Steve Martini - Double Tap

I finally catch up to Karen in the crowd, take her by the arm. When she turns she seems surprised. “I wanted to thank you. I couldn’t earlier. The judge’s gag order.”

“No need to thank me,” she says. “I did what I was supposed to. Can they rearrest him?” she asks. She’s talking about Emiliano.

“They could, but it won’t do them any good. They’d run into the same wall that just fell on them. National security trumps all,” I say.

“If I ever get in trouble, I want you for a lawyer,” she says. “What do you think he’ll do now? Mr. Ruiz, I mean.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“You think he’d talk to me?”

“I’m sure he would.”

Suddenly she smiles. I have suspected for a while that Karen’s testimony on the videotape may have been motivated by something more than her simple wish to maintain Chapman’s name unsullied.

Nathan is finished with the press for the moment. He comes up and plants himself near us, listening as I talk to Karen. The way he is eyeing the pretty redhead, I can tell that Nathan is looking for an introduction.

The press follows him and suddenly it’s a crowd. One of them tries to ask me a question.

“I have nothing to say.” I have told Tim Saentz, the AP reporter, that as soon as the trial is over, he has the exclusive on anything I can talk about.

The three government lawyers come out of the courtroom. The press abandons us and mobs them, leaving Karen and me to talk, Nathan hanging on the periphery.

Kwan suffers from the political equivalent of seasonal affective disorder. He would die if he could not bask in the reflected glory of the latest topical event.

“One last question, then I have to run. How’s Mr. Klepp doing?” I ask her.

“Harold?” She looks at me. “You haven’t heard?”

I shake my head.

“Harold was put on administrative leave, escorted off the Isotenics campus the day after you talked to him at the bar. He hasn’t been back since. The only reason they didn’t fire him was to keep him quiet. It seems I wasn’t the only one at the bar that night.”

What she means is that someone else saw us and told Victor Havlitz.

Nathan spies the network logo on one of the cameras. “Be back in a minute,” he says. He sidles over toward the reporter with the microphone standing there, getting ready to do his lead-in for a spot on the nightly news. Kwan hands his newly minted congressional card to the cameraman. The guy is busy making adjustments to his tripod and lights. A second later the three of them, Nathan, the reporter, and the cameraman, are negotiating the news value of a little face time for the freshman congressman.

“I’m sorry to hear it. About Klepp, I mean.” My mind is wandering. Staying up three nights in a row going through boxes and prepping for trial has me exhausted.

“It’s fine,” she says. “Harold already has another job.”

My eyes are on Nathan in front of the camera as she talks. He is a perfect politician: glib, superficial, manipulative. He has a grand sense of self and a natural talent for a profession for which lying is usually listed at the top of the job description; in short, the clinical definition of your average sociopath.

I hear the words Department of Defense and my hobbled attention is drawn back to Karen. “They offered him a job auditing software quality control for the Department of Defense, Office of Procurement.” She’s talking about Klepp’s new job. “Can you believe it? I don’t think Victor knows yet.” She smiles and winks. “I’d like to be a fly on the wall when they tell him.”

Somehow I suspect that her ear may be connected to Victor’s outer door when this happens. Karen Rogan, the keeper of company secrets. I will never know exactly how much she really knew about IFS and Satz, the information they were mining. But my guess is that I barely scratched the surface.

Harry comes out of the courtroom behind me, trailing some print reporters like flies. “Ruiz wants to talk to you,” he says.

One of the reporters turns on me. “Mr. Madriani, what does this mean for IFS?”

“In a minute,” I tell him.

“See you later. I’m gonna call your office. I want his number.” Karen is talking about Ruiz. She turns and wanders off down the hall.

“They won’t release him from the jail until one of us gets the judge to sign the discharge order,” says Harry.

“Why don’t you take care of it.”

“He’d like to thank you,” says Harry.

“Right now I have something I have to do. Tell him I’ll catch up with him in just a few minutes. Ask him if he can stick around.”

I turn to head down the hall

“Where are you going?” says Harry.

“County law library,” I tell him.

“The library?” Harry looks baffled. He throws his hands in the air. “Whatever.”

Itake the elevator down to the main floor and go out the door and across the street.

Three minutes later I’m inside the county law library doing a Nexis search on two names.

It takes me less than a minute to find what I’m looking for. The two names, Nathan Kwan and Isotenics, Inc., produce a brief news article more than three years old. The dateline is “Capital City”:

The governor today signed into law SB 1478, the controversial state tax legislation authored by Senator Nathan Kwan (D-Capital City). The legislation is designed to give manufacturers of computer software in the state selling their products or providing services to government agencies sizable state tax incentives that would permit them to reduce their corporate federal income tax liability. The legislation became embroiled in controversy when it was discovered that a single company in Southern California was the exclusive beneficiary of the bill. According to estimates, under the terms of the legislation, Isotenics, Inc., located in San Diego County, stands to reap more than $200 million a year in corporate federal income tax savings.

It is what I feared: the confirmation that Nathan Kwan murdered Madelyn Chapman.

All the small parts of the puzzle had been in front of me all the time. For some reason I couldn’t assemble them until Karen slapped me in the face with the news that Harold Klepp had been marched from the Isotenics campus the day after I met with him at the bar. At that moment I knew that Nathan had lied to me.

The day he came bearing a gift to my office, the old picture of Nikki in the kitchen in Capital City, Nathan told me about the telephone conversation he had overheard while out at Isotenics. He told me about the midlevel executive named Jack, and his boss who he’d never met before, Harold Klepp, and how he’d overheard Klepp on the phone talking about IFS and the Defense Department. The only problem is, Nathan couldn’t have heard the conversation, because Klepp wasn’t there. He was already off the job, posted away from the Isotenics campus, on administrative leave in a holding pattern until the end of trial, when they could fire him.

It’s little wonder that Nathan went off to talk to the reporter and do an interview when he heard Karen mention Klepp’s name and what had happened to him. His heart must have gone through the floor when he heard it, wondering if I would put it together. Why would he bring me such a lie?

Ordinarily, I might pass it off as a natural “Kwanism,” Nathan trying to nose his way into the case for political dirt that he could trade in his new job once he got to Washington. But then I remembered that day when Janice handed me his new business card: the one with the embossed gold seal-the one that read 42nd Congressional District . I had seen that number someplace before.