“First you don’t want to sit, now you don’t want to stand. Which is it?”
“How about just show me your cards and let’s get this over with?”
“I talked to Hackett. Matson isn’t cooperating with you. I talked to Granger’s lawyer and Granger wasn’t cooperating with you, either.”
Braunegg remained silent. His face set. Not sure where Gage was headed.
“Read over your complaint. You have allegations in there that could’ve only come from Matson and Granger. And only Matson was talking-and not to you.”
“Like what?”
“The alleged connection between Burch and Fitzhugh. That went from Matson to Peterson to you.”
Braunegg blanched like he just got caught stuffing jumbo shrimp into his wife’s purse at a cocktail party.
“And that’s all you want? We hold off of Burch? Why not just go to the press? Take a shot at making us pull out of the case? You might even get Peterson fired.”
“Because somebody else would take it over and I’d just have to come up with a way to lean on them-and I don’t have time. And it doesn’t help me to end Peterson’s career. Another U.S. Attorney would just come into the case and we’re back where we started.”
Braunegg looked toward the parking lot exit, as if there was a street sign in the distance to tell him which way to turn, then decided to call for help. “I’ll talk to my partner.”
Gage pulled out his business card, wrote a telephone number on the back, then handed it to Braunegg. “This is the telephone number of Kenny Leals at the New York Times. You can either call me in one hour agreeing or call him in two hours explaining. Do yourself and Peterson a favor. Call me in one.”
Gage had driven less than a mile away from the Hidden Valley Country Club when his cell phone rang.
“You’ve got a deal. Two months. But someday the shoe’s going to be on the other foot,” Braunegg said. “What goes around comes around.”
There was only one type of person Gage hated more than liars: people who thought in cliches. They couldn’t help but lie to themselves.
“No it won’t and no it doesn’t.”
“You better watch your back.”
Not another one. Better answer in a way he understands.
“You couldn’t sneak up on the dead.”
CHAPTER 45
I think we’ve got a leak from the grand jury in the SatTek case,” Peterson told United States Attorney Willie Rose at the weekly meeting of the senior staff in the windowless conference room on the eleventh floor of the Federal Building.
Spread around the table along with Peterson, as head of Securities Fraud, were the chiefs of Major Crimes, White Collar, Organized Crime, Anti-Terrorism, and the Drug Enforcement Task Force. All of them looked at Rose with uncertainty. The first black federal district judge in the Eastern District of California, Rose had resigned a year earlier to assume leadership of what the press called the “troubled” U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California. And while each knew they had been promoted as part of Rose’s solution to the troubles, they all feared becoming vehicles for his political ambition.
“If we had somebody in Congress with balls enough to sponsor a constitutional amendment,” Rose said, “we’d get rid of the stupid thing. We don’t need a damn grand jury to tell us we have a case. We tell them. It’s a waste of our time and taxpayers’ money.” Rose tossed his pen onto his yellow legal pad, then looked over at Peterson. “Why do you think you’ve got a leak?”
Everyone at the table, and their assistants sitting behind them, alerted like golden retrievers. Peterson wasn’t a guy who said whatever happened to flit through his mind. If he raised an issue, he’d thought about it.
“We’ve had two grand jury targets murdered and one who barely survived.” Peterson glanced around at the others. “Some of you know him, Jack Burch. The dead ones are a chartered accountant in London named Fitzhugh, and Edward Granger, a venture capital guy who we had just told the grand jury would be coming in to testify as a cooperating defendant.”
“I thought Burch was road rage,” Rose said.
“That’s the party line, but I’m not sure. The later shooting that I thought was road rage wasn’t. It was domestic. The wife thought hubby was having an affair with a woman he jogged with in the mornings. But even if we set that aside, we have Fitzhugh and Granger. It’s like somebody is trying to contain the case and somebody in the grand jury is tipping them off.”
The tension in the room ratcheted up.
Rose shifted into cross-examination mode. “What’s your evidence?”
“It’s less evidence than a pattern. Shortly after I introduce the case to the grand jury, Burch and Fitzhugh get hit. Then we tell them that Granger is about to cooperate and he gets taken out.”
“What about Matson?”
“Nobody’s bothered him and he says he’s not afraid.”
Rose peered over at Peterson as if the solution was obvious. “Doesn’t that tell you that he’s somehow in on it?”
Peterson shook his head. “I’ve spent a lot of time with him. He doesn’t have the balls.”
“Then what?”
“My guess is that there’s something we don’t know that connects Burch, Fitzhugh, and Granger that’s separate from Matson, and somebody doesn’t want it to come out.”
“Who were the stockbrokers?” asked Lily Willison, the leader of the Organized Crime Division, known as Mainframe because of her computerlike memory.
“Northstead Securities in San Diego. Kovalenko. Yuri.”
Willison looked toward the ceiling, searching her mental database, then back at Peterson. “He’s as gangedup as they come. Just like his dead brother. Maybe he’s the one trying to contain this thing.”
“I considered that,” Peterson said. “But as far as we can tell, Kovalenko’s only connection to SatTek was pump and dump. And he isn’t afraid of doing a couple of years. He won’t get involved in murder just to save himself a short vacation in minimum security. And even if it is him, the information about who to target had to come from somewhere.”
“Why not just ask the court to impanel another grand jury…” Willison hesitated, her face flushing. She swallowed, then finished the question, voice rising to a squeak. “And start over?”
The question hung in the air like a raised sledgehammer. Everyone knew, Willison most of all, that she was about to get thumped.
“Let’s back up,” Rose said, setting up the blow. “How many indictments has that grand jury issued?”
“Fifty, sixty, something like that,” Peterson said.
Willison’s interlaced fingers began to dig into the backs of her hands.
“How many defendants altogether?”
“Two hundred or so. Maybe more. They did two racketeering indictments with about thirty defendants each.”
Rose looked at Willison, then swung down. “Are you ready to disclose grand jury misconduct to two hundred defense lawyers? Ready to answer two hundred motions to dismiss? Maybe a hundred speedy trial motions? Maybe even a bunch of grand jury abuse motions? When we don’t even know for sure what happened?”
Willison shook her head, but held his gaze.
Rose reached for his pen, then began drumming it on the conference table, looking from face to face, lowered eyes ducking guilt by association.
“I see there aren’t any volunteers for a little motion exercise.”
Rose exhaled. It was moments like these that reminded him how much easier life was on the bench. He took the U.S. Attorney appointment only to get his name in the media to set up a run for governor, and planned to kick it off with Burch’s indictment and a no-one-is-above-the-law-time-to-get-the-big-time-lawyers press conference. But grand jury problems were messy. The public wouldn’t understand and the mess would slop back onto him.
Rose glanced at Peterson. “You and I need to visit the chief judge. Anybody have anything else?” Rose paused, then looked around the table. “No? Then we’re done.”
The chief judge cleared his calendar for the meeting, and later that day Peterson called Zink into his office.