Extreme Exposure (6 page)

The company was being up front about the fact that burning tires would save them millions of dollars each year, as the state paid industry to dispose of waste tires. Instead of spending money to fuel their kiln, they’d be earning money, adding to their bottom line. On the surface it seemed like a mutually beneficial solution to a serious environmental problem.

So what was the catch? Or was there a catch? Had Reece already grown so jaded that he looked for ulterior motives where there were none? Perhaps. But something about Stanfield left a bad taste in his mouth.

Reece pored over the EPA data on tire-burning until the columns blurred. He glanced at his watch. It was almost midnight. He’d just finished packing his briefcase when the scent of a woman’s perfume wafted into his office, followed by Alexis Ryan.

“Working late, I see.” She leaned against the doorjamb to his office, arms crossed to emphasize her artificially enhanced cleavage. Dressed in a fitted gray suit, her bleached-blond hair pulled back in an elegant French braid, she somehow looked as fresh now as she had when he’d passed her in the hall early this morning.

“What do you want, Alexis?” He slammed his briefcase shut and grabbed his jacket, keys, and cell phone.

“Are you this rude to all lobbyists, or is it just me?” Her cherry-red lips turned down in a slight pout.

He strode toward her, reached for the wall beside her, and flicked out his office light. He looked into her blue eyes and smiled. “I’m not being rude, Alexis. I just know you well enough to know you don’t come around unless you want something.”

She leaned toward him, gave him a better view of her breasts. Her perfume surrounded him like a cloying fog. “I thought we should meet this week to talk about the budget bill.”

“Let me guess. There are a few expenditures you want to make certain don’t get cut from the prison budget.”

She tilted her head coyly and looked up at him from beneath smoky lashes. “Something like that.”

He reached for the doorknob and pulled his office door shut, forcing her into the hallway. “You can’t win my vote this way, Alexis. You know that. You’ve already tried, remember?”

It was hard for Reece to fathom why he’d ever found her attractive. It was even harder to believe he’d had sex with her. He’d met her shortly after being elected, accepted her invitation to get acquainted over lunch, and found himself living every man’s fantasy when for dessert she went down on him in the front seat of his Jeep. They’d had a heated affair that had ended a month later when he’d failed to vote in favor of a huge increase for the state’s prisons. The experience had left him feeling sullied and more than a little used. But it had opened his eyes.

The flirtatious look on her face turned into a scowl. “You’re so arrogant, Reece. You really believe you’re better than the rest of us, but your self-righteous idealism won’t get bills passed.”

“You’re wasting your breath, Alexis.” Drew Devlin strode down the hallway on his way to the elevator. Devlin was the Senate president and on the opposite side of the aisle from Reese on every issue. Their loathing for one another was mutual—and very public. “Another two years, and he’ll be back to teaching high school social studies.”

Reese paid no regard to Devlin’s attempt at an insult. Deliberately, he smiled and looked down at Alexis. “I don’t suppose my methods are as effective as yours, but at least I don’t work on my back.”

He ignored her outraged gasp and walked casually down the rose marble stairs into the foyer and out into the chill of night.

K
ARA TURNED
on the digital recorder and slipped it into her pocket as she rounded the corner onto Smith Road. Before
her stood the abandoned warehouse and the parking lot where she’d met the whistleblower on Monday.

An old, blue battered Chevy truck was parked in the lot, the whistleblower inside.

“Colorado plates—MAI-2431.” She spoke the license plate number aloud, knowing it would be picked up on her recorder and saved for later.

As she turned into the lot, the whistleblower got out of the truck, walked to the passenger side of her car, and tried to open the door.

It was locked.

Despite her misgivings, Kara unlocked it, allowing a total stranger to climb inside.

Dressed in jeans and a heavy plaid work jacket, he looked at her through a cheap pair of mirrored sunglasses, then craned his neck to look around them as if he expected someone to be following him. “Drive.”

“All right.” Kara eased the car back into the empty street, headed back toward Quebec, and ignored the voice in her head that warned her to be wary of this man. “You know my name. You know how to reach me. I’ve given you my word that I won’t give you away. It’s time you told me who you are and why we’re meeting in an abandoned parking lot on the edge of town.”

He was still looking over his shoulder. “Henry Marsh.”

She had worked whistleblower cases before and knew it made people jittery to break ranks and divulge wrongdoing that their bosses and coworkers were covering up. But fear was rolling off this guy in waves. She could see it in his jerky movements, hear it in his rapid breathing, and smell it in his sweat.

Either he was paranoid, or he was truly terrified.

Feigning a calm she did not feel, Kara spoke in slow, soothing tones. “I’ll just keep driving, Mr. Marsh. No one is following us. Tell me what has a big man like you shaking in his work boots.”

T
WO HOURS
later, Kara pushed her way into Tom’s cluttered office.

He looked up from his computer. “Have a seat, McMillan. What’s up?”

Kara sat, notepad in one hand, cup of tea in the other. “He’s a foreman for Northrup Mining Corporation, a gravel-mining operation north of Denver. And if he’s telling the truth—and I have strong reason to believe he is—dumping toxic waste is just one of a host of serious environmental crimes taking place out there.”

Tom listened, asking the occasional question, as Kara told him how the whistleblower went to work for Northrup three years ago and had noticed immediately that strange things were happening. Emissions data he’d recorded during the day were altered between shifts. Oils and solvents recorded as having been disposed of at a toxic-waste facility were warehoused in leaking drums—and then magically disappeared. And the primary air-pollution-control system on their main building hadn’t been operational since before he’d gone to work for the plant, despite data in the company’s state reports that claimed the system was fully operational and sucking up millions of pounds of pollutants each year. As the plant paid the state by the pound for emissions, Northrup’s lie could be saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

Tom frowned thoughtfully from beneath his mane of hair and matching bushy eyebrows. “Does he have an ax to grind with management?”

Kara had already thought of this. The first rule of dealing with a whistleblower: find out if he or she has reason to get back at the company.

“He says his record is clean except for a workmen’s comp claim last year, which he disputed and won with the union’s help. Of course, he could be lying. We have no way to know for certain unless we ask Northrup, but then we’d be giving him away.”

“Any record on Northrup?”

“I’m putting together an open-records request on them as soon as we finish. I’ll have that out before I leave today. If the health department or the EPA has anything on file for them, I’ll find it.”

As soon as the state government received her request for public documents, the folks at the health department would legally have three days in which to respond. Not that the state government always complied. But that’s what lawyers and courts were for.

“Request any health studies done in the area. Maybe there’s a cancer or asthma cluster in the areas surrounding the plant.”

“Already on it. Can you think of anyplace else I can look?”

Tom’s hazel eyes bored into hers. “You could always go out to the plant, but, of course, you’d be trespassing.”

Kara nodded. “I’ll see what I can arrange.”

“I
CAN
’
T
believe I agreed to this.” Kara drove Holly’s car down the highway toward the Northrup plant and glanced at her watch. She hadn’t been able to drive her own car because of the Colorado Press Association license plate. “You shouldn’t be here. This isn’t a game.”

“Hey, you can’t have all the fun.” Holly sat in the passenger seat dressed in a long black wrap skirt and a red silk blouse, looking as excited as a child on her way to the zoo.

“I wouldn’t call committing felony trespass ‘fun.’ ”

“You can’t fool me, Kara. You live for this stuff.”

Kara couldn’t deny the rush of adrenaline was exhilarating, but she wouldn’t give Holly the satisfaction. “You get to interview rock stars, movie stars, reality TV stars. You don’t think cozying up to Bono after the U2 concert at Red Rocks qualifies as fun?”

“Oh, sure. But there’s no risk in that. No risk, no glory. How is this supposed to work again?”

Kara spotted the Northrup gate down the highway ahead of them, pulled off the road, and braked to a stop. “In two minutes, I’m supposed to drive through that gate and follow the water truck that will be waiting there. I’m supposed to follow at a distance as the truck passes through the razor wire and the security checkpoint. Where the truck turns left, I’m supposed to turn right. If I keep following that road, he says I’ll come to a little wooden shed. Off in the trees past the shed is where they’re dumping the drums. I’ll shoot some photos, get proof of my own, and then we’ll head back out the way we came.”

Holly clapped her hands together. “Good lord, it’s just like in the movies!”

“If this were like the movies, I’d be Julia, you’d be Brad, they would be shooting at us, and somehow we’d manage to look gorgeous and have sex while the bullets were flying.”

“Bullets?” Holly sounded abruptly subdued. “What exactly will they do if they catch us?”

“Call the cops. Have us arrested. Throw our butts in jail.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“I warned you. But we’re not going to get caught. He says lots of wives drive in to pick up their husbands at this time of day because there’s a change of shifts, so no one will notice two more women in a car.”

“We hope.”

“Yes. We hope.” Kara looked at her watch again and felt her pulse quicken. “Show time.”

She pulled back out on to the highway, drove the remaining quarter-mile to the gate, and turned right onto Northrup property.

Large signs stood on either side of the road. “No Trespassing. Violators Will Be Prosecuted To The Fullest Extent Of The Law.”

“Oh, great.” Holly groaned.

“I told you not to come. It’s too late to let you out now.”

Ahead of them, a large green-and-white truck pulled into the road, water spraying onto the asphalt from nozzles at its rear.

Kara glanced at her watch. Three o’clock sharp. “Right on time.”

“Well, now I know what a water truck is. Why do they do that?”

“They process mined gravel here. Spraying with water helps keep dust out of the air. Now, I’ll just follow him at a casual distance and see where he takes us.”

Nice and easy, Mr. Marsh
. Kara knew he couldn’t hear her, but she sent him calming thoughts anyway. The poor guy had been horrified when she’d first suggested he help her get into the plant.

“If they connect me with you, I have no idea what they’ll do to me or my family,” he’d said.

Kara had tried to reassure him. “They can arrest me, but they can’t do anything to you. There are federal laws that protect whistleblowers from retaliation.”

“Laws don’t do no good if you’re dead.”

“No one is going to die, Mr. Marsh.”

To his credit, he’d calmed down and had come up with this plan himself. And so far it was working perfectly.

The road curved to the west, and a concrete wall topped with razor wire appeared before them. A guardhouse separated the right lane from the left, but no one was on duty. The change of shifts.

Kara smiled as they drove through. “Smooth as silk.”

They’d gone only a short distance when the water truck crossed a set of railroad tracks and turned left.

She spied a dirt road on the right and turned onto it. “Breathe, Holly.”

Holly took a ragged breath, her hands clutched into fists in her lap.

Kara followed the road, one eye on her rearview mirror, as the car was swallowed by a stand of cottonwoods. Where there were cottonwoods in the West there was water. It couldn’t be far now.

They’d driven perhaps a quarter mile when a small wooden shed appeared on her right. Her heart thrumming,
she stopped the car, glanced around her, and saw no one.

It was now or never.

“Stay here. If anyone discovers us, tell them I was driving and got sick.”

Holly looked like she might be feeling queasy herself. “Okay, but don’t take forever! This place is freaking me out!”

Kara grabbed her digital camera, opened the door, and hurried behind the building. The faint smell of coal smoke, carried on the chilly wind, tickled her nose. The snow made crunching sounds beneath her feet and recorded her every step as she hurried into the trees. Muddy tire tracks and dozens of old footprints suggested this was the spot in the photographs, just as Mr. Marsh claimed it was.

And then she saw.

A few feet beyond her, a frozen irrigation ditch pooled in a small lake of ice. Rusted metal drums lay half-submerged, set like trashy gems in the ice among the dead husks of last summer’s cattails. The ice had a sickly green tinge to it, and the water beneath seemed iridescent. In several places, dark liquid lay thick and congealed on top of the ice—the most recently dumped material, she guessed.

A burning anger grew in her belly. This was likely someone’s bright idea of how to cut costs. But whatever this stuff was, she’d bet her reputation it wasn’t good to drink. No doubt it was seeping into the groundwater and spreading onto other people’s property. Folks out here drank, washed, irrigated, and watered their animals with well water. If, indeed, the toxins had made it into the groundwater, there was a good chance that people, livestock, and crops were being contaminated as well.