House Rivals (5 page)

“How did you find all this stuff out, about Stevens and the easement and the other farmer?”

“When Stevens changed his position I wanted to know why, and I started digging. I talked to people, like the Democrats he'd been working with, and his lawsuit, of course, was a matter of public record.”

“But you don't know for sure that Curtis made the other farmer cancel the easement, or why he did it, or if that's the reason Stevens changed his vote.”

“I do know! I just can't prove it. Stevens denies it, of course, and when I asked the other farmer—who his neighbors all said is a shitty farmer and up to his neck in debt—he refused to talk to me. But I know!”

Before DeMarco could object again, she held up a hand to silence him. “There was another case. A Democrat, who lives in Williston, which is right about in the middle of the Bakken oil field. She was making a big stink about flaring and saying that Curtis was one of the biggest polluters.”

“Flaring?” DeMarco said.

“Jesus,” Sarah muttered, appalled by DeMarco's ignorance. “Flaring is where they vent off and burn waste gases that supposedly can't be efficiently captured and processed. If you were to go up in space it would look like there are ten thousand bonfires burning on the Great Plains. They actually have satellite pictures showing this. Flaring is bad in that it not only contributes to greenhouse gases but it actually wastes a lot of gas. They're burning off
millions
of cubic feet of gas a day.”

DeMarco wondered if she was exaggerating—but he doubted she was. “So why do the gas companies do it?” he said.

“Because it's cheaper to flare the gas than it is to install the equipment to capture it. Or they'll say it's for safety reasons. Anyway, this legislator from Williston runs a bakery and she was pushing for legislation to reduce flaring. Then out of the blue comes an old lady, who looks like everybody's grandma, and she files a lawsuit saying she was poisoned by a cupcake.”

“A cupcake?”

“Yeah. She said she found rat feces in the cupcake and it made her sick, and she got a lawyer to file a suit. This baker couldn't afford to fight a lawsuit, and if a rumor got out that she had rat shit in her flour, it would kill her business. Then the same thing happened, just like with Stevens. The lawsuit was dropped and the baker quit being a squeaky wheel. When I asked her about it, she started crying and wouldn't talk to me. Shouldn't you be taking notes or something?”

“No,” DeMarco said. “I don't need to take notes, not at this point. I get the gist of what you're saying but the thing is, I'm not sure what to do next. I have to give it some thought.”

“Well, I know what you need to do,” Sarah said, her eyes blazing like they might set DeMarco's martini on fire. “First you need to go read my blog and then get Mr. Mahoney to read it.”

DeMarco almost laughed out loud. Mahoney never read anything. The people who worked for him read the documents that Mahoney was supposed to read, then told him what the documents said.

“Then what Mahoney needs to do is convince the attorney general to investigate Curtis. What Curtis is doing isn't happening in a single state, so it would be appropriate to get the FBI and the Justice Department involved. They need to form up a federal task force.”

“A federal task force?” DeMarco said. “Based on a cupcake lawsuit?”

“Shit, I'm just wasting my time with you,” Sarah said. She started to get up but DeMarco placed a hand on her forearm. “Hold on, Sarah. I just need to think about all this, then maybe I'll talk to Mahoney.” He had no intention of talking to Mahoney.

“Okay,” Sarah said, then tears welled up in her eyes. “I just can't get anybody to take me seriously and this is serious stuff. Curtis is making a mockery out of democracy and nobody cares.”

“I care, Sarah.” Actually the only thing DeMarco really cared about was this girl not getting hurt. Although he admired her courage and her commitment, he thought she was being naïve if she believed she could change a political system that had become blatantly corrupt. She also didn't seem to understand that without solid evidence—which she didn't appear to have—she would never be able to prove to the satisfaction of any court in the land that Curtis was doing anything illegal. But his job wasn't to help her advance her cause; his job, as far as he was concerned, was to keep her from getting killed.

“Now tell me,” DeMarco said, “about these death threats and the other things people have done to try to get you to stop.”

6

“Do you hear me?” Curtis said. “I want that bitch to quit writing about me.”

Marjorie and Bill were still sitting in the Pirogue Grille with Leonard Curtis, less than two miles from where DeMarco was meeting with Sarah Johnson. By now their coffee was cold and the waitress didn't bring them fresh cups because Curtis had rudely instructed the waitress to leave them alone.

Sarah Johnson's blog was the bane of Curtis's existence. It was a disorganized, unstructured mess that if printed out would run two thousand pages, and it served three purposes. First, Johnson used it as a journal or a diary in which she recounted what she'd done that day in her relentless pursuit of Leonard Curtis. It discussed, in mind-numbing detail, legislation or legal cases she'd researched. She also named people she'd talked to, usually castigating those people for incompetence or stupidity. Marjorie and Bill, therefore, pretty much always knew what Johnson was doing because she told the whole world.

The second part of the blog was an ongoing rant against the American political system, and Johnson raved about how Curtis manipulated politicians with campaign contributions, took them on junkets, and paid for misleading television ads. She admitted that what Curtis was doing was arguably legal, but she wanted everyone to know how he was using his vast wealth solely to benefit Leonard Curtis as opposed to the common people.

It was the third part of the blog that was the real problem, however, and the reason for Curtis's angst. What Johnson would do was look for any legal or legislative issue in the tristate area that affected Curtis. Next, she would identify people who appeared to be pivotal to the legislation passing or failing, or to a lawsuit being decided in Curtis's favor. Marjorie couldn't even imagine the hundreds of hours Johnson spent researching and investigating. Johnson's final step would then be to find some evidence, no matter how circumstantial or far-fetched, that a key person had been bribed, coerced, or otherwise unduly influenced. However, the evidence—if you could even call it evidence—could never be tied directly to anything Curtis had done personally. Nor had Johnson been able to find a single person willing to admit that he'd been bribed or coerced.

But the problem was that Johnson was right! In the past two years, she had uncovered eleven instances where Curtis had in fact bribed or coerced politicians.

Marjorie had tried dozens of times to convince Curtis that Sarah Johnson wasn't worth going after and that he should simply ignore her. She told Curtis that less than fifty people a week read Johnson's rambling blog. For that matter, they weren't sure that anybody actually
read
it; they could just see that less than fifty people a week visited her website—and eight of those people were Bill, Marjorie, Leonard Curtis, and five lawyers.

One reason so few people read her blog was that Johnson didn't have the ability to make the complex legal issues she wrote about simpler and more understandable, and the way she wrote wasn't engaging and put people to sleep. Furthermore, in person, Johnson was rude and antagonistic, and she alienated the people whose help she needed. The bottom line was that no law enforcement organization had been persuaded by her and her incomprehensible blog.

But Curtis didn't care. Curtis wanted her stopped.

So Bill and Marjorie had tried to stop her. They started off with a low-key approach. They had a lawyer send a cease-and-desist letter to Johnson warning that she would be sued for libel if she continued to make blatantly false accusations against certain people named in her blog. Letters from lawyers terrify most normal people. Normal people can envision spending massive amounts of money and time battling a lawsuit, and then, ultimately, losing the lawsuit and everything they own to pay off the lawyers and penalties imposed by the court. But Sarah Johnson wasn't normal, and the letter from the lawyer didn't deter her one tiny bit. She posted the letter verbatim in her blog, citing it as an example of the kind of thing Curtis would do to stop any investigation into his criminal activities.

Next, Leonard Curtis
did
sue her for libel—and Johnson's lawyers responded with a motion for discovery, asking for virtually every document Curtis's businesses had generated in the last two years. Curtis's lawyers were now fighting Johnson's lawyers to keep her from getting the documents. Curtis also had courts in three states issue restraining orders against Johnson, specifying she couldn't call him or come within a hundred yards of him. These orders were granted—and frankly, ­reasonable—because for a while Johnson was essentially stalking Curtis.

When Curtis's lawsuit didn't stop her, they tried to scare her by having a crude, rough-sounding guy make harassing phone calls, saying he was going to kill her if he lost his job because of the things she was doing. They figured Johnson
had
to know there were violent yokels all over Montana and the Dakotas and they all owned guns. In other words, they thought she'd take the threats seriously—and maybe she did—but she didn't stop going after Curtis.

Then Marjorie had an idea she was sure would work. Using Curtis's money, she convinced an editor at a major East Coast newspaper to offer Johnson a job investigating coal mining in West Virginia and Kentucky—places where they literally blew the tops off mountains to get at seams of coal. Marjorie figured that working for a legitimate newspaper on a big-time environmental issue would appeal to Johnson's ego as well as her crusading nature. But that didn't work either because by this point, Johnson's primary focus wasn't the environment—her mission was to nail Leonard Curtis.

Marjorie and Bill's next move was to have Gordy completely fuck up Johnson's website, figuring she wouldn't have the resources to fight off a cyberattack. They also had three more people file lawsuits against her, thinking that she wouldn't have the money to fight four lawsuits simultaneously. And that's when they found out that the twenty-two-year-old college dropout was extraordinarily rich thanks to her dead mother. Sarah's lawyers were now doing everything they could to turn the lawsuits into jury trials where Leonard Curtis would be subpoenaed to testify.

The last thing they did was send three guys to rough her up. This had been Bill's idea. Marjorie said at the time she thought it was a mistake but Bill said that a young woman, all on her own, might be brave when it came to lawsuits and harassing phone calls but real, physical violence was a whole different story. So Bill told the guy he hired not to hurt her, but to do his best to scare the living shit out of her. But, as Marjorie had predicted, all the assault did was piss Johnson off and the cops were now looking for the people who had assaulted her.

“So what are you going to do next?” Curtis asked, as they sat there drinking ice-cold coffee.

“Mr. Curtis,” Marjorie said, “I know you don't want to hear this but I really think we ought to just leave that crazy girl alone. Nobody's listening to her. Nobody takes her seriously. Nobody reads her stupid blog.”

“
I
read her damn blog!” Curtis said, smacking one of his small fists on the table. “I want her stopped.”

“Okay,” Bill said, seeing that Marjorie was getting nowhere and just making Curtis angry. “We'll regroup. We'll come up with something.”

“Yeah, well, if you don't, I'll find somebody who can,” Curtis said.

That was the very last thing Bill and Marjorie wanted to hear. They knew Curtis was happy with their work, but they also knew he wouldn't hesitate to fire them. Curtis fired people the way cats shed fur, and they knew they'd never find jobs that paid anywhere near what Curtis was paying them.

7

Curtis left the Pirogue Grille at nine thirty to go back to the Radisson. Curtis was a man who went to bed every night at ten p.m. and he allowed nothing to keep him up any later. As soon as he left, Marjorie and Bill ordered drinks—a Glenlivet neat for Bill, a glass of good Merlot for Marjorie. They never drank when they were with Curtis because Curtis didn't drink.

“What are we going to do?” Bill said.

“I don't know,” Marjorie said. They sat there for a couple of minutes, sipping their drinks, saying nothing, as they tried to come up with an idea to stop Johnson that might actually work. Finally Marjorie said, “There's always Murdock.”

“Aw, Jesus, Marjorie. Murdock? Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I guess I am. I don't want to do that but . . . Johnson's irrational. She's insane! She's been butting her head against a brick wall for two years, yet she refuses to stop. She's too rich to buy off and she's too crazy to scare off. I mean, she's like those fucking Muslim suicide bombers: she's willing to blow herself up to blow
you
up. How can you deal with a person like that?”

“But Murdock?” Bill said.

“Hey! If you got a better idea, spit it out.”

When three men in ski masks terrorized Sarah Johnson in a dark parking lot, the short ringleader had been Bill's ex-brother-in-law. His name was Tim Sloan, and Bill could understand why his sister had divorced him. Tim was a lazy, shiftless, useless slug whose primary source of income—after Bill's sister divorced him—was a Social Security disability check for a nonexistent back problem. But Tim wasn't totally stupid and he was always desperate for money as long as he didn't have to work too hard for it, so Bill used him occasionally.

Bill and Marjorie's territory covered three large states, and Tim would be sent to pick up documents that they didn't want emailed as emails left a traceable record. A couple of times, Bill had Tim volunteer to help out on the campaigns of candidates Curtis opposed hoping Tim might overhear something that would give Curtis's guy an advantage. One time they had Tim deliver photos to a certain judge when they wanted to impress upon him the inadvisability of a ruling he'd been about to make. And Tim was the gravelly voiced man who had harassed Johnson with nasty phone calls, threatening to kill her if he lost a job that he didn't have.

But Murdock was in a completely different league than Tim Sloan.

The first and only time Bill and Marjorie had used Murdock was six years ago. It was so long ago they could almost convince themselves they'd never used him at all. A lawsuit Curtis couldn't afford to lose had made it all the way to the South Dakota Supreme Court and if the court ruled against him, it was going to cost him millions. To make matters worse, this occurred during the great recession of 2008 and even Curtis was having financial problems.

The problem was that there were five justices on the South Dakota Supreme Court and Bill and Marjorie knew that two were going to rule against Curtis, two were going to rule in his favor, but they had no idea what the fifth justice was going to do. The swing judge was an unpredictable screwball named James Wainwright III who had no consistent record on anything. It was as if he flipped a coin every time he made a decision. To make matters worse, Bill and Marjorie hadn't been able to find anything they could use to persuade Wainwright. He was rich and, as best as they'd been able to tell after having a private detective watch him for two months, had no vices they could use to control him.

If Wainwright was gone, however, the governor would appoint his replacement. Curtis had no strong hold over the South Dakota governor but the governor was “gas-friendly” and Bill and Marjorie were about ninety percent sure he would pick a guy who would rule in Curtis's favor. So they just had to get Wainwright off the bench—they
had
to—and after everything else they'd tried had failed, Curtis told them to call Murdock. They had no idea how Curtis knew Murdock and Curtis, being Curtis, wouldn't tell them. It was apparent, however, that he'd used the man before.

Bill met with Murdock in a steam room at a small gym in Denver clad in nothing but a white towel, a practical precaution to ensure Bill wasn't wearing a wire. Murdock turned out to be an average-looking guy of indeterminate age; he could have been forty-five or a decade older. He had receding dark hair, brown eyes, a bony nose, and thin lips. He was in good shape but he wasn't physically impressive; he wasn't any more muscular than Bill. Nor did he look the way Bill imagined a contract killer would look: evil, steely-eyed, cold as ice. If Murdock had said that he sold vacuum cleaners at Sears, Bill would have believed him.

Bill told Murdock that Judge Wainwright of South Dakota needed to have a fatal accident within the next three months, but the judge couldn't be obviously murdered. Murder could lead to all sorts of problems, and the last thing Curtis wanted was some hotshot law enforcement team investigating Wainwright's death.

Six weeks later, Wainwright drowned. He owned a cabin in the Black Hills and liked to fish for trout in the small streams near his place. His body was found lying in less than a foot of water in Spearfish Creek. It appeared as if he'd slipped, hit his head on a rock, fell into the water unconscious, and drowned. He was still holding his fishing rod in his hand when he was found. The rock that he'd smacked his head on was lying near him, his blood was on it, and there was no evidence that anyone else had been with the judge—such as fingerprints on the rock or footprints that didn't belong to the judge or tire tracks from a second vehicle parked near the scene—at least no evidence that a local county sheriff could find.

But Bill didn't want to bring in Murdock to deal with Sarah Johnson. He'd lost ten pounds and didn't sleep soundly for three months after Wainwright's
accident
. “Goddamnit, there has to be another way,” he said to Marjorie.

“Bill,” Marjorie said, “I don't want to do this either, but I've got two boys to send to college one day, and my house isn't going to be paid off for another fifteen years. I am
not
going to let that girl destroy my life.”

Before Bill could respond, Marjorie's phone beeped the signal for a text message. “It's Heckler,” she told Bill. “Let me see what he wants.” Marjorie left the bar to call Heckler, and the reason she did was because she needed a cigarette. She never smoked around her kids but she'd sneak one every once in a while when she was under stress.

Heckler was a local private detective who they were paying to watch Sarah Johnson. He'd been following her for the last three months, although he couldn't stick with her twenty-four hours a day as he needed to sleep sometime. Heckler also recorded her cell phone calls and used the GPS feature in Johnson's phone to keep tabs on her location. When it came to technology, Heckler was a dinosaur but Gordy—Bill and Marjorie's grass-smoking associate—had downloaded the necessary spyware onto Johnson's phone.

Marjorie had actually been amazed to learn that there were companies that legally sold software that could be used to monitor cell phone calls and track people's movements. According to these companies' websites, you had to have physical access to the phone you wanted to monitor and, of course, the owner's permission, but Gordy was smart enough to load the spyware onto Johnson's phone by embedding the software in an email he sent to her. Marjorie had told Bill she was thinking about having Gordy put the software on her kids' phones so she'd always know where they were and what sort of mischief they might be planning.

Thinking about getting Murdock involved, Bill decided to have another scotch. He looked around for the waitress and didn't see her, so he walked up to the bar. He ordered a drink from the bartender, then glanced down the bar. Aw, shit. There was a woman sitting there—glaring at him. He'd slept with her once, couldn't remember her name, and he hadn't ever called her back after the one time. He was trying to make up his mind if he should go say hello or just ignore her when Marjorie came back into the bar. She walked over to him and said, “Come on. We don't have time for you to get laid.”

They sat back down at the table and Marjorie said, “Johnson met with a guy tonight.”

“You mean she had a date?”

“No. Heckler said the guy was older than her. Heckler said he was a hard-looking SOB. Those were his words. He said Johnson and the guy had a drink together and she left an hour later. Heckler said it didn't look like a social thing.”

“So who is he?”

“His name's Joe DeMarco. Heckler got his name when he called Johnson. Then Heckler followed him back to his motel and paid a clerk to get a peek at the registration form.” Marjorie paused before she said, “DeMarco's from Washington, Bill. I mean, D.C. not the state.”

“D.C.?”

“Yeah. We better find out who he is before you talk to Murdock.”

Bill didn't bother to say that he hadn't yet agreed to talk to Murdock. All he said was, “I think you're right. I just hope he isn't carrying a badge. Curtis will go through the roof if he is.”