House Odds (28 page)

“He bought a bag of peanuts for the game. People eat peanuts at baseball games. And then he sat on them, for Christ’s sake. He didn’t
pulverize
them.”

“McGrath knows about your peanut allergy, doesn’t he?” Emma said.

“Sure. I told the guys about it when I was in college, and once, this asshole, this guy who played backup quarterback, put a couple peanuts in this pizza I was eating. He thought it’d be funny to see what happened. Fortunately, the medics got there in time. But just because Rusty knows I’m allergic doesn’t mean he was trying to kill me. I’ve known the guy for twenty years. We were teammates.”

“Yeah,” Emma said, “Rusty seems like a real team player, all right.”

And DeMarco wondered how Campbell would feel about his teammate if he knew that McGrath had screwed his wife.

“Campbell,” DeMarco said, “you have to face reality. Richard Praeter did not commit suicide. Rusty McGrath killed him and he’s going to kill you next.”

“That’s bullshit,” Campbell said. “Why would Rusty kill anyone?”

“You know why,” DeMarco said. “You, Praeter, and McGrath have been involved in a criminal conspiracy for years. You gave Praeter information on your company’s research, he bought stock at the right time, hid the trail from the SEC, and then shared the profits with you and McGrath.”

Campbell opened his mouth to protest, but DeMarco kept talking.

“When all of you received subpoenas the other day from Molly Mahoney’s lawyer, McGrath decided that you and Praeter had become expendable. He killed Praeter and he would have killed you in Charlottesville if my friend hadn’t intervened.”

“That’s what this is all about,” Campbell said. “You guys are trying to get Molly off by pinning something on me.”

“We’re not trying to pin anything on you,” Emma said, “We’re trying to save your life.”

“You need to confess, Campbell,” DeMarco said. “That’s the only way you’re gonna stay alive.”

“Confess to what?” Campbell shrieked.

“That you gave insider tips to Praeter, and that you and McGrath were Praeter’s partners.”

“And we want you to tell us why you set up Molly,” Emma added.

Oh, boy,
DeMarco thought.

“For the tenth fuckin’ time,” Campbell screamed, “I didn’t have a goddamn thing to do with Molly! And don’t you people ever come to my house again.”

39

“Thanks for coming by, DeMarco.”

Lawyer Daniel Caine was in his well-furnished office riding an exercise bike, the pedals a blur at the rate he was going. As Caine cycled to nowhere, DeMarco sat drinking expensive coffee, thinking Caine would probably put ten miles on the odometer in the time it took him to finish the cup.

“I’ve got some bad news,” Caine said, not even breathing hard. “Actually I have two pieces of bad news.”

“Great,” DeMarco said. That was just what he needed: more bad news.

“As you know our defense is based primarily on the fact that the e-trade brokerage and bank accounts were established online, and that the people who did this, possibly Campbell and the late Mr. Praeter, stole Molly’s identity and used computers at an Internet café to commit their crimes. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Molly ever spoke or met with the brokers, nor is there any direct evidence she used the computers at the café to set up any accounts.”

Caine sounded like he was doing a summation for a jury. He was also telling DeMarco things he already knew. “So what’s changed?” he asked.

“We’ve been going through the records we subpoenaed from the SEC,” Caine said. “Kiser
buried
us in paper. She filled a FedEx delivery truck with boxes of files, knowing it would take us forever to go through everything.

“Well, yesterday one of my guys, this intern we just hired, found something. I’m going to give that kid a bonus when this is all over. Anyway, a brokerage firm called CoreTrade is one of the firms that Molly allegedly used to buy stock in Hubbard Power, the submarine battery company. Well, now there’s some circumstantial evidence that Molly called them.”

“Circumstantial?”

“Yes. Before the stock was purchased, someone called CoreTrade and asked how one went about setting up an online account, what information was required, what documents had to be signed, that sort of thing. Well, CoreTrade, clever boys that they are, use their caller ID system to automatically record the phone numbers of callers; they also log some calls they receive, and note the subject of the call. They do this so they can call people back who express an interest in their services but don’t sign on with them the first time they call.”

“You’re not going to tell me that the call was made from Molly’s cell phone, are you?”

“No. But the call was made from a phone at Reston Tech, and the phone is in a conference room just down the hall from Molly’s office. Kiser must have found out about the broker’s call-back system, went through it looking for phone numbers, and finds the number for one of several hundred phones at Reston.”

“Was Douglas Campbell working the day the call was made?” DeMarco asked. Even though DeMarco knew it was Molly who’d made the call, Kay Kiser couldn’t prove it, and if Campbell was there that day, Kiser couldn’t prove that he
didn’t
make the call.

“I’m way ahead of you, DeMarco,” Caine said. “Campbell was on a recruiting trip to a bunch of colleges in the Midwest.”

“Well, shit,” DeMarco said.

“Like I said, it’s circumstantial. The fact that a phone call was made to a brokerage firm from a phone fifty feet from her desk doesn’t prove she made the call, but it doesn’t help our case.”

“So is that it?” DeMarco said.

“No. I told you I had two pieces of bad news,” Caine said. He finally stopped pedaling and climbed down from the exercise bike. He dabbed at the sweat on his face with a towel, though he wasn’t really sweating all that hard. Caine reminded DeMarco of the guy who played the robot in the second
Terminator
movie, not Arnold, but the skinny, unstoppable guy made of liquid metal.

“Molly normally used cash at the café but one time she paid for her computer time with a credit card, and the time she used the computer is on the café’s copy of her receipt. The time recorded coincides
exactly
with the time one of the five brokerage accounts was established online. Just like with the phone call, Kiser can’t prove that Molly established the account—there are ten computers in the place—but her being there at the exact time the account was set up is devastating.”

Daniel Caine didn’t know about Ted Allen, but DeMarco was beginning to suspect that Caine now knew he was defending a guilty client. The good thing about defense lawyers, however, is that most of their clients are guilty, and guilt or innocence often has very little to do with a lawyer’s strategy.

“So how are you going to handle this?” DeMarco asked.

Caine grimaced. “I’ll continue to argue that Kiser can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Molly made the phone call or that she set up the e-trade account. I’ll say the people who are trying to frame her are so smart and devious that they established one of the brokerage accounts
knowing
she was in the café that day, that they obviously followed her there.”

“I’m not sure that’s going to fly,” DeMarco said.

“Well, if you have a better idea, I’m listening,” Caine said.

“I don’t,” DeMarco said.

40

DeMarco caught up with Mahoney in a hearing room at the Rayburn Building.

He’d been part of a group of lawmakers who spent the last four hours beating up a couple of bankers, the bankers having been given multimillion-dollar bonuses while simultaneously losing several billion dollars of their shareholders’ money. Beating up investment bankers was one of the recurring Punch and Judy shows in D.C. The only point of the hearings, as far as DeMarco could tell, was for the politicians to be seen on television
pretending
to be outraged by the bankers’ greedy behavior; he knew they were pretending as they never passed any laws to truly change that behavior.

“I just got out of a meeting with Molly’s lawyer,” DeMarco said. “Things have gone from bad to worse.”

“What the hell are you talking about,” Mahoney said, and his face began to flush to an unhealthy shade of crimson—and he hadn’t even heard the bad news. Mahoney saw nothing wrong with shooting the messenger, particularly when there was no one else to shoot.

DeMarco relayed what he’d learned from Caine: that Kiser now had more evidence, albeit circumstantial, that she could use to convict Molly. DeMarco concluded by saying, “Caine’s good and she still has a chance at trial but I’d say the odds of her being found guilty have gone up substantially.”

As DeMarco watched Mahoney absorb the bad news he couldn’t help but think of the old saying about never backing a dangerous animal into a corner, which is what Robert Fairchild and Ted Allen were doing. Mahoney was just sitting there, glowering, but what DeMarco saw was a white-haired bear—a bear with yellow fangs and long sharp claws. What Big Bob and Ted didn’t realize was that Mahoney wasn’t the type of man to go down without a fight, even if he
knew
he was going to lose the fight. Somebody, very soon, was going to feel the bear’s claws.

“I’m starting to think,” DeMarco said, “that the only way to get free of Ted and keep Molly out of jail is to give Ted his money and let that guy Denny Reed take the fall for her.”

“Don’t forget,” Mahoney said, “that I also have to move a hundred million dollars from the U.S. Treasury to the State of New Jersey.”

“Yeah, well,” DeMarco said, “someone’s going to have to tell Ted that even you can’t make that happen.”

“But I can,” Mahoney said, and then he explained.

Every year the Congress of these United States appropriates a pile of money for the Department of Defense, a green stack so high it reaches the clouds. And every year DOD spends all the money it’s been given and then comes back to Congress with its hands held out, like an Oliver Twist clad in olive drab asking for more porridge. After a suitable period of haggling, Congress inevitably gives the military more money, and the additional monies given are termed a “supplemental,” meaning that Congress will increase, or supplement, the staggering amount already provided in the original appropriations bill. It just so happened that the annual defense supplemental was currently winding its way through the hallowed halls of Congress.

Now, the average citizen, naïve schmuck that he is, thinks that the Pentagon is being given the extra money to buy more soldiers, tanks, planes, and guns—and of course the average citizen is completely wrong. The military supplemental is, in reality, just another mechanism for Congress to distribute pork, and the fact that some of the money is actually used to help our fighting forces is often coincidental or, at best, tangential. Last year, for example, Mahoney—that great grandmaster of pork distribution—used the supplemental to build a parking garage for union workers at a defense plant in Massachusetts. The stated rational for this expenditure was that erecting said garage would make the workers more efficient at producing whatever they produced; the reality was that the parking garage created happy voters and made a certain construction company—one that contributed heavily to Mahoney—even richer than it was before. And it appeared that this year, if he had to, Mahoney was going to use the defense supplemental to help Ted Allen get his convention center built.

The way Mahoney planned to do this was to include in the supplemental one hundred million dollars for the state of New Jersey—mere chicken feed in terms of defense spending—and the money would be earmarked for military recruitment and homeland security. The deal was this: when the new convention center retail mall was built, it would include rent-free space for military recruiters—like there was a chance in hell that the slot machine grannies coming down from New York were going to stop by the recruiting office. In addition, the state had to agree that in the event of a disaster—hurricane, tsunami, terrorist attack—the convention center would become a place for the public to cower until the threat had passed.

“Won’t the Republicans in the House try to stop you?” DeMarco asked.

“No,” Mahoney said. Mahoney didn’t bother to explain but DeMarco figured that Perry Wallace, Mahoney’s diabolical chief of staff, had cut deals with key Republicans over other provisions in the bill and that New Jersey’s Republican congressional delegates were all backing Perry, of course, as the bill benefited their home state and supported New Jersey’s Republican governor. The Democrats would go along for the simple reason that Mahoney would make them. In other words, Perry had worked his backroom magic, all the politicians were perfectly aligned, and he was just waiting for Mahoney to give him the go-ahead.

“But I’m not gonna do it,” Mahoney said. “Goddamnit, I’m not.”

DeMarco knew Mahoney didn’t really care about the hundred million—it wasn’t
his
money—what the bear cared about was allowing Ted Allen to win.

“So what the hell are you gonna do next?” Mahoney said.