When The Devil Whistles Page 3

  Erik frowned. “Just let it go into voicemail. I’m starved.”

  She ignored him and answered the phone. “Hi, Connor. So, how did it go? Did we have a good day?”

  “A very good day. I tried calling you earlier, but you must have still been up at Heavenly. What did you think of Killebrew Canyon?”

  “Loved it—perfect snow and it scared me half to death, just like you promised.” She imagined being on those slopes with him, but then pushed the thought away. It could never happen, so why think about it?

  “I’m glad to hear it. And glad you made it back off the mountain. When I couldn’t reach you earlier, I was a little worried that you might have done some involuntary tree hugging at sixty miles an hour.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, I did come close to splattering myself a couple of times, but that’s all part of the fun.” Erik caught her eye. He pointed at his watch and glared. She realized she was getting too friendly and pulled back to safer ground. “But give me the skinny on what happened. Is DOJ going to intervene?”

  Connor paused before going on in a slightly cooler tone. “They haven’t made a decision yet. All that happened today was that Max Volusca and I interviewed the CEO of Hamilton Construction. He had some credibility issues that both Max and I noticed, and that seemed to irritate Max. The CEO also didn’t have an immediate explanation for the discrepancy between the invoices you found and the ones they sent to the state. Also, by the end of the interview Max and I both thought that there might be more to this case than the Oakland DMV building contract. It’s still early in the investigation, but overall today was certainly positive.”

  “Connor, is that all hypercautious lawyer-speak for ‘yeah, they’re probably going to intervene and it looks like there’s serious money here, but I don’t want to get your hopes up?’ ”

  He gave a low chuckle. “Something like that.”

  “Excellent! Hey, I’ve got to go, but thanks for the call.”

  “Hot date with your pet rock star?”

  She laughed, but felt a twinge deep inside. “Something like that. Talk to you.”

  She hung up, turned to Erik and kissed him hard, trying to convince herself that she really did want to be with him tonight. “Okay, now I’m ready to celebrate!”

  3

  CONNOR SAT BACK IN A CREAKY OLD WOOD AND LEATHER CHAIR AND looked out over the view from the back porch of what his family called “the California beach cabin.” In fact, it was a 3,100-square-foot structure that had a part-time maid and was bigger than most nearby homes. It was only a cabin in comparison to “the California house” east of San Francisco, which was about twice as large.

  Waves crashed on the stony shore, and a cool Pacific breeze riffled the sea grass and whispered over his head in the majestic redwoods dotting the lawn surrounding the “cabin.” Two pelicans rode the breeze and watched the water just offshore for anchovies.

  Connor’s Blackberry buzzed intermittently on the table beside him, sounding like a dyspeptic bumblebee. He reached over and switched it to silent. He’d check his voicemail and e-mail when he felt like it, and he didn’t feel like it right now.

  The firm wouldn’t mind his absence—the clique of senior partners who ran Doyle & Brown cared a lot more about seeing his contribution to the bottom line than about seeing his face in the office. Last year he’d brought in more money than any other partner under 40 and he was on track to do it again, so he could safely play hooky for a couple of days if he wanted. It was the prerogative of profitability.

  Plus, he had an excuse for ignoring the outside world. There was a mediation scheduled for next week in the Hamilton Construction case, and he was here to get ready for it. That meant no distractions.

  He leaned over and rummaged through his trial bag—a boxy, wheeled briefcase designed for carting large volumes of paper between office and courtroom. He pulled out Hamilton Construction’s opening mediation brief and started to read.

  Two months of intense scrutiny from Max Volusca and his team of auditors would be painful for any executive. And if the executive in question happened to run a company as corrupt as Hamilton Construction, his suffering would be severe. So Connor was not surprised when Hiram Hamilton and his lawyers requested mediation.

  Even so, Connor was a little surprised by how weak the company’s brief was. It did not include even a token protestation of innocence. It conceded up front that “a certain amount of accidental overbilling may have occurred” and then launched into a string of complaints about the methodology that the government’s forensic accountants used to calculate the amount of the overbilling.

  Connor finished the brief, smiled, and dropped it back into his bag. Any day his opponent’s main argument was “well, we didn’t steal that much” was a good day. Even though he was fifty yards from the ocean, he could smell the blood in the water.

  Now that he thought about it a little more, the company’s lawyers had probably done the best they could. During the two months since Hiram Hamilton’s witness interview, the company had grudgingly coughed up a steady stream of damaging documents. They had to turn over the real invoices for the Oakland DMV contract, of course. But they didn’t know what other projects DOJ might have dirt on, so they couldn’t stop there without risking a few years wearing the orange jumpsuits Max Volusca had promised.

  By the time they were done, it was clear that the company had ripped off the state of California to the tune of at least $1.5 million—maybe as much as $5 million depending on what kind of accounting assumptions were used.

  And they had bragged about it. Some of their executives apparently hadn’t learned the Enron Rule: e-mail is forever. So when Max managed to pry the e-mail archive tapes out of the company, he and Connor found choice quotes like, “Those morons in Sacramento don’t audit, so you’re fine as long as you don’t do anything obvious. No $400 hammers.” Connor imagined how that would play to a Sacramento jury and sat back with a contented sigh.

  He relaxed and watched the breakers crash. Hamilton Construction clearly was willing to be reasonable at the mediation. The real problem would be managing Max, but Connor had plenty of experience at that.

  4

  ALLIE DIALED THE NUMBER OF HER TEMP AGENCY MANAGER AND FORMER bar-hopping partner, Trudi Wexler. They still kept in touch by phone and e-mail, but hadn’t seen much of each other since Trudi got married and started shooting out babies like a Pez dispenser. She picked up on the first ring. “Hey, Al! What’s up? Are you home yet?”

  “I just got back yesterday. I would’ve called you earlier, but I was beat. I took out my contacts and just flopped down on my bed. I didn’t wake up until, like, half an hour ago. Want to grab a cup of coffee?”

  “Allie, it’s nine o’clock at night.”

  “Okay, so get decaf. What do you say?”

  Trudi laughed. “Let me ask Dave. He brought work home, but Maddie just went down and I’ve fed the twins, so I might be able to sneak out for an hour or so. Hold on a sec.” Muffled voices for half a minute. “Okay, where do you want to meet?”

  “How about the Starbucks on Powell just off of Market.”

  “Sounds good. The one right there on the corner?”

  “No, no. The one a block to the north.”

  “Oh, okay. The one in the Nikko or the one on the street?”

  “On the street.”

  “Got it. I’ll see you there in fifteen minutes.”

  Allie got there first and ordered an Americano and a scone. While she was waiting for her order to come up, Trudi walked in. She looked different somehow. Older. Her hair was still jet-black and her face still belonged in an Oil of Olay ad, but she definitely looked older. Less makeup, shorter hair, flats instead of heels, naked lobes instead of gold hoops, a tired look around the mouth and eyes. It hit Allie: Trudi looked like a mom. How depressing.

  Trudi gave Allie an affectionate hug and ordered a decaf latte with skim milk. She turned to Allie with a bright smile. “So, tell me about the tour! How was
it?”

  “It was great, but I’m wiped. We hit ten cities in two weeks and the band’s manager threw out his back moving equipment after the first show, so I had to help out a lot more than I usually do—driving, dealing with little problems at the venues, and stuff like that. I slept four or five hours a night. It was fun, but I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.”

  “Mm-hmm,” said Trudi as she picked up her coffee. She opened her mouth as if to say something more, but just took a sip of her coffee. They found an isolated little table in the corner and perched on a couple of bar stools.

  “So, how’s Erik?” asked Trudi. “How was it being with him 24/7 for two weeks straight?”

  “Erik’s fine,” replied Allie. “He loves being on tour. The energy from the crowd just lights him up. The real trick is switching him back off afterward. He’s so fired up after a concert that he wants to stay up all night.”

  Trudi nodded and looked Allie in the eyes. “Meth does that too, doesn’t it? Is he still using?”

  Yes. The image of postconcert Erik, chattering nonstop and stinking of sweat and meth mouth, pushed itself into Allie’s mind. She looked down at her coffee. She’d also seen him and the other band members selling a few times. Fans—usually nervous young men with bad teeth and furtive eyes—would come up to the band’s van when no one was around, and money and plastic baggies would exchange hands.

  Allie forced a smile. “He’d better not be. He knows how I feel about that crap. So, how’s business? Got any jobs for me?”

  Allie could see the concern in Trudi’s eyes, but she let the Erik issue lie. “For my best temp? Of course I’ve got jobs.” She paused and bit her lip. “My boss would kill me if she heard me say this, but do you want something permanent? One of our clients is looking for someone who knows accounting software and government contracting rules, and you know both of those better than anyone I’ve ever met. The money and benefits would be better than you’re getting now, and there’d be advancement opportunities. What do you think?”

  Allie shook her head. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ve tried that before and I get bored after a few months and quit. Or I want to take a month off and fry myself on a beach or go boarding or something. That’s fine if I’m temping, but it doesn’t work so well if I’ve got a permanent job.”

  Trudi laughed and shook her head. “You’re amazing! Dave and I both work full-time, and we can just barely afford a week in Tahoe every year. You work part-time as a temp and you’re always taking these exotic vacations and you’ve got a great apartment in Noe Valley. How do you do it?”

  Allie smiled and took a long sip from her coffee as she searched for something to say other than By secretly suing your clients, of course. “Well, I own some stock in a little company that pays big dividends. That, and I clip coupons.”

  “Wow, I’ve got to buy some of that stock with my next bonus. What’s the company?”

  Allie cleared her throat and shook her head. “Sorry, but it’s… it’s privately held. So the stock isn’t for sale. Besides, the owner doesn’t like to talk about the company. It, um, it does hush-hush government work. If word got out, there’d be the devil to pay.”

  5

  THE GRASP II WAS THE BEST CIVILIAN DEEP-SEA EXPLORATION AND SALVAGE ship on the West Coast—and her crew would argue that she was the best in the world. A twenty-ton crane towered over her deck midship. A smaller crane near the stern supported a complicated device called an ROV (short for “remotely operated vehicle”) that explored the deep and guided the crane.

  Today, however, the Grasp II was not exploring but waiting at her home dock in the Port of Oakland. “The wife and kids weren’t too happy to hear there’d be no Hawaii trip again this year,” commented Mitch Daniels, the Grasp II ’s ROV pilot, as he helped stow extra cable for the ROV winch.

  “Take ’em to Yosemite. It’s closer and cheaper.” Ed Granger eyed Mitch’s work critically. “Hey, don’t put that cable there. Too close to the spare cameras. Don’t want to bust one of those.”

  Mitch thought the cable was fine where it was, but he didn’t protest. Ed’s official job title was simply “ROV Chief Pilot,” but he was in fact master of all things related to the ROV, and he knew it better than he knew his children. He had even given it a name: “Eileen,” after his ex-wife’s divorce lawyer. Both of them were expensive, ugly, and very good at poking around in the muck.

  “Tried Yosemite,” Mitch grunted as he moved the massive spool of metal cable where Ed wanted it. “Wife didn’t go for it. She said she’d promised the kids dolphins and volcanoes and what was I going to do about it? So I said, ‘What am I supposed to do, miss the ship and get left behind? I’ll lose my job.’ And she gets all mad and says, ‘You can’t just make me break promises to the kids!’ So I tell her to go—” he broke off in a curse as the cable got stuck on a crate. After he got it loose, he continued, “So anyway we had a pretty good fight about it.”

  “You guys fight a lot,” Ed observed.

  Mitch shrugged and grinned.

  Ed grinned back. “You like the way she fights, huh?”

  Mitch laughed. “I guess you could say that.”

  “Sign of a good marriage. Well, this trip should be worth the fight.”

  Mitch stopped working and looked up. “Why’s that? You know something?”

  Ed looked around and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “They had me put some new sensors on Eileen. Metal detecting stuff.”

  He patted Eileen gently. To the untutored eye, the ROV was a chaotic seven-foot mass of cables, pipes, propellers, and cameras. To a marine engineer, however, the Grasp II’s ROV was a masterpiece—a cutting-edge array of depth-resistant sensors and cameras, a Swiss-army-knife array of tools and manipulators that could probe deep into ocean floor mud or perform delicate surgery on oil rig parts, and half a dozen powerful thrusters that could hold it virtually motionless above the bottom of the sea even when buffeted by deep water currents.

  Mitch noticed the new bank of sensors on Eileen’s tool sled. “So you think we’re looking for a shipwreck?”

  Ed nodded. “But not just any shipwreck. There’s already a magnetometer on Eileen and we’ve got side-scan sonar. The new metal detector looks for nonferrous heavy metals.”

  Mitch stared at him blankly.

  Ed rolled his eyes. “Metals like gold, Mitch.”

  6

  LAST SUNDAY, CONNOR’S PASTOR HAD PREACHED ON MATTHEW 5:9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” The pastor’s central message had been that if God blesses peacemakers, we also should honor and respect them. The pastor did a nice job with the sermon, but Connor thought it was a little obvious. After all, who doesn’t like peacemakers?

  Now he knew.

  Connor was in no mood to bless the retired judge who was mediating State of California ex rel. Devil to Pay, Inc. v. Hamilton Construction Corp. The mediation had been going on for nearly five hours, and Connor was seething.

  The problem wasn’t that the mediator was incompetent. Quite the contrary. The mediator was a wily old trial judge named Abraham Washburn who had retired to the greener pastures of private mediation, where he could do half the work of a judge for twice the money. Unfortunately, he was proving entirely too good at his new career for Connor’s liking.

  “A good mediator only looks for one thing: weakness.” So another judge-turned-mediator had told Connor several years ago as he was preparing for his first mediation. Connor had seen the weaknesses in Hamilton Construction’s case perfectly clearly, but he had missed a serious weakness on his side of the table: Max Volusca.

  Connor had figured that he could count on Max to take a hard line throughout the negotiations but ultimately allow himself to be talked into whatever deal Connor could get. That sort of tag-team effort had worked well in the past and had shaken loose handsome sums in half a dozen prior settlement negotiations.

  Max was taking a hard line this time too, but Judge Washburn had persuade
d him that it was more important to fight over principles than dollars. “You represent the Department of Justice, not the Department of Finance, counsel,” he had told Max. “And isn’t justice better served by a comprehensive deal that includes a criminal plea and a public apology, even if that means a little less money?” That resonated with Max, even once it became clear that “a little less money” really meant “nothing more than repayment of the most egregious overbilling”— a number that Hamilton Construction insisted was less than $1 million.

  Connor protested, of course. A criminal plea and apology would look great in a press release from the Attorney General’s office but would have little real effect. Companies like Hamilton Construction didn’t give a rat’s rear end about bad publicity as long as it didn’t interfere with business.