Extreme Exposure (4 page)

Syd ran a hand through her short, spiked salt-and-pepper hair and shook her head. “Can you do it in fifteen?”

“If I have no choice.” Sophie met Kara’s gaze and gave her that “Why do I bother?” look. The two of them had been coworkers for the better part of three years and had grown to be good friends. “Want mug shots?”

“Get one of the victim if you can,” Syd said, still calculating. “And the killers, too.”

“Harker, what have you got for us?”

Matt, whose red hair and freckles left him looking like a kid even though he was almost forty, waved a packet of documents. “There’s a special City Council meeting tonight. They’ll be taking public comment on the proposed homeless shelter. I don’t need more than six.”

Syd nodded. “Perfect.”

“Novak?”

Tessa, a transplant from Atlanta and the newest member of the team, fiddled with a sharpened pencil. With a sweet southern accent; long, wavy, honey-blond hair; and big, blue eyes, she’d immediately caught the attention of every straight man in the building, including a few who had wives, but had told the lot of them to get lost. She was at the paper to work, not to flirt, she’d said. Kara had instantly come to respect her. “The mayor has called for an internal investigation of the Gallegos shooting. Ten inches ought to do it.”

Syd nodded, calculated.

Tom leaned back in his chair, apparently done with his notes. “Maybe the mayor can hire a consultant for hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach the boys in blue the difference between a gun and a cell phone. McMillan?”

Kara had just taken a sip of her rapidly cooling tea and swallowed quickly. “I’ve got that meeting with the water board at one and should be ready to wrap that story this week. Also, I got a tip from some anonymous caller who says he’s got damning evidence against a factory outside the city. I’m meeting with him at Quebec and Smith at noon. He was very
cloak-and-dagger about it. Could be a wingnut, but there’s only one way to find out.”

K
ARA SLOWLY
pulled her silver Nissan Sentra into the empty parking lot, glanced around for any sign of the man who’d left her the strange message, but saw no one. Grass and weeds grew up through the cracked and crumbling asphalt that passed beneath her tires. To the west stretched an empty field. To the south ran a line of rusted railroad tracks and, beyond that, the always-crowded lanes of I-70. To the east stood an abandoned warehouse, its windows broken, its wooden beams stripped of paint and falling from the walls. There was no billboard or sign to show what kind of business had once been housed here, nothing but emptiness and decay.

Tap. Tap.

She gasped, startled to find a man standing just outside her window, where seconds ago there had been no one. He stood so close she could see only the faded denim of his jacket and jeans and a bit of white T-shirt. With a work-roughened hand, he motioned for her to roll down the window.

She hesitated. What if he wasn’t the man she was supposed to meet and just some rapist on his lunch hour? Even if it was the right person, how did she know she could trust him?

There was nothing to do about it now.

With one hand on her cell phone, she rolled down the window.

He bent down, and she got just a glimpse of his face—reddish-blond moustache, blue eyes, shoulder-length blond hair under a baseball cap—before he shoved something roughly through the window.

Whatever it was struck her chin, made her gasp. It fell into her lap—a heavy bundle of documents with her name on it.

“What . . . ?”

But when she looked up, the man was gone.

CHAPTER 3

R
EECE STEPPED
off the Sixteenth Street Mall and into Bravo Ristorante. He slipped off his sunglasses and looked about for the men he’d come to meet. They had contacted him prior to the legislative session in hopes he’d sponsor a bill for them in the Senate. He had agreed to have lunch with them to at least discuss the matter.

The tuxedo-clad host greeted him and led him to a table near the back where three men in business suits sat mulling over menus. They sat apart from the other lunch customers—the better to avoid being overheard, he supposed. Although the good citizens of Colorado probably imagined new laws were born in the marbled halls of the Capitol, most of the real work was done clandestinely in restaurants and on golf courses, with deals cut over prime rib, cigars, and holes-in-one.

Reece didn’t much like it and had entered office determined never to be used or bought. There was only one way to hold public office, and that was honestly, openly, and in the spirit of service. He paid for his own meals and drinks, turned down gifts, and refused to discuss important issues in secret. But to accomplish anything he had to at least appear to play the game.

The men rose as he approached.

“Senator Sheridan.” An older man with a head of thinning white hair extended his hand. “Carl Hillman. So good to finally meet with you.”

Hillman was a lobbyist for a number of mining companies in the state and stood across the aisle from Reece on every environmental issue. Ordinarily, Reece wouldn’t have given him the time of day, but the bill Hillman had proposed had intrigued him.

Reece shook each man’s hand in turn, returned their greetings, and recalled what he knew about them.

“Mike Stanfield, Senator. Thanks for joining us.”

Stanfield was the CEO of TexaMent, a Texas-based cement company with a processing plant somewhere in Adams County, north of Denver. With Stanfield at the helm, TexaMent had become the second-largest cement company in the world, with $10 billion in profits last year. His gold ring and diamond-studded platinum Rolex were evidence he took a fair amount of that $10 billion home with him.

“Galen Prentice of Prentice, Burns and Prentice. Pleased to meet you, Senator.”

Prentice was the lawyer representing TexaMent. He appeared to be in his mid-forties, with a bit of gray at his temples and a hairline that was in full retreat. From the look of his Armani suit, he’d made a killing off his corporate clients. His firm represented high-profile companies—pharmaceutical firms, oil and gas companies, insurance companies—in their dealings with the state bureaucracy.

Reece sat and accepted a menu from the waiter. “Just water, please.”

As the others placed their orders, he glanced over the menu and decided on the seared ahi tuna.

Do women really taste like tuna?

A pair of green-gold eyes flashed through his mind, and he fought back a grin.

Kara McMillan.

He’d spent far too many hours over the weekend thinking about her. He was certain she’d been mortified by her behavior once the tequila had worn off, and he was content to let her squirm for a while. She’d called his sister a bimbo, after all.

Not that her words had truly offended him. The whole thing was too damned funny to make him angry. The look on her face when he’d told her Melanie was his sister had been priceless. Besides, Kara’s cattiness likely meant she hadn’t liked seeing him with another woman. And that satisfied his male pride in a way he couldn’t explain and didn’t care to examine.

Truth be told, the hour or so he’d spent with Kara was the most fun he’d had with a woman in a long time. When she had asked him in for tea, her eyes smoky with female sensuality, he’d been hard pressed to refuse her. But he’d been certain they’d end up sharing more than tea, and he’d always made it a policy never to have sex with a woman who might wake up the next morning and claim she didn’t know how he’d gotten into her bed.

There would be another time. He would make sure of it.

The men laughed at some joke and jerked Reece out of his own thoughts. They were looking at him, broad smiles on their faces. He smiled back and chuckled as if he’d been listening. He needed to pay attention, not let his mind drift off with thoughts of women—or one particular woman.

Stanfield’s smile faded, and he glanced at his watch. “Shall we get down to business, gentlemen?”

“Certainly.” Reece met his gaze and found the man’s blue eyes as cold and hard as flint.

K
ARA PORED
over the page, ignoring the chatter of the newsroom around her. Clearly these were chemical measurements of some kind. The looked like the kinds of readings the EPA took when monitoring air emissions, but they weren’t official government documents. Perhaps they were the company’s own measurements, part of a self-monitoring program.

Most of the elemental symbols she recognized:
As
for arsenic,
Si
for silicon, and
Hg
for mercury. All showed elevated levels, particularly mercury. But someone had altered the measurements, deleting some, rewriting others.

The chemical charts dated back over a period of two years. They were accompanied by a series of unsigned memos on plain paper reminding the company’s environmental compliance officer to “correct false readings and eliminate unnecessary data.” Someone had gone over those words in yellow highlighter to make sure she saw them.

Last was an EPA report documenting a plume of pollution running for almost a mile beneath the plant where it threatened to contaminate groundwater. The report was ten years old.

She was about to flip through the report when it opened on its own to a page near the center. Several photographs had been tucked inside. Each bore a date stamp indicating the photos were taken four days ago.

The photos were dark and had obviously been taken at dawn or dusk—she couldn’t tell which. They appeared to have been shot in close sequence. The first showed several men in hardhats, their faces cloaked by darkness, in the midst of unloading metal drums from the back of a heavy truck. The license plate of the truck was not visible, and the name of the company on the door was obscured by mud. Kara could just make out the letters “r-u-p.”

The second photo was much like the first, but more drums now sat on the ground. The third showed men carrying drums toward a ditch just off to the left of the truck—a ravine or perhaps an irrigation ditch. The fourth showed a man with a crowbar prying the lid from one of the drums. The fifth showed two men dumping the contents of the drum into the ditch as the others watched and the man with the crowbar pried open yet another drum.

Chills ran down Kara’s spine.

She had a bona fide whistleblower on her hands.

The man who had given her these photos had taken a serious risk. The deliberate dumping of toxic waste—she was sure the drums didn’t contain Kool-Aid—was a felony. If he had been discovered either shooting the photos or delivering them to her, he’d likely lose his job, maybe even face harassment from his coworkers and his employer.

But which company was this? She looked carefully at each photograph once more and again felt chills when she got to the last one. But all she could see were those last three letters—r-u-p.

She turned to her computer and was about to begin an Internet search when she saw the time—5:42. Outside her window the sun had already set.

“Damn!”

She quickly shut down her computer, stuffed the documents into her briefcase, grabbed her keys, and dashed down the hallway past the busy production department and out the side door. If she didn’t hurry, she’d be late picking up Connor again. Worse than the money the YWCA would charge her would be the sad look in her son’s eyes. He hated to be the last to go home.

She rushed to her car, opened the door, tossed in her purse and briefcase, and slid behind the steering wheel. It was only a few blocks to Connor’s day care, but downtown Denver was a tangle of one-way streets that were inevitably choked with traffic during rush hour.

It was 5:58 when she pulled into the YWCA parking lot. Two other cars were parked there, and one of them belonged to Connor’s teacher.

Kara scrambled out of the car and up the walkway just as a father stepped out with his little girl. As she reached for the door handle, she spotted Connor staring dejectedly out of the window at her—last again. She felt the familiar twist of regret in her stomach.

She stepped inside the foyer and unfastened the child-proof wooden gate. “Hey, pumpkin!”

Connor gazed up at her from his perch by the window, a look of resignation in his brown eyes. He shuffled over to his cubby and pulled his blue down coat from its hook.

“He’s had a good day.” Janice, Connor’s teacher, wiped down a shin-high table. “You ate all your lunch and helped me keep an eye on the little kids, didn’t you?”

Connor nodded and stuck an arm in a sleeve.

“I’m happy to hear that. Thanks, Janice.” Kara helped Connor the rest of the way into his coat, knelt down, and zipped it. She kissed him on his tiny nose. “I’m so happy to see you!”

He reached for his lunch box, while Kara took the papers and drawings from the top shelf of his cubby and looked through them. “What a nice butterfly! I love its pretty blue wings.”

“There’s a permission slip there I need you to sign. The Friday after next, we’re taking the four- and five-year-olds on a field trip to the museum to see the dinosaurs.”

“That sounds like fun, doesn’t it, Connor? You love dinosaurs.”

Connor looked up at her, his little mouth curving into a smile.

Janice lifted tiny chairs onto the newly cleaned tables. “We need parents to help chaperone, and as you work so close by, I was hoping you could be one of them.”

“Well, I . . .” Kara glanced at the permission slip. She would love to come along, to spend a part of her day with her son and other children, but Tom would never give her time off for that. “I don’t know. I save all my personal time to use when Connor is sick.”

Janice gave Kara a look that said she heard excuses like this from all the parents and had little respect for them. “Well, see what you can work out. We can’t take the trip without chaperones, and so far only one parent has signed on.”

Kara took a breath and fought back a sense of overwhelm. “I’ll let you know. Are you ready, pumpkin?”

The look on Connor’s face said he’d been ready an hour ago.

K
ARA RINSED
the shampoo from Connor’s hair with a pitcher full of bathwater, then grabbed a towel and wiped water from his eyes. “There you go—no more sea slugs or slimy snails in your hair.”