “This is a dangerous comment, Poppy, so I unpublished it right when it came in. It’s still in the system. I wanted to let you decide what to do about it.”

  Swallowing his anger, Emery said, “Let’s re-publish the comment. It’s unsubstantiated, but if anyone at Kan-Tel objects, I’ll tell them to write rebuttal comments. Meanwhile, we’ll try to substantiate what she wrote for a re
port of our own. It’s time to go public on Kan-Tel and publishing her comment is the best way I can think of to start.

  “I also think it’s time to bring in some technical muscle beyond what Sadie and Juwan provide. That means sharing the scoop.”

  Chapter 43: Stormy Munday

  December 29, 10 a.m.

  “Let me get this straight,” Armand Jenkinson said. “You hijacked our story exposing the dam sabotage the very same day we broke it. You ran with it and built a kick-ass blog business with it. And now you want to cut us back in on the action?”

  “That’s right,” Emery said. “Help me corroborate that Ferdinand Cannon died of head injuries suffered in a June 2008 home invasion in Colby, Kansas. I also need ColoradoMuckrakers to help me force a conclusion to The Story next Tuesday, when both of our targets are certain to be at the Capitol.”

  “How would we begin?”

  “I’ll scan in the police report on the assaults against the Cannons and e-mail it to you. But all I have on his death there in the Springs this year is what Mrs. Cannon wrote in her comment. I’ll also send you the e-mail address she used to authenticate her comment, but it looks as though she’s not much of a web-head. She might not respond to an e-mail. We know she’s living out your way but I don’t know where. So you’ll have to do some legwork to nail it down.”

  “And we’ll both post the story simultaneously?”

  “Yes, if we get it nailed down.”

  “You could do the reporting yourself by phone. What’s the real reason you’re being so generous with us?”

  “It saves me a lot of time,” Emery said. “Also, what was supposed to be a beating for hire in northwest Kansas is now a murder story that’s news in Colorado, too. Your audience will read about it on your web site and mine will read it on mine. Win-win.”