John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

‘How’d she get those?’

Thorne’s voice took on a mild tone of reproach. ‘Well, Al, I was going to ask you the same thing.’

Valens took it in silence. ‘So where’d you leave it?’

‘I sent him back to Pierce.’

Valens was silent for a long moment. ‘How close was he to us?’

‘ Way too. But now he’s looking at Pierce, who had every reason. More than every reason.’ Thorne smiled thinly . ‘I think Sergeant Griffin will come to the conclusion that Mr Pierce must have done it. And with no physical evidence, he’ll have to go to the strongest motive .’

But Valens didn’t sound convinced. ‘What if he comes back to us, though? After all we’ve -’

Thorne cut him off. ‘Al, he wants to catch a killer. Our arrangement is not his area of interest. He won’t be looking this way.’

Valens’ voice betrayed the panic Thorne knew he must be feeling. ‘But what if he does, Baxter? What if he does?’

Thorne spoke in his most soothing tones. ‘Then he’ll have to be managed, that’s all.’

The limousine bearing the Democratic candidate for governor pulled up to where a crowd of perhaps a hundred citizens waited in the chill by the Union Square entrance to the Saint Francis Hotel.

In the back seat, Damon Kerry nodded appreciatively at the man next to him. ‘Good job, Al. Nice turnout.’

Valens wore a distracted air. There was no doubt that the crowd here would be satisfactory. You tell semi-indigents that you’ll pay them twenty bucks to go someplace and stand around for fifteen minutes, and you can generally get some good percentage of them to show up and do it. And since both sides did it, neither could snitch off the other to the media.

Five months ago, Damon Kerry had unexpectedly taken the primary after the two other Democratic contenders had vilified each other to death in a series of TV debates. Since that time, Valens found himself more and more coming around to the opinion that the system could be improved by simply eliminating the middle men and paying people directly to vote.

In a cynical moment – and there had been hundreds lately – he’d amused himself doing the math. He’d concluded that for about the same amount of money they’d already blown through on this campaign, they could have paid every registered voter in the state twenty bucks to go into the booth and mark the ‘X’ next to Kerry.

If he took the number of citizens who actually voted – somewhere near thirty per cent of California’s adults – and only wanted to ensure a simple majority of fifty-one per cent, he could up the ante to nearly a hundred dollars per vote. With that kind of incentive, people would take the whole day off with pay to ‘vote.’ That was the way to do it. Hell, they’d even make money on the deal.

‘What are you thinking about, Al? You’re not here.’

The limo had stopped at the entrance. He couldn’t very well answer honestly, but since that wasn’t an issue with him at any time, it didn’t slow him down now. A quick shift of the mental gears and he was back to strategy, the campaign, life, or his anyway. ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said distractedly. ‘Bree, I suppose. This new angle with Bree. The woman in jail.’

The television news had broken the story about Frannie Hardy only hours before, and it was already clear it was going to become large. Anything to do with damn Bree Beaumont was going to continue to have an effect on the campaign. Valens couldn’t get away from it. It had surprised Al to see how Bree had come from out of nowhere to be such a focal point in the campaign. Certainly it had never been Valens’ intention to get Bree and Damon together. She had been with the enemy. But then, after a radio program they had both appeared to defend their respective positions, things changed.

Bree had always viewed herself as a pioneer against pollution. She took pride in the fact that her MTBE was really doing a great job of cleaning up California’s air. It wasn’t just science to her. She cared that she was doing good. She was, it appeared, altruistic. She wanted a better world. In this way, she was very much like Damon Kerry, more so than Valens could have ever imagined.

Valens didn’t understand principled people at all, but these two – the candidate and the scientist – connected to each other in a big way. Damon Kerry, passionate and personally charming, hadn’t attacked Bree on the program. He’d been either smart or lucky enough to zero in on their common concern – keeping poisons out of the environment.

And what he’d made Bree do, which even Valens at the time had thought was brilliant, was direct her attention down, into the ground.

Before this one radio show, Bree’s entire scientific life had been directed into the atmosphere. She had been cleaning up the air, defending how she did it. And that had kept her busy enough that she hadn’t looked too carefully at the ground. She assumed, and the corporate culture in which she’d been immersed had aided the assumption, that her stuff – MTBE – in the ground would act like regular gasoline. Eventually it would dissolve or evaporate out. Reports – even scientific reports – to the contrary were paid for by the ethanol industry, by SKO. Bree considered the source, and discarded the facts.

So in her mind she had always been on the side of the angels, doing good work.

And then, suddenly, Damon Kerry had made her see it all differently. And in the immediate aftermath of that conversion, she’d been the greatest thing for the campaign since the battle of the front-running mudslingers.

But soon afterward, from Al Valens’ perspective she became a substantial liability. Something personal started going on with Damon Kerry. Before Valens knew it, Bree was showing up everywhere with his candidate. Late dinners, early lunches, fundraising breakfasts.

By the time of her murder, Bree had mutated from occasional irritant to constant influence. Kerry was paying more attention to her than to Valens – giving more credence to Bree’s idealistic, stupid advice than to his own campaign manager.

As the relationship evolved, Valens saw that it was only going to be a matter of time before the opponent’s camp – to say nothing of the media – got wind of the story and used it to ruin everything he’d done. Valens had had nightmares about the headline: ‘Candidate in Affair With Married Mother of Two.’

No, it wouldn’t do. Bree Beaumont’s death was not at all a bad thing for Damon Kerry, although it would probably be a while before he would see it.

Now, in the darkened back seat of the limousine, Kerry’s face grew grave.

In the immediate aftermath of Bree’s death, he’d gone into hibernation for three days. Valens had had to cancel all of his appearances, pleading a virus, the flu, something. For one terrifying moment, it had even looked as though Kerry was going to stop campaigning altogether, to give it up.

Valens had had to employ all of his wiles to get his client back on track, invoking Bree’s sacred name. Bree would never have wanted him to quit. He had to hold on, and win the governorship for Bree if for nothing else. Fight the oil companies who had used Bree for their own evil purposes. If he didn’t go on, Bree would have died in vain. All that nonsense.

But ultimately, it worked.

Now Valens leaned forward, rolled the connecting window down, and spoke to the driver. ‘Peter, take it around the block one time, will you? We’re a little early.’

This wasn’t true, but Kerry wouldn’t know that, and now that he’d mentioned Bree, it wouldn’t hurt to solidify the spin. No doubt someone would question Kerry about it at the Almond Growers’ Association cocktail party tonight, and it would be bad luck to give an answer upon which they hadn’t already agreed.