What were they thinking?”
“It was a cost-plus contract,” Jerrod said, shrugging almost humorously. “They were real costs, right?”
Cost-plus contracting required the contractor to itemize the costs of performing the work. The government paid the costs, plus a profit percentage specified in the contract. Slick contractors looked for creative ways to pad the costs and thus increase the base from which their profit was calculated. This padding often involved layers of subcontracts to companies that were subsidiaries or even mere shells for the principal. Those subcontracts included a profit which was added to the prime contractor’s cost, even though that cost was simply money being shifted from one accounting column to another in the corporate books.
When the contractors were slick enough, this padding slipped right through the audits, enabling them to “profit on profit.” The Mercator people weren’t that slick. Not even by half.
Instead, they’d claimed that the contract had required them to open a temporary office in Houston to oversee the work being done locally. Under the regulations, if the office was temporary—opened solely for that one contract—reasonable office costs were chargeable to that contract.
The key words were temporary and reasonable. And the office complex in Houston was neither.
Mercator had bought two floors of a downtown high-rise, and its Houston complex housed two dozen executives and their staffs, overseeing no less than ten different contracts throughout Texas and Louisiana. The lavish furnishings might still have slipped through, had Mercator not billed the whole cost of the complex on each of those ten contracts. Fortune magazine had broken the story in a three-part whistle-blower saga aptly titled Deca-Dipping.
“Y’know what I can’t understand?” Jerrod asked, as Georgie thumbed through one of the stacks of paper that had been resting on his desk.
“What’s that?”
“Why are they even fighting it? It makes no sense. They have no defense. Christie Jackson said she offered them a quarter-million-dollar fine to plead out. That’s spare change for a company like Mercator. Why not just pay the damn fine and move on?”
“They’re worried the three-strikes law will actually get passed,” Georgie said.
She did have a vice, and Jerrod knew what it was. Georgie was a news junkie. She subscribed to a dozen online newspapers, from the Times of London to the Beijing Evening News, and a score of newsfeeds. If you wanted to know whether a pilot was missing in Afghanistan or a panda mating in China, all you had to do was ask Georgie.
Which Jerrod did. “What’s that?”
“There’s a joint contracting reform bill winding its way through committee,” she said. “Among other things, it has a three-strikes rule. Get popped for fraud three times and you’re out of the government contractor pool.”
“Like that will ever pass,” he said.
She shrugged. “It might. There’s a lot of support for it in the Netroots.”
“Huh?”
“The blogosphere,” she explained. “More and more, online communities are learning how to lean on government to get things done. When it rose from the traditional media we called it a grassroots movement. When it happens online…”
“I get it,” Jerrod said. “But how much influence do those people really wield? Yeah, they can get a story from the outhouse to CNN, but these contractors give huge sums to congressional campaigns. They’ll hold a hearing or two and talk about how something has to be done, and then some lobbyist will remind them that they’d shut down a big chunk of the government if they passed a law like that. Hell, we’ve farmed out so much of what government does, it’s not as if we can just turn off the spigot.”
“Spoken like a former contractor,” Georgie said with a playful grin.
“Hey,” he said. “I was just a grunt for hire. Don’t go lumping me in with those people.”
“Whatever,” she said. Lightning flared so bright that it washed out the room, followed by a sky-rending crack. Jerrod looked out the window again, noting that heavy rain appeared to be sweeping closer. Rush hour was going to be a mess.
“So…what? You came in here just to cheer me up?” he asked, swiveling his chair to face her again. “Or did you actually have something in mind?”
“Just to tell you this is probably our one chance,” she said. She handed him a printout. “Apparently the good folks there like Houston.”
He scanned the page. It was a blurb from one of her many online newsfeeds. “MMG buys Houston Examiner. This matters to me…how?”
“MMG,” Georgie said. “Mercator Media Group. Say goodbye to one of the last independently owned newspapers in Texas.”
“Interesting,” Jerrod said. “But again, how does that matter to me?”
“Erin McKenna broke the Mercator story when she was a freelancer for Fortune.”
He nodded. Georgie’s other vice was drawing out a story just to the point where he wanted to strangle her. She knew he knew Erin McKenna. They’d never met, but her story in Fortune had been so thorough as to be a blueprint for his investigation. “And?”
“She’s not a freelancer anymore. The Houston Examiner hired her as an investigative reporter.”
“And now Mercator owns the Examiner,” he said. The pieces came together. He let out a long sigh. “Oh shit.”
“Maybe you need to go to Houston,” Georgie said. “It would be bad to come this far and lose a key witness.”
Jerrod looked at the file on his desk, the paltry window onto a life too short. Or a life that had been turned into a living hell of slavery.
“More than the Mercator case seems to have followed you from Houston. Cold case?” Georgie asked, following his gaze.
“Not quite.” He hated to leave it. But he couldn’t allow anyone to tamper with witness testimony. Reluctantly, he reached for the phone.
He was going to Houston. Maybe he could nose around on the missing-child case some more while he was there. Two birds with one stone.
Regardless, he needed to find out what was going on with Erin McKenna.
2
Erin McKenna climbed the stairs to her third floor apartment, a small box of personal belongings under her arm. As her feet hit each tread, a curse escaped under her breath.
Fired. Just like that. Oh, they called it a staff reduction, but she was too much of a reporter to believe it. Since word of Mercator Media Group’s purchase of the paper had begun to filter down, she’d known she was in the crosshairs. She’d expected pressure not to testify in the trial. The pressure had never come, and she’d gone off to Federal Court this morning and testified without one whisper of a suggestion that she reconsider.
Then she had come back to the office to find the news editor and her managing editor standing over her desk, her belongings already in a box, with
