Tame Me (The Macintyre Brothers 3)

"That's cool. Who is he?"

"McPherson works for Brentford, Wallace and Conroy, a law firm that deals with Wall Street types, doing investigations of clients and companies the law firm represents or is involved in suing."

The name seemed familiar, so I must have heard about the firm in the news.

"I have nothing to do with Wall Street, other than investments the company has made over the years."

"My guess is that he's been investigating MBS for some company that wants to sue or invest in the Chronicle. I can't think of any other reason."

Josh nodded and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "The invest part I'm not concerned with, but the sue part I am. I'll have to go back through our stories on business fraud over the past few years to see which ones might have led to charges. If he keeps trailing us, I'll have to go speak to Messrs. Brentford, Wallace and Conroy and ask them to explain."

"If your paper or one of MBS's news programs did an expose on one of their clients, it would be enough to make then look for dirt on MBS that they could use as leverage -- to get us to shut up about them."

"We have the First Amendment on our side, if it comes to a defamation lawsuit," Josh said. "But it could get very expensive defending the paper if it comes to that."

I thanked Reg and asked him to keep track of the man while I tried to figure out what story might have led to the law firm researching me and MBS. Not that I was worried about Mr. Fedora any longer. He wasn't personally a threat to either me or Ella, but if he started to harass us, I'd go to the company and demand they explain and call off their dog.

My next task was more research on the story about Ella's father and Henry Garner. MBS had done many investigative reports of a political and economic nature over the years. My father had been particularly interested in financial fraud. He was an idealist, who believed that it was wrong for the rich and powerful to hide their money from the IRS, even if there were legitimate offshore investments that could be made to keep it from taxation.

My father was even more adamant about politicians who used their insider knowledge of economic conditions to profit by buying or selling stocks based on upcoming deals or stock performance or company intelligence. That had been the case with Garner and the whole business from before he was governor. Garner learned about an upcoming financial report of a company under federal investigation for fraud and had sold his stock, taking a big profit the day before the news was made public and the stock price fell precipitously.

That was against the law, and as a result, Garner was charged and convicted. He'd had a couple other previous charges against him for financial fraud that had never resulted in anything but fines, but finally, he must have reached the threshold for fraud with a judge and he got time.

What aroused suspicion on my part had been the fact that Carlson hadn't been charged. I figured he'd either been a witness for the government's financial crimes unit or had got away with his involvement for some reason. I feared it might have been because of a bribe he'd paid. One of the contacts I'd discussed the case with had said he'd always been suspicious about why Carlson hadn't been charged along with Garner.

I'd arranged to meet with Tim Mathis, a veteran in the news world and one of

my father's former reporters who worked on the case years earlier. Tim agreed to meet with me at a bar in the financial district, and I'd taken Reg with me when I went, just to be on the safe side. While I went inside, Reg stayed on the sidewalk outside the bar and watched the area in case we'd been followed. While I wasn't worried about any threat from Mr. Fedora, aka Grant McPherson, any longer, I was interested in whether he kept following me.

* * *

The bar wasn't too packed when Reg and I arrived, with the happy hour crowd limited and so I joined Tim Mathis, a grey-haired man wearing half-eye glasses, sitting at a table by the storefront, reading a copy of the New York Times and drinking a beer.

"Tim Mathis?" I asked and waited for his response.

"That's me," he replied. He glanced up at me and then at Reg, who nodded and went to sit at a nearby table.

I extended my hand to Mathis and we shook, then I sat on the chair across from him while he folded up his paper.

"Sorry to hear about your father," Tim said after I had given my order of a beer to the waitress.

"Thanks," I said. "It was fast. We were all shocked even though we knew he was dying."

"He was a great man," Tim said softly. "Self-made, totally committed to journalism. He will be missed."

"He will be," I replied. "Thanks for your card and flowers."

"Don't mention it. I hear you're the big cheese now at the Chronicle," Tim said, a good-natured ribbing in his tone. "I was just reading your competition."

I nodded. "We're hoping to resurrect it. It has a great history."

"That it does."

Preliminaries out of the way, I decided to dive right in.

"So, I wanted to talk with you about the story you did for MBS on Henry Garner, Emmet Carlson's partner, who was convicted of insider trading back in the nineties."

Mathis went over the story for a few moments, recalling how they were given some leads to track down about a stock deal that had been suspiciously close to the day news was released about the company being charged with fraud and it turned up Garner. They'd followed Garner for several months before they'd been able to write anything substantive. When Garner was finally charged, it was a big local scandal in New Hampshire and notable to people who followed Wall Street, but to people outside of the financial world, it would be nothing much of interest. Just another inside trader who was caught. The only difference was that this time, he went to prison.