The Fifth Vote

By Dan Baumann

Reporter Ron Jordan is drawn into the conspiracy when he’s called out in the middle of the night to cover the accidental death of a federal judge. Only it’s not an accident, Jordan soon realizes. As he continues to dig, the cocky 28-year-old reporter is pulled, dangerously, into the president’s inner circle. From the opening scene to his final discovery, Jordan is forced to examine basic questions about himself, including the ultimate question of who he really is. In turns self-deprecating and brash, Jordan himself narrates The Fifth Vote.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Baumann
• Release date: Feb 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301764099

Book preview

Chapter 1

The chief justice had died, the circumstances were murky, and the blogosphere throbbed with conspiracy theories. As President Howard Wood moved to replace him, he wanted more than a reliable vote for his political agenda. What he sought was personal – and filled with peril.

Along with everyone else, I was oblivious to Wood’s little intrigues – until a call came that sucked me into their vortex. Other matters were occupying my shitty little life, as it would later (and famously) be tagged by none other than Himself. Matters like a broken love life and a stunted career.

I was scraping bottom when my boss Max called – or so I imagined. His call first lifted me until I thought I could reach no higher. Almost before I could shout star reporter the arc turned as impatiently downward, small gap between dream and nightmare. Myths I’d been taught banished, ghosts fleeing a ghostly White House closet.

But back to the beginning of my tale and to my shitty little life:

Jordan! Max’s basso threatened to rupture the tiny earpiece of my cell phone. Well, he said more than just Jordan! but not, "Ron, I’m really sorry I woke you at this ungodly hour of 3:00 a.m."

Max is an assignment editor on the Record’s 24-hour mobile-web-and-paper (in that order) newsroom in downtown Washington, D.C. He drinks a lot of coffee, fully caffeinated. He never apologizes, and he never uses first names. When he manages to tear himself away from the news desk to visit home, he probably calls his wife Mrs. Weil.

Only two hours earlier, I’d pulled back a coarse, monk’s blanket and slid into my cold bed. Its emptiness swallowed me, defeating any chance of rest before morning.

You’re married to you career, Alicia had sobbed when she broke off our affair and tossed me out of the apartment she’d allowed me to cohabit the past three months.

I had not noticed, or had chosen to ignore, the gathering crisis. We’d just had the most fantastic sex. I was supining in her toasty little four-poster in a state of total, post-coital wellbeing, my six-three wedged crossways between head and footboard.

Then she nailed me back. It started with the customary what’re-you-thinking kind of probe. I wasn’t thinking much of anything except doing it again. Hormonal seas were building, and the evidence was there for all to see. However, she wasn’t looking at the little pup tent I had hoisted in the percale. She’d propped herself up beside me, her pale breasts pendulating in the periphery while she locked my eyes with hers.

While I’m dreaming of a life together, she said in a choked whisper, you’re thinking about your next great story. It fills your head. I can’t compete.

If I had glanced in a mirror just then, I’d have seen a snake or some other odious creature. What I see in my mind’s mirror today, after these many months of reflection, is a careless, arrogant jerk. However, I did not look in the mirror just then because I was too busy trying to read Alicia’s unflawed face, framed by those soft, reddish-gold curls. She seemed sweetly, completely vulnerable.

If someone asked you who are you, you’d say ‘I’m a journalist.’ That’s how you see yourself, a journalist. Not as Ron Jordan, person. It’s like for some reason you’re running away from yourself.

Whoa, I tried to hide the irritation, "What is this really about?"

You need to examine who Ron Jordan is beneath the journalist.

Sorry, I blurted, "I’m not much into self-discovery. I find out what’s going on inside other people. That’s what I do for a living. That’s who I am."

Something new radiated across her face, spreading from her temples to trace her chin and up across her brow. Lines, like fine cracks in a windowpane an instant before it shatters. An instant before I shattered it.

Can’t you just let go of this self-discovery crap? I was mumbling now, searching for defensible ground. We love each other. We have great times together.

No, Ron, we have great sex together.

That sounded like what I had just said, but her voice pitched higher and took a more querulous undertone. Tears streaked her cheeks, and a pearl of mucus gathered at the tip of her nose.

Then as soon as we’re done off you go, alone in your head somewhere, planning your Pulitzer.

When she said Pulitzer, it sounded like an expletive.

Her body shook, interrupting the verbal hurricane. Warm tears rained copiously onto my chest as she struggled to begin again, to force her vocal cords to release their cloud of words. Dense as I am, I still did not see what was coming. I tried to pull her closer, to comfort her, but she impaled my ribs with an elbow. Neither I, nor her own raging emotions, would stop her from saying what she had to say.

I need to be the most important thing in your life, not what happens during breaks in the excitement.

This must be some kind of sudden estrogen thing, I decided.

Okay, honey, I’ll work on it. I’ll change.

Nothing for a second. Then she took a deep breath and slowly straightened. The silent echo of my words sounded patronizing even to me, and their shallowness evidently helped her regain control. She lifted the edge of the sheet to wick away the flood and pushed herself upright. Now she looked down at me in the way one might examine an insect pinned to a display board.

You can’t change, she said. I finally realize that. Some men roll over after sex and light up a cigarette. You roll over and fire up that stupid laptop.

My personal laptop was no longer fired up, but enough of that. Back home in my lonely rooms, I popped a few Tums Ultras to damp the fire raging in my gut and silently cursed the woman. She’d been unreasonable, harsh even. We did have great times together. We could have worked things out. Maybe, it occurred to me, she had just been looking for an excuse. Yes, that was it.

Some people handle disappointment by clinging soulfully to lost dreams. You won’t find me among them. Not when I’ve been wronged. Alicia had tried to push the blame onto me when it was clearly where she was headed all along. Even keeping me in the dark about her plans until I’d given her one last, memorable romp in the sheets. And she had the temerity to call me a user. I was better off without her. She could beg, but I would never go back to her.

This settled, I finally edged toward sleep. My mobile snatched me from the brink.

Alicia? I caught it on the first chirp. The sniveling sounds I heard guttering into the device filled me with self-loathing, but I could not slow their rush: I love you, and I’ll do whatever you ask.

I blurted all this out before common sense and my caller ID screen could mount a defense.

Jordan! I love you too, Max mocked my plaintive, lover’s tone. Then he unleashed a malicious, thundering cackle.

Oh, Jesus! I said.

Now my boss knew I was a complete idiot, adding him to a growing list.

I need you over in Culpeper, he switched to his usual, no-nonsense manner. A federal judge died in a traffic accident. Cops’re still workin’ the scene.

A traffic accident?

Crisp as bacon, according to a neighbor who called in the tip.

"A goddamned traffic accident?"

I usually take assignments with more grace. The Washington Record is my second job since graduating from the Missouri J-School. It’s the second most important news source in the country, or so I imagined at the time. But after three years covering suburban happenings at the Record’s Warrenton, Virginia, bureau, I was feeling stuck. I was overdue to break the homepage – and the front page. With a traffic accident?

I’ll e-mail you our file on the guy, Weil’s tone softened. Name’s Marshall Bradington, a federal appeals court judge. History of speeding. I mean, like he’s trying out for NASCAR or something.

You owe me, I growled and, Alicia not being present, I took out my anger on the disconnect button.

I padded into the bathroom and glared at the apparition above the sink. Two deranged orbs gaped back, their bloodshot hue punctuating steel-gray irises. At twenty-eight, I took pride in the still-lean body of an ex-college swimmer. Alicia’d liked it, for a time anyway. I counted on a high-energy lifestyle to burn off my bachelor’s dependence on fast food. Splashing soap from my face, I reached for the wire-rims and, careless even for me, used my wet fingers as a comb. The cops wouldn’t give a shit how I looked and, at this point, neither did I. Grabbing the laptop – the stupid laptop – and shaver, I headed for the car. Alicia had one thing right. I was ready to do Great Journalism. But here I was, chasing suburban ambulances.

The Twinkie-like snout of my little Ford Fiesta buzzed through the damp, predawn chill of the Virginia countryside, calming me a bit, and I began to regret snarling at the boss. Bureau reporters are expected to write schools-in-need stories and chicken-dinner yarns alongside the local weekly hacks and virtual-community wannabes. Unfortunately, Max had caught me during a bad run of acid reflux.

Route 729 snakes through the foothills north of Culpeper. The town’s soft glow yielded to a black, country night, and gravel eventually displaced the blacktop. Beyond a twist in the roadway, my headlights carved a sudden vignette from the darkness: A band of yellow cordon tape, a patrol car, and the unleashed chaos of a strobe bar.

I pulled over, powered my laptop, and opened Max’s e-mail. For a major league judge, Bradington did have an amazing record of traffic stops.

Max had dropped a one-sentence brief about the accident onto the paper’s website, washingntonrecord.com. A wire service story about a terrorist bombing in Paris the previous evening led the ever-busy homepage. Among eight known American victims, one name flew off the screen.

Like a walking stick escaping a one-canary cage, I extricated myself from the Fiesta’s tiny cabin. A rank odor confronted my nostrils, a mixture of burning fabric and rubber. There was something else, too, the smell of cooked flesh.

A sheriff’s deputy, late-40s, brunette, radiating mature sexuality, stood at the police line. Her arms were folded across her generous chest in a stern posture of authority.

"Morning, officer. I’m Ron Jordan from the Record." I gave her a big smile, wishing I’d run a comb through my hair.

Liz Roland, Mr. Jordan.

She unwrapped herself reluctantly to accept my business card.

I’ve seen your stories in the Culpeper section. (Ouch!)

I could see more lights flashing a quarter-mile down the road. Summoning the polite-young-man demeanor that worked well with older women, I asked permission to duck under the yellow plastic strip, to get a better look at the scene.

I need to hold everyone here for now. You’re the first.

I’d have to find another approach. Then I noticed, in the glare of the squad’s lights, that her eyes were a match for mine an hour earlier. She, too, had been crying.

Something wrong? You seem…upset.

He was a friend.

Under patient coaching, Roland explained she was the first officer to arrive at Judge Bradington’s home one morning five years earlier when the judge opened his eyes to discover that the beloved wife lying next to him would not open hers ever again. Roland’s training had kicked into gear, and she checked for vital signs. Marla Bradington was already cold.

I phoned the coroner’s, and then, while we waited, we sat together in his living room, knee-to-knee, his hands shaking in mine. We talked about the gifts of life and love and the devotion of a spouse.

The human touch they skip in too many cop classes.

You must have been a great comfort, I said.

After that, he treated me as a friend. He’d call every once in a while, just to say hello. Seeing him – like that…

As she finished her story, Roland saw that I had begun taking notes. A look of alarm as she realized she’d left her role as hardened cop to expose a vulnerable side.

Oh, God. There was anguish in her voice. Please don’t print this. It’s much too personal.

It says so much about the man’s character.

Yes, but it’s just too private for me. I can help you find a hundred other good stories about him.

I promised to find a different angle for my story.

Does your department have a program? I asked.

A program?

You know. To handle grieving.

Oh, Mr. Jordan, you are so nice to think about that. We do.

I want you to promise you’ll take advantage of it.

Yes, sure, of course.

We both knew she wouldn’t. But she must have decided I wasn’t a cop’s usual image of a reporter. That is to say, I wasn’t a complete asshole. In a few minutes, the area would be crawling with talking heads for the cable and TV news programs. They’d whip around asking touchy-feely questions, half listening to the answers and posturing in front of their cameras. Not all of them thought they were big shots, but most did not bother to ask anything meaningful. Just slam-bam, thanks for the sound bite, ma’am.

Ah…then again, Mr. Jordan, let’s take a closer look. I’ll walk down there with you, but we’ll have to come back when the others show up.

In the pre-dawn shadows, I could see the burned-out hulk of a stretch Beemer resting on its side against a scorched old oak at the foot of the embankment. Emergency crews were passing a body bag into the back of an ambulance.

He was unrecognizable, she said simply.

How did it happen?

Might have been going too fast to take the turn…or he might have been distracted. He was wearing one of those Bluetooth headsets.

Open-and-shut. The guy had been distracted and taken the curve too fast. Still...something seemed out of place. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. Then I spotted it: The scorched trail began right at the edge of the road.

Does this mean anything? I said.

She didn’t respond. Maybe her emotional shock had short-circuited her training. Bending down, I rubbed a few remnants of burnt grass between my fingers. They felt oily. I raised my hand to my nose, then offered to let her smell.

Gas, she said.

Wonder why there’s gas up here, I said.

Still squatting, I noticed a sudden glint, small shards of red and clear plastic half buried in the gravel, invisible until the emergency light splashed over them.

"Do you suppose these were here before the accident?"

She gave her head a quick shake, as though waking from a slumber, and gestured to one of her officers.

We need to run tests on this debris. And collect soil samples while you’re at it.

Walking back to my car, I told Roland I wanted her to look at something on my laptop. It was still open to the story about the bombing in Paris, and topping the list of victims was a Washington attorney. Laura Bradington.

Same last name, I observed redundantly.

Roland covered her face with her hands and settled heavily onto the seat beside me.

Oh, my God, she said, emotion welling up again.

Are they related?

Judge Bradington’s daughter is named Laura, Roland said. His only child. A lawyer.

I wonder, I said, if he knew about this.

Maybe was distracted by it, Roland said. Or despondent enough to take his own life?

Maybe.

Then I checked the Record’s timestamp.

But this list was posted just an hour ago.

Chapter 2

Max would sputter. I could hear it already

Boring, stupid headline, he would rant. Can’t you do better than ‘Federal judge dies in crash’?

I had thought about adding, Crisp as bacon just to tweak him. The boys on the digital side of the newsroom constantly campaigned for us to plant keywords that would snag casual visitors from the search engines. I think they got secret bonuses for increased page views and social media referrals.

One time, Max and I got into a row over headlines.

It’s just another burden the corporate penny-pinchers are trying to put on the reporters, I complained. If they succeed, poof, there goes Max.

Silence engulfed us while Max searched for a rejoinder.

So let me get this straight. You write crappy heads so I can feed my kids?

With dawn arriving, reporters’ cars and TV vans crowded around the police barricade. Deputy Roland was keeping them at bay.

The sheriff will read his statement shortly, she barked bureaucratically, now in charge of herself as well as them.

I was feeling smug. Roland had given me a copy of the sheriff’s blather while I sat wedged in the cabin of my car, working at my laptop. The release said less than I already knew, but I quoted from it anyway, to stay on the right side of the department. The others would scramble for hours to confirm the detailed version in my first story. Those with less chops would simply quote the Record. Their bosses would grumble and say, How did you miss this?

The crash had attracted more media attention than I would have expected, and again I regretted snarling at Max. With 600 people on the Record staff, competition for good assignments was intense.

Better be on your way, Deputy Roland said, tapping on my car window, unless you’ve got an hour to spare for Barney.

She nodded toward an old beater as its driver searched for a spot to park. Barney Jacobs, she explained, was a good-hearted guy with plenty of time on his hands. He belonged to Town of Culpeper police auxiliary and got his kicks riding along in one of the department’s crisply detailed blue-and-whites.

Barney likes to talk even when you don’t have a lot of time to listen.

Barney would have to talk to someone else. I needed to get to Warrenton, to confirm Laura Bradington’s connection to the judge before wrapping that angle into my story. The paper had more mobile and web users now than print readers, and they wanted to think their news was updated constantly. Even at five in the morning.

The deputy was a great source. Judge Bradington had lived in Richmond, she told me, but he and his wife had built a getaway near Culpeper. It was a 60-acre spread north of town with a sweeping view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Marla was fighting cancer, and it was a place of safety and comfort.

Reporters don’t break stories without help. I learned that early on. The key is to cultivate your sources. Fresh out of college, in Little Rock, I blew the whistle on an official taking envelopes stuffed with cash in his statehouse office. Good, patiently developed sources, sources who trusted me, gave me the scoop.

Maybe I should have hung around to hear Barney out, because Roland called as I headed back to the bureau to let me know that he believed a second car was involved in the crash.

He was out there trapping critters. Believe it or not, there’s a plague of groundhogs up there destroying everyone’s garden. Said he heard a helluva crash down the road, and a few minutes later a car came flying by.

And he waited until this morning to tell someone?

He did call in about the crash. Thought more about the second car later on.

What kind of car was it?

Plain white Ford Interceptor, he said. With D.C. plates. Couldn’t describe the driver except he thought it was a man.

That’s a police vehicle.

And the D.C. department doesn’t use plain white cruisers. Odd, isn’t it?

Maybe a federal agency?

Or a federal contractor.

Anything else?

Well…he claims a headlight was out. On the passenger side.

Deputy Roland knew I already suspected foul play. Now, she feared Barney was serial-dialing the media.

Tread with caution, she counseled a few times. Barney lives for attention, would love to get his name in a big time paper.

I thanked her for the heads-up.

Chapter 3

I got to know Howard Wood pretty well in the following months, along with his chief sidekick Kurt Ritter and a whole coterie of bigwigs, as I tried to figure out what had happened to Judge Bradington. Can you imagine a snot-nosed kid from St. Louis, stuck and frustrated reporting chicken dinners in the Virginia ‘burbs, becoming a confidant of the president of the United States?

I have to say it was a mixed blessing. On the upside, I became intimate with the taste of the president’s favorite gin, had Ritter whispering sweet nothings in my ear – for a while, anyway – and even earned a transfer to the Record’s central newsroom in D.C. On the downside…well, I keep getting ahead of my story.

Okay, I admit to being a little obsessive about getting my facts nailed before publication. Obsessive because how many lawyers named Laura Bradington could there possibly be in Washington, D.C.? Then again, a wrong assumption has ruined many a reporter’s career. How was I to know that my failure to tie in Laura’s death in my first story would trigger a cascading series of Oh-Shits! in the Oval Office?

I became a palace butterfly overnight, by Washington standards, my pupate state lasting mere weeks. Only then could I begin to piece together the scene that occurred in the Oval that morning after Judge Bradington’s death. Or, rather, two scenes, depending on whether you believed President Wood or Ritter, his chief political adviser. I didn’t believe either of them so assembled a kind of amalgam of what the two later had to say, each out of earshot of the other and, of course, entirely off the record.

The president was wearing his customary weekend outfit, a western-style shirt and jeans. Sunlight from the south lawn splashed over his shoulder and sparkled in his penetrating, blue eyes. Despite the early hour, a smile played on his almost-handsome Irish face.

A happy mood, Ritter reflected as he entered the double-O. Too bad he would have to destroy it.

Hi ya, Kurt. What ya doin’ here so early on a Saturday? Wanna piece a this sugar donut? The president who enjoyed sweets wrestled with the president who wanted to look good in history’s portrait gallery. Ritter wondered how the match would be decided.

After years working with Howard Wood, he’d come to feel not all of the president’s utterances required a response. Unlike the boss, he had been in his office since daybreak, his seven-day routine. The neat pinstripe he wore even on weekends did not camouflage the way his flesh sagged on a maturing frame, a reminder that he once carried almost twice his current weight of 155 pounds. Donuts were no longer on his menu. Fingernail chewings were, though. The man who held such immense power in his hands could never break the habit of gnawing his fingernails down to the bleeding quick. I noticed it the first time he reached out to shake my hand and did my best to avoid doing so in our later encounters.

I wanted to catch you first thing, Ritter said to the president. He was trying hard to ignore away the tic that pounced on his right eyelid in moments of stress, but the president spotted it nonetheless.

You seem kinda high strung today, buddy. The skin around the president’s eyes crinkled. He liked to hear people describe him as relaxed, confident, given to mischief.

Mr. President, can we take a little walk outside?

Wuz up?

Just want to get a little air while we talk, sir. The garden smells earthy and fresh this time of year.

You know we took out the recording stuff years ag…

Ritter halted him with a sharp look and waited to respond until after they emerged out-of-doors.

"Goddamned NSA may have the place bugged. I don’t trust