Steve Martini - Double Tap

As I stood in the courthouse hallway, watching Karen Rogan walk away, it hit me. It was on the papers found in Madelyn Chapman’s in-basket: the census data that Walter Eagan had scrambled so badly when he was dying, the papers that Chapman had grabbed from Klepp when he told her about the problem. The ones she’d told him to forget about. The ones on her desk the day she died.

There was good reason for her anxiety. She wasn’t busy. She was scared. Eagan, Chapman’s man Friday, had not made a mistake, he had cooked the numbers in the “42nd District.” Congressional redistricting is performed under federal law every ten years, following the new census. Drawing new boundary lines for congressional districts within each state is done by the state legislature in accordance with rules set forth by law.

In this case Isotenics had been hired by the legislature to create the software so that computers could lay out the new congressional boundary lines for the entire state. They would pump in the census tracking data and prepare a master plan by computer for new boundary lines, adding new congressional seats since the state’s population was growing. Within the general guidelines of those projected boundaries, incumbents and ambitious candidates could haggle to cut a few corners, but the major boundaries would usually hold fairly firm. Generally, unless there was a reason, no one would bother to look behind the cut of the initial plan, figuring it was grounded on federal census data. The press would spend all of its time looking for scandals among the shavings where corners were cut and where dragon heads were added to gerrymandered districts.

But Nathan Kwan had mastered a whole new scam. He had captured the process at an earlier stage. He had cooked the numbers at a level deep enough that no one except software experts would ever check. Eagan had arranged the initial software so that the 42nd District would become a mirror image of Nathan’s old state senate seat, where name recognition on the ballot would carry the day. Anyone wishing to run against Kwan would be dead on arrival at their campaign headquarters.

It was payback for the tax bill Nathan had carried three years earlier for Chapman and Isotenics. No doubt Eagan probably had to push the boundary lines out of shape on a dozen other districts to make it work.

The problems all started when Eagan died. Stuff fell through the cracks. Klepp saw the numbers. Because he was software-savvy, he was able to check the program. He realized that the tracking data for the original cut didn’t add up. If the courts found out, they would order a whole plan, new software to be programmed. Nathan’s dream district would end up scattered all over the map, flowing onto the turf of other political warlords who could run against him at election time and kick his ass. He wasn’t the only politician hunting for a safe seat in Congress, facing term limits and political annihilation. Members of the legislature were eating their own in the struggle to survive.

Add to this the fact that Chapman was already embroiled in the political firestorm of her life. Congress and the press were bearing down on the Primis project, Isotenics’s crown jewel. She didn’t have time for Nathan and his problems. She certainly didn’t need the distraction and added strain of a budding scandal over redistricting. Ordinarily it is one of those subjects that tends to cause the eyes of wary citizens to glaze over. Learning that politicians are prone to engage in shady deals when feathering their own nests has all the jarring revelation of informing them that the ancient Greeks spoke Greek. Talk to the average voter about census-tracking data, and they will go to sleep. But tell them about a deal to carve a district in return for a new tax loophole involving bribery, a deal in which the name of a certain company, Isotenics, surfaces and you have a story with legs. Add to that the fact that Isotenics is already on the working press’s hit parade because of its intrigues with the Pentagon and its proclivity to produce software that allows government to snoop into John Q’s e-mail, and you have a story that might just get up on those legs and trample your company.

Chapman’s deal with Nathan suddenly took on risks she wasn’t prepared to face. If Klepp talked about what he saw, it wouldn’t take rocket science to connect the tax bill with the funny district boundary lines favoring Kwan.

Seeing the dangers, and considering Chapman’s natural inclination to grow and to defend her empire, she would have cut right to the chase. She probably told Kwan to go away. That the deal was off. After all, what could Kwan do? He couldn’t go running to the police or the press and complain that Chapman had reneged on a deal to bribe him: a cushy tax break in return for a seat in Congress.

My guess is that when she told him to get out, Nathan must have gone ballistic, Caligula on his worst day. It must have put a shudder through her. This was probably the reason she asked Ruiz to help her out, to keep an eye on her for security’s sake, off the books. Chapman couldn’t go back to her board of directors and ask for security again, not after making a scene over the video in her office and canning the executive protection detail. The board would want to know why. What could she tell them: that she’d gotten a good deal on bargain day and bought a legislator to boost the bottom line? Corporate directors might appreciate the results, but they wouldn’t want to know the details if it might mean an invitation to a courthouse party by way of a felony indictment. Any hint of a scandal and they would push her out the door.

The stage was set for a bloody collision. Unless he wanted to go out, hang a shingle, and go broke practicing law, Nathan had to get rid of her before she could reprogram the redistricting software and scatter his dreams of Congress.

Nathan-the former prosecutor, the former Capital City cop, the ex-Marine-would know a good handgun when he saw one. How he found out about it and knew where it was is anyone’s guess. But, knowing Nathan, where there was a will, there was a way.

With the laser sight to zero his shots, the silencer to dampen the recoil, and the railing on the balcony to steady the piece, putting two shots into Chapman’s head from upstairs as she stood in the entry below was probably one of the easier things he had to accomplish that day. On the others he didn’t do as well.

In the brief time that he was a prosecutor, the analysis of evidence was not high among Nathan’s gifts and talents. The closest Nathan ever got to a crime scene as a cop was setting up barricades at the perimeter and driving by in a squad car. Putting the silencer on the rocks and setting the pistol in the flower bed as if it were made of crystal-I’m sure that never dawned on him as an issue.

Nathan’s burning need to know where the case was going, and to steer it in any direction except the one that might take it back to his own front door to roost, was the reason Kwan attached himself to me and why he has been camped in the courthouse for the last two weeks. Nathan wasn’t there to glad-hand the press: he was trying to make sure that all the diversion he engaged in that day at Chapman’s house continued to lead us all in the wrong direction.

I print out a copy of the story on Kwan’s tax bill and walk toward the elevator. If we had our cell phones I would call Harry at the courthouse and give him a heads-up. As it is, they are locked in our cars out in the parking lot.

In the empty elevator I ride to the main floor. It’s already getting dark outside. I hustle out the front door, right into his arms.

“I was wondering what you were doing, going to the library. What do we have here?” Nathan plucks the folded paper from my hand before I can fold it further and lose it in a pocket.