Living Witness(120)

Molly Trask opened the paper and looked at what was written there. “Well,” she said, “Dellbach Construction. I’ve seen that name somewhere.”

“They’re doing the new school complex,” Evan told her. “They’ve got a big sign out there on the road. We pass it nearly every day.”

“Ah,” Molly said. “But this other thing—this other thing. Isn’t this a teachers’ union   you’re talking about?”

“The local branch of the American Federation of Teachers,” Gregor said. “Absolutely.”

Molly Trask pushed the paper away. “For God’s sake,” she said. “We can’t investigate a teachers’ union  . Not without authorization from somebody a lot higher up than you. I don’t think even Kevin could okay it without getting permission from Washington practically.”

“Well, I’m not interested in the union  , per se,” Gregor said. “I’m interested in whoever the local person is who’s doing the negotiating on this latest teachers’ contract.”

Evan Zwicker shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “The national office will send somebody out to do the negotiating. That’s part of the reason for joining a big outfit like the AFT. They’ve got lawyers. They’ve got ombudsmen. They’ve got professional negotiators. If you’re saying you think there’s something corrupt going on with those negotiations, we have a big deal here.”

“Because it wouldn’t just be the one guy, if you see what I mean,” Molly said. “They’ve got checks and balances, these union  s do. They have to. The Justice Department doesn’t trust them as far as it can throw them, so they’ve all got procedures, ways of checking on their people, that kind of thing. Which means that if something is going on, it’s almost certainly going on all the way to the top. They’re either clean or they’re shot through with corruption.”

“All right,” Gregor said, filing that one for later. He reached over to the piece of paper and tapped on the item at the bottom. “With that one—I’m not sure just how you should go about it. The school district keeps a textbook fund somewhere. I don’t know where. There must be a bank account, bank records, that kind of thing. And the district gets operating money, too. I need the bank information.”

“Well, that’ll be easy enough,” Evan said.

“We may need a warrant,” Molly said.

“We can get a warrant,” Evan said. “But we might not need one. A lot of districts these days operate with sunshine rules. They publish their stuff at least once every year or two. The first thing we ought to do is look through the local paper and the local records. Everything you want could be right out in public like that, or it could have been sent as a report to every household in the town. Then all you have to wonder about is whether the accountant is honest.”

“Can we check that out?” Gregor asked.

“Sure,” Molly said. “You know, I hate to say it, but this is the best I’ve felt since we got here. It really has been boring. I mean, in spite of all the things people say, there just doesn’t seem to be any real craziness going on here over that lawsuit. Unless, you know, that’s what the murders are about, and there really is somebody willing to kill other people because they believe in evolution.”

The middle-aged waitress was back, with her order pad.

Gregor didn’t bother to look at the menu, which he had already seen several times in the last two days. He just reminded himself not to order anything fried or with a sauce, and opted for a turkey sandwich on toast with the vain hope that it would not come covered with enough mayonnaise to float the Queen Elizabeth II.





TWO





1


By the time the police cars and the cable news vans got back to Main Street, Franklin Hale was scared to death—except that he never thought of himself as scared, so he decided he had to be angry instead. And he was angry, on some level, angry at the way his town was being torn apart by all this crap, and at the way nobody in those cable news vans really cared about anything or anybody that was actually here. That was what Franklin had figured out, long before all this started. The people who ran cable news companies, the people who went to Washington to be representatives and senators, the people who wrote books and articles for magazines—all those people lived in their own special world, where all the people they met and all the people they knew were just like themselves. The other people, the people who made up most of the country, the people left behind in small towns and small cities and second-tier suburbs, Franklin’s people, well those people might as well not exist. They were only important once every few years, when it came time to vote. Even then, they were more like animals in a zoo than real people, which was why people like Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper could spend Sunday mornings nattering on about The Mind of the Swing Voter instead of talking about anything serious.