Nothing but the Truth (44 page)
But no such luck.
Three of the calls were from clients in various stages of feeling abandoned and the last was Jeff Elliot. When Hardy called him back, he was himself on fire over the blaze at Hardy’s house, although he did pay a fleeting moment’s lip service to sympathy for Hardy’s loss. “Is there anything I can do to help you, Diz? You got a place to stay?”
“Yeah, we’re covered, Jeff. Thanks, though.”
But back to the scoop. “And you think it was arson?”
“I’d bet a lot on it. In fact, I wouldn’t rule out that it’s the MTBE people, the
Valdez
Avengers, all those jerks.”
Valdez
Avengers, all those jerks.”
“If that’s true,” Jeff said, his enthusiasm overflowing, “it’s a giant break in that story.”
“That’s my goal,” Hardy said drily. “Sacrifice my home for a good story. Maybe you’ll win the Pulitzer and I’ll be happy for you. We can have a party in my new house.”
Elliot apologized. “I didn’t mean it like that, Diz.” He paused. “But don’t you want to get whoever did this, take ’em down?”
“You don’t know.”
“I bet I do. All I’m saying is here, maybe, we’ve got a real connection.”
“Between who?”
“That’s what I think I have, Diz. Do you want to hear it?”
“Talk,” Hardy said.
“Okay. After you left yesterday, I went with what you said—the guy from Caloco—”
“Jim Pierce.”
“Yeah, all right, Pierce. He’d told you that SKO funded these cretins, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, what if that were true? Where was the connection? So I started poking through among all the crap I showed you yesterday—that thick file of paper—and realized that a lot of the pro-ethanol stuff comes from this organization named the Fuels Management Consortium, FMC for short. It’s here in town. Familiar?”
“No, but this stuff wasn’t my major until a couple of days ago. I thought FMC made tanks and stuff, big equipment.”
“Same letters, different company.”
“Okay. Go on.”
“Well, FMC produces pro-ethanol, anti-MTBE press releases. Tons of them. Sometimes the source of them is a little hard, like impossible, to recognize because they get picked up by intermediaries—syndicated as hard news stories in the dailies, also in industry publications, the
Health Industry Newsletter, Environmental Health Monthly,
like that. So I never put it together that it might be one source.”
Health Industry Newsletter, Environmental Health Monthly,
like that. So I never put it together that it might be one source.”
“And then you did?”
“Right. Plus every time some more MTBE leaks into another well, we get the update before the ink’s dry on the EPA report.”
“I’m listening.”
“Okay, so a few months ago, we—the
Chronicle
—we decided to do a big spread on the dangers of MTBE. I mean, this was a four-day front-page feature. Lots of scary stuff—cancer clusters, birth defects, the usual. Even a layperson such as yourself might remember it.”
Chronicle
—we decided to do a big spread on the dangers of MTBE. I mean, this was a four-day front-page feature. Lots of scary stuff—cancer clusters, birth defects, the usual. Even a layperson such as yourself might remember it.”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, Kerry had just taken the primary and suddenly this was news, and we ran it. Anyway, the reporter who wrote the article, as it happens, is a friend of mine named Sherry Weir. She shows up in the office last night on this water temple poisoning as I’m thinking about our discussion, yours and mine. She tells me that FMC was the prime source for her feature—it’s an impressive propaganda factory.
“So yesterday, when Sherry hears about the Pulgas Temple, her first stop on the way to the office is the FMC offices in the Embarcadero buildings. Okay, she knows it’s Saturday afternoon, they’re probably closed up, but it’s a shot. And what does she find?”
“An armed nuclear weapon?”
“She finds that nobody’s there, all right, but out in the hallway for pickup are the day’s press releases, bound and labeled for distribution, all about the water poisoning, doomsday in San Francisco, sidebars on the dangers of MTBE pollution, like that. Anyway, she pulls a few off the top of the pile and brings them back for her article.” A beat. “Get it?”
“I’m not sure.”
Jeff’s voice went down to an excited whisper, but it rang with triumph. “They
had to be
written and printed up before it happened.”
had to be
written and printed up before it happened.”
Hardy took a moment to let it sink in. If this was true, it appeared to link some of the eco-terrorist activity with FMC, but not necessarily to SKO, and certainly not to Valens or Kerry. How could it help him?
But Jeff thought he had the answer to that, too. “Because FMC is run by this joker named Baxter Thorne ...”
“Who works for SKO,” Hardy guessed.
“You’re too smart, except not so fast, Red Ryder. Back when she interviewed him, Sherry couldn’t get Thorne to admit who paid him. He calls himself a public affairs consultant. According to him, he represents all kinds of environmental groups and other clients, but says his contracts demand confidentiality. She asks him specifically about some of these activist groups and he admits he’s given them some advice.”
“Advice. That’s a nice word.”
“I thought so, too. But even nicer is this. I call this buddy of mine, a colleague in Cincinnati, at the
Sentinel
—”
Sentinel
—”
“You’ve been a busy boy, Jeff.”
“This could in fact be my Pulitzer, Diz. You’d be busy, too. Turns out that Baxter Thorne is not unknown in Cincinnati. It wasn’t exactly common knowledge, but my buddy knew—for years Thorne was the dirty-tricks guy for Ellis Jackson.”
“Who is . . . ?”
“You’re going to love this—Jackson is the CEO of Spader Krutch Ohio.”
Hardy felt a little tingle along the back of his neck and knew it wasn’t the cold outside leaking through his office window.
Jeff was going on. “So we’ve possibly got SKO paying for dirty tricks in San Francisco. We’ve got somebody who might put MTBE in the water, might kill Bree Beaumont ...”
“Might burn my house down,” Hardy added evenly.
“That, too,” Jeff agreed. “But what we don’t have and we do need is how, if we’re on the right track, Baxter Thorne came to be worried about you.”
“Somebody told him.”
“I’m with you. But who?”
Hardy racked his brain, trying to keep himself from the kneejerk reaction for the second time today that it had to be Valens. But it might go higher—Hardy couldn’t rule out that a directive could have come from Damon Kerry himself, although Jeff Elliot wasn’t going to accept that.
But why stop with Kerry? The connection with SKO might even be Phil Canetta—cops who worked freelance security at conventions had also been known to provide muscle, to help with dirty tricks. Had Canetta ever done that kind of work with SKO, he wondered. Or with Baxter Thorne?
“I really don’t have any ideas, Jeff,” he said, “other than I’d like a few private moments with this Thorne fellow.”
“Did you talk to Al Valens this morning, by the way?” Jeff asked. “At the Clift? Since you woke me up for it.”
“Didn’t I tell you all about that?”
He heard Jeff sigh. “No. I think you left it out.”
And suddenly, the morning’s information clicked with what he had just learned from Jeff. Bree’s report. She had changed her mind about ethanol and Valens had tried—successfully he said—to keep her from talking to Kerry about it. Who would this silence benefit even more than Kerry himself? SKO. And SKO was the operative Baxter Thorne.
What if Valens’s efforts to keep Bree quiet hadn’t worked after all? What if someone needed to shut her up?
Valens again, once removed.
Maybe.
But Hardy didn’t want to lead Jeff Elliot there. He had his own agenda and he figured he’d sure as hell earned the right to pursue it now. “I thought he’d told me a lie,” Hardy said mildly, “and I wanted to talk to him about it.”
“And had he?”
“It was more a misunderstanding. It got straightened out.” Deflection time. “You ever catch up with Kerry?”
“Today’s agenda,” Jeff promised, “if I get to it.”
“What would stop you?”
“One of the problems doing a daily column,” Jeff said, “is you’ve got to write it. Kerry’s going to be impossible until Tuesday. Tomorrow I’m going for Thorne.”
“How are you going to get to him?”
Hardy would bet Jeff’s eyes weren’t tired now—he was on a scent. “A little classic bait and switch. I’ve put in a call to FMC that I’d like an interview on the Pulgas story, which he’ll want to talk about. Once I’m in the door, I’ll ask different questions.” He changed his tone. “I think we’re very close, Diz, really.”
“I hope so,” Hardy said, “but do me one favor, would you?”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t go alone.”
After they hung up, Hardy immediately put in a call to Glitsky’s pager. Jeff Elliot might hate him for it, but from Hardy’s perspective this was now a police matter, and that’s where it was going.
In fact, even without Bree Beaumont, the case could be made that the arson at Hardy’s house, if it had been started by the same people who dumped the MTBE, was related to a San Francisco homicide, and therefore in Glitsky’s domain. Even though the Pulgas Water Temple was in San Mateo County, it was City property and Glitsky could assert at least dual jurisdiction—he had authority to investigate the death of the middle-aged hiker who’d been killed there yesterday.
And now, with the new information Hardy could supply from his talk with Jeff Elliot, that investigation might lead him to Baxter Thorne, and perhaps all the way back to Bree.
Waiting for Glitsky’s call, he got up from the desk, stretched, and came around front to throw a round of darts. But he didn’t retrieve any of them. Instead, he walked to the window and looked down onto Sutter Street, then returned to his chair and pulled his collections of paper up closer to him.
Now that he knew he was looking for something specific—evidence of any relationship between FMC and Bree—he thought he might have a better chance of seeing it.
But the telephone rang.
“Yo.”
“Get a car phone, some kind of beeper, something, would you? I’ve been calling all over town trying to run you down.”
“I’ve been here at my office. And I called you, remember?”
“Yeah, well, I couldn’t imagine you’d be working on a Sunday so I didn’t think of there.”
Hardy ignored the bad attitude. Abe had gone to a murder scene and had spent the last several hours there. It was understandable that he was in a surly mood. “Okay, so now we’re talking. You interested in what I called about? You will be.”
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