Authors: Simon Gould
Sensing that the governor had closed the shutters on his questioning, and having no evidence to push him further he thanked the governor for his time and leaving Tassiker to wonder why he’d turned up asking about Sarah Caldwell, he made his way back outside, pausing only to wink at the pretty secretary on his way out.
Lighting up a Marlboro, he leant against a wall, thinking desperately. He had to get something concrete. The last thing he wanted to do was to go back to Los Angeles with no more than he left with. It was true that Patton and Holland had that prisoner verification sheet off Barnes, but Williams had said that wouldn’t be enough and he was right. It would take far more than that.
Just as he was contemplating lighting up a second cigarette, he saw Governor Tassiker leaving the site at a brisk pace. Well if an empty office presented itself, how could he not take that chance? Seizing the opportunity, after watching the governor leave, he made his way back up to the secretary.
‘Hey’, he smiled.
‘Oh hi there’, she beamed back; she looked genuinely pleased to see him.
‘I think I’ve left my cell in the office’, he confessed. ‘I don’t suppose you could check with governor Tassiker could you?’
‘Oh, he’s popped out for an hour’, she said, ‘I’m surprised you didn’t see him leave, you’ve only been gone a few minutes’
Axon just smiled and shrugged ‘Must have just missed him I guess. Listen, I need my cell, I’m due back in LA soon. Could you let me check?’
‘I’m not sure’, she looked apprehensive. ‘The governor doesn’t like anyone in there when he’s not there’. Axon looked at her in what he hoped conveyed a pleading manner with his eyes.
‘Oh I suppose I could let you in’, she smiled. ‘Just don’t tell him’.
‘As if I would’, he grinned back. ‘Thank you, honey’.
Once back in the governor’s office, Axon knew he didn’t have much time. A minute, maybe two tops.
A quick rummage through papers on the desk revealed nothing; but he knew that had been a long shot at best. He heard the receptionist’s telephone ring and hoped that if she was otherwise occupied it would buy him a little extra time.
A couple of drawers were locked, and even he would find it hard to justify to a court why he’d broken into them with no warrant and very little hard evidence. After nearly two minutes, he knew he had to get back out to avoid the secretary becoming suspicious. He had to think. He was pretty sure based on what they had back in LA that Caldwell had been here. Why would Tassiker cover it up? What would he do in Tassiker’s shoes if he had helped cover it up?
A thought struck him from nowhere. A long shot didn’t even begin to describe it. If the governor had covered it up, and then out of the blue a detective from Los Angeles arrived asking questions, the first thing he would do when the detective left was call somebody to let them know that people were asking questions; call somebody higher up in the cover-up chain.
Picking up the governor’s office phone, he held his breath as he hit the redial button. ‘Hey, you ok in there?’ he heard the receptionist’s muffled shout from through the walls. The phone stopped ringing and somebody answered it.
‘Hello, District Attorney Paul McCrane’s office, how may I help you this afternoon?’
‘Sorry, wrong number’, he replied and put the phone down.
Quickly making his way back out, he waved his cell in the direction of the secretary. ‘Got it’, he said. ‘Underneath the chair!’, he added, making himself look just like an idiot that had misplaced his phone and not like a member of the LAPD trying to uncover illicit information from her boss.
‘No problem’, she grinned. ‘Maybe I’ll see you again?’ Given that he suspected that Tassiker was involved in the cover up of Sarah Caldwell’s incarceration and subsequent release, he thought that highly likely.
‘Yeah, maybe you will’, he grinned back.
Well at least he was leaving with something. Maybe not a major piece of the puzzle, but a piece of the puzzle nonetheless. So the first person Tassiker calls after he’d questioned him about Sarah Caldwell was Paul McCrane, the guy that Barnes swore he saw with Tassiker the day before Caldwell disappeared from San Quentin, and the guy that Tassiker had denied knowing not even ten minutes ago. Surely, that was not a coincidence, was it?
50
About half way to the church in West Adams, Agent Balfer took a call. For about five minutes he listened, practically in silence as someone at Quantico relayed to him what they had found, during which time I cradled the antidote that we had been carrying round all day nervously in my fingers, straining to hear the contents of the call. The movement of the bagged up syringe in my hands became hypnotic, especially given the lack of sleep the previous night.
‘Under usual circumstances’, Agent Balfer began, jarring me back to reality, ‘I wouldn’t be telling you this. However, these are far from usual circumstances so I think I can make an exception in this case. What I’m about to tell you is classified, not to be repeated to anyone. You both understand?’
Charlie and I both nodded, wondering what was coming next from Balfer.
‘Six years ago, the governor of a maximum security penitentiary in Illinois was at the centre of a major scandal; the details of which are not important. What is important, is that following this scandal, someone from the Whitehouse instructed the Director of the FBI to roll out a program that would keep, shall we say, discreet surveillance on the activities of all of the major US prisons; San Quentin being one.’
‘How is that legal?’ I asked. As ever, I was sceptical.
‘Well it’s not something we could use in court, let’s put it that way’, Balfer continued, confirming my suspicions that it wasn’t, in fact, legal at all. ‘It’s more so the FBI can keep tabs on who moves in what circles. Just a database really of known associates; a pool of individuals interacting with each other.’
‘Go on’, said Charlie, suddenly more interested.
‘Well like I say, it’s nothing we can use directly, and at the time we wouldn’t have flagged it as anything suspicious. We had no reason to, until now, given the time frame you have regarding Sarah Caldwell’s supposed release from San Quentin’.
‘What is it?’
Just over six months ago, Paul McCrane visited the governor of San Quentin four times in one week. He hasn’t been there at all, since we started tracking, before or since that week’.
I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. Like Balfer had said, that was nothing we could use, besides which, it was highly circumstantial.
‘There is more’, Balfer smiled, sensing my disappointment. ‘Two things actually: My source down in Quantico tells me that McCrane and Tassiker both went to Harvard together’. Now that was more like it; at least we had a link between them. I wondered how Axon was getting on down in San Francisco.
‘And the second?’ I asked?
‘Well like I said, discreet surveillance was set up, and with San Quentin being one of the more high profile prisons, it had more surveillance set up than most. There are cameras covering every conceivable exit; installed in various structural objects that no-one outside of the FBI knows about. On his last visit to San Quentin, we have photographs of the DA leaving with an unidentified woman. We can’t see anything after he left with her, so we don’t know how he transported her away from San Quentin, or to where; but my source swears it’s Paul McCrane leaving with her.’
‘And it’s definitely a woman?’ I clarified.
‘That’s what he says’, Balfer affirmed, ‘A copy of everything he has there is getting emailed to my laptop’.
Just as Balfer had finished recounting what Quantico had uncovered, and just as we pulled up outside the church in West Adams, Captain Williams rang me, telling me what Axon had found out at the prison.
‘So Tassiker denied he knew Caldwell or McCrane?’ I repeated for the benefit of Charlie and Balfer. ‘Yet he rang McCrane’s office immediately after Axon left? That’s excellent news Captain’. At long last, I actually believed we may be getting somewhere. I quickly repeated what Balfer had told us, and as I did so, I firmly believed we had enough to bring Tassiker in. So did the Captain.
‘Trouble is’, Williams advised. ‘We have no idea where he is at the moment. But we’ll stay on it. As soon as we locate him, we’ll bring him in’.
‘Hey, Patton’, spoke up Charlie, who had been quiet, listening intently to all this information get banded back and forth.
‘Yeah man?’ I turned to him.
‘Good news that may be’, he said, ‘but let’s focus on the job in hand. Let’s get Stella back’. Once again, Charlie was my anchor. I turned to Balfer.
‘Can you co-ordinate what we have with McCrane and Tassiker from here?’ I asked. ‘Finding Tassiker may now be the key’.
‘Of course’, Balfer agreed. ‘You need me’, he said nodding towards the church, ‘you know where I am’. The more I was working with Balfer, the more my respect for him continued to grow.
Although we were beginning to get pieces of the bigger picture together, I couldn’t help remember my last conversation with The Chemist; with Sarah Caldwell? The Chemist had seemed so pleased with our choice of getting Stella back and that was a very frightening prospect. It was a thought I carried with me as we entered the church.
51
Earlier today
Even before the Senator had called him with a green light to publish, Britland-Jones knew what story he was going to use. There had been so much information in the file given to him by Conway that the difficulty had been in deciding what
not
to use.
As much as he’d wanted to remain at the garage yesterday and read everything in the file, common sense had prevailed and he had driven back home first. It wasn’t the sort of information you wanted to get caught with, and it certainly wasn’t the kind of information you wanted to be reading in the offices of one of Los Angeles’ premier daily papers, where everyone was always inserting themselves into other people’s business! No-one was expecting him back today. In truth he spent very little time at the offices, preferring to be out in the field chasing the news and often typing up reports in the comfort and peace of his own home rather than the cramped conditions and intruding nature of his desk at the office. Today, however, the news had found him.
What Conway’s motive was for wanting a story published unconcerned the journalist. Just as long as fifty thousand big ones were his at the end of it, that was all that mattered. As an added bonus, he was about to go to his editor with an undeniable scoop. He’d been so successful over the last couple of years that the editor had long ago stopped asking him where he got his information from; just so long as the paper continued to sell more and more copies. His editor was a bad-tempered, loud and obnoxious individual in his mid-fifty’s; Vern Beecher was about as close to the stereotypical Hollywood portrayal of a newspaper editor as he thought it was possible to be. He remembered the joke going round the office when the remake of Spiderman had come out, the guy playing the newspaper editor of Peter Parker’s newspaper was almost identical to Beecher.
He was sure Conway had his reasons for wanting Burr and McCrane disgraced but he wouldn’t be chasing those for any kind of story. He thought fleetingly about returning to the United Kingdom when this was over; maybe a clean break would be the best thing. Far away from Los Angeles and far away from any repercussions this story might bring.
After reading through the thick file twice, he had decided that the story should be centrally concerned with the two-hundred thousand dollars that Burr and McCrane seemed to have creamed off a housing fund for redevelopment in downtown Los Angeles, the board of which they were both high profile, long-term members. There was no doubt that the news that these two corrupt, public figures had stolen so much money from those so much in need would distress the entire community and that shockwaves would reverberate across the entire state. It was also a story that would highly likely have the police knocking at their respective doors sooner rather than later, just as the Senator had instructed.
Knocking on Beecher’s door, he entered to see that his editor was in a customary bad mood. ‘You better have something good for me’, he barked. ‘I’ve had jack shit off you for over two weeks. What have you got for me?’
Britland-Jones tossed his story onto the desk and without asking proceeded to help himself to a cup of coffee. It was well known around the office that you should wait for Beecher to offer you anything before just helping yourself. He was big on office etiquette.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ Beecher was going scarlet with rage.
Calmly, Britland-Jones pointed to the papers he’d just dropped on his editor’s desk then raised his cup of coffee in Beecher’s direction. ‘It’s just that good’, he said. ‘I’ve just given you the story of a lifetime’.
52
As we circled around St. Johns, I noticed that sometime during today’s events, the afternoon sun had subsided and the sky had morphed into an early evening haze with the sun just beginning to set. We’d been on The Chemist’s trail today for around twelve hours, yet it felt like only a couple of hours since I’d gotten the call this morning.
Going inside the church, I heard what sounded like a service in progress. ‘Perfect timing as usual’, I remarked to Charlie, knowing we would have to interrupt whatever holy ceremony was taking place.