Read Online The Fool's Run by John Sandford - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Sandford
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franchises. He made no movies, never bought a sports franchise.
His wife died in the early seventies, and he never remarried. In the past few years, as he became richer and richer, he grew more and more reclusive. Not a Howard Hughes exactly, but he seldom left his Chicago mansion.
There was more biography, including information on his wife and children. The wife had been a big benefactor of the Chicago Institute of Arts. The children kept every nickel they could lay their hands on, and spent most of their days in warmer climates.
Anshiser’s company computers had routine defense industry security, Bobby said. He had gone in for a look around but had found nothing that interested him. It was all design work and perhaps a million pages of clerical records and correspondence. He did find references to Anshiser’s accounting company, stumbling onto the records of traffic between the company’s computer and that of the accountants.
Naturally, he followed up, tapping into the accountants’ computer. Way down in the database Bobby found a private file that detailed Anshiser’s cash gifts to the president and dozens of other working politicians. If you were given to tsk-tsk -ing, this would be an occasion. The president, as a Midwestern senator, had built an image as the plain-talking, square-dealing conscience of the Senate. So he took twenty thousand dollars in a brown paper bag in a Ramada Inn in Des Moines? Tsk-tsk. I carefully tucked away that portion of the printout.
There was also a report on Maggie. She was not quite as advertised. Before the hitch at the University of Chicago, she’d gone to a bad public high school in a Pennsylvania steel town. Her daddy worked at the mill before he disappeared altogether, leaving Maggie and her mother to get along as best they could. After high school, she worked for two years with an Indianapolis accounting firm, and then headed for the university. One of the partners in the accounting firm paid the ticket, at least for the first four years.
After that, she was hooked up with an economics professor, and then with Anshiser. She was not a secretary, except in the old-fashioned British sense. On two different occasions, she’d been dispatched to straighten out troubled companies. She had temporarily been the president of the vending subsidiary, and when she had it running right, interviewed and picked her own replacement. She also ran a trash-hauling company during an Arizona jurisdictional war, and won the war outright. She did it, if Bobby’s reports were correct, in a little more than three months.
There were problems in that Arizona garbage gig, trucks burned, tires slashed, gas tanks blown up. Will see if can find more, but not much around except newspapers.
While Maggie was getting noticed in the business press, Dillon was the invisible man. There was nothing on him except credit reports and a few citations to articles he’d written for professional library magazines. The credit reports said he was a millionaire in his own right. There was a note that said he collected Japanese netsukes.
I READ BOBBY’S Anshiser material and reread Dillon’s Whitemark report, sitting in a comfortable leather chair with a light over my shoulder, my feet on a hassock, looking out over the river in the darkness. I needed to think. It might be impossible to slow down Whitemark without attracting an awful lot of attention from the wrong kind of people. But the money . . .
I spent the rest of the week painting, fishing on the St. Croix River, and working out at the dojo. I read Dillon’s report so often that I could recite it by heart. LuEllen called twice with questions, Dace twice more. They were ready to sign up.
At eight o’clock in the morning, six days after the flight to Chicago, I walked up the hill to the dojo. The first classes were at noon, but the sensei did office work in the morning. He came to the outer door when I knocked, raised his eyebrows when he saw who it
His wife died in the early seventies, and he never remarried. In the past few years, as he became richer and richer, he grew more and more reclusive. Not a Howard Hughes exactly, but he seldom left his Chicago mansion.
There was more biography, including information on his wife and children. The wife had been a big benefactor of the Chicago Institute of Arts. The children kept every nickel they could lay their hands on, and spent most of their days in warmer climates.
Anshiser’s company computers had routine defense industry security, Bobby said. He had gone in for a look around but had found nothing that interested him. It was all design work and perhaps a million pages of clerical records and correspondence. He did find references to Anshiser’s accounting company, stumbling onto the records of traffic between the company’s computer and that of the accountants.
Naturally, he followed up, tapping into the accountants’ computer. Way down in the database Bobby found a private file that detailed Anshiser’s cash gifts to the president and dozens of other working politicians. If you were given to tsk-tsk -ing, this would be an occasion. The president, as a Midwestern senator, had built an image as the plain-talking, square-dealing conscience of the Senate. So he took twenty thousand dollars in a brown paper bag in a Ramada Inn in Des Moines? Tsk-tsk. I carefully tucked away that portion of the printout.
There was also a report on Maggie. She was not quite as advertised. Before the hitch at the University of Chicago, she’d gone to a bad public high school in a Pennsylvania steel town. Her daddy worked at the mill before he disappeared altogether, leaving Maggie and her mother to get along as best they could. After high school, she worked for two years with an Indianapolis accounting firm, and then headed for the university. One of the partners in the accounting firm paid the ticket, at least for the first four years.
After that, she was hooked up with an economics professor, and then with Anshiser. She was not a secretary, except in the old-fashioned British sense. On two different occasions, she’d been dispatched to straighten out troubled companies. She had temporarily been the president of the vending subsidiary, and when she had it running right, interviewed and picked her own replacement. She also ran a trash-hauling company during an Arizona jurisdictional war, and won the war outright. She did it, if Bobby’s reports were correct, in a little more than three months.
There were problems in that Arizona garbage gig, trucks burned, tires slashed, gas tanks blown up. Will see if can find more, but not much around except newspapers.
While Maggie was getting noticed in the business press, Dillon was the invisible man. There was nothing on him except credit reports and a few citations to articles he’d written for professional library magazines. The credit reports said he was a millionaire in his own right. There was a note that said he collected Japanese netsukes.
I READ BOBBY’S Anshiser material and reread Dillon’s Whitemark report, sitting in a comfortable leather chair with a light over my shoulder, my feet on a hassock, looking out over the river in the darkness. I needed to think. It might be impossible to slow down Whitemark without attracting an awful lot of attention from the wrong kind of people. But the money . . .
I spent the rest of the week painting, fishing on the St. Croix River, and working out at the dojo. I read Dillon’s report so often that I could recite it by heart. LuEllen called twice with questions, Dace twice more. They were ready to sign up.
At eight o’clock in the morning, six days after the flight to Chicago, I walked up the hill to the dojo. The first classes were at noon, but the sensei did office work in the morning. He came to the outer door when I knocked, raised his eyebrows when he saw who it
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