When he got seated at his desk, he retrieved the four messages he’d received since last night, hoping against hope that one of them would turn out to be from Canetta, or even Ron Beaumont. If Al Valens had left a message Hardy hadn’t been able to get back at his home, then maybe either or both of the men he wanted to talk to had tried as well, or called here at his office afterwards.
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.’
‘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.
‘OK. 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.’
‘OK. 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.’
‘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.’
‘OK, 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 lay person 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. OK, 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 is 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.’
Hardy took a moment to let it sink in. If this were 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 Rider. 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-’
‘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 wracked his brain, trying to keep himself from the knee-jerk 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 between SKO and him 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’s operative in San Francisco Baxter Thorne.
What if Valens’ efforts to keep Bree quiet hadn’t worked after all? What if someone needed to shut her up?
Valens again, once removed.