Extreme Exposure

by Pamela Clare

  Delete.

  “Hi, Kara—”

  Delete.

  “Hi, Ms. McMillan. I really need to talk with you. I work at a factory outside the city, and some bad things are happening out here. Pollution and all—it’s right up your alley. People need to know about this. But I can’t be seen with you, and I have to know I can trust you not to use my name or tell anyone you got this information from me. Meet me at noon in the parking lot behind the abandoned warehouse at Quebec and Smith Road. Come alone. Don’t worry about knowing who I am. I’ll recognize you.”

  Kara replayed the message several times, listening closely to the man’s voice. It was no one she knew. He sounded gruff, nervous, but not threatening.

  There was every chance he was just another weirdo, someone who thought his boss was a space alien or had an ax to grind with management. But something told her he was authentic—perhaps the current of very real fear in his voice, or perhaps the fact that he knew his story fit her beat.

  She glanced at her planner and saw she had scheduled a lunch downtown with a member of the state water board for her story on water conservation. Colorado was prone to drought, and with the population explosion of the past decade, water resources were stretched to their limits in some areas. It was an important story, and she couldn’t afford to cancel the interview.

  She listened to the message again and saved it. Then she pulled up the number of the state water board and was about to dial when her phone beeped. The LCD display showed it was Holly calling on the inside line—again.

  “I know you’re there, Kara,” Holly’s voice said over her speaker. “If you don’t pick up—”

  Kara picked up the receiver and dropped it back into its cradle, disconnecting her ex-friend. Then she picked up the receiver again, pressed an outside line, and dialed. She had just managed to postpone her lunch meeting until one o’clock when she spied Holly making straight for her.

  “Thanks for being so understanding. I’ll see you there.” Kara hung up and glared at Holly as Holly entered her cubicle. “I’m not talking to you ever again. Go away.”

  “I called four times this weekend, and you didn’t call back!” Dressed in a mauve peasant blouse, a short tweed skirt in mauve and yellow, and knee-high black boots, Holly looked like she’d stepped out of the pages of Vogue. “Now tell me what happened!”

  “If you hadn’t deserted me, you’d know exactly what happened. Instead, you walked out and left me with him—and the bill!”

  “I only did that to make sure you didn’t have fare for a cab.” Holly exposed a twenty she had crumpled in her palm and tossed it on the desk. “Here. That ought to cover my part of it.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of manipulating people?”

  Holly frowned. “You didn’t sleep with him, did you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “If you had, you’d be grateful this morning instead of surly.”

  Kara grabbed for her notebook and pencil, then stood. “He was too much of a gentleman. He took me home and walked me to the door, and that was it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an I-team meeting. You arts and entertainment writers might have all day to gossip, watch DVDs, and listen to music, but we investigative reporters actually work for a living.”

  She ignored the insulted look on Holly’s face and walked off toward the conference room.

  “WE NEED a shooter in Boulder by five. Another protest about breast-feeding in public.”

  Kara fought to keep her thoughts off Reece Sheridan and on the meeting as Tom Trent, the editor in chief, doled out last-minute assignments. A big man whose linebacker body matched his bulldog personality, he was more than a little intimidating to most people. His green eyes had a way of seeing through people that made even other men squirm. Only his curly gray hair, which more often than not he let grow until it covered his eyes, softened his appearance in any way.

  “I’m on it.” Joaquin Ramirez, by far the best photographer at the paper, tapped the time into his pocket planner. Young and sexy, he reminded her of Antonio Banderas. If only he hadn’t been twenty-five. “Will your mother be at this one, Kara?”

  “Probably.” Kara hid her irritation behind a smile.

  Joaquin had covered the first such protest in Boulder a few weeks ago and come back with a photograph of Kara’s fifty-two-year-old mother topless, her bare breasts barely concealed behind a sign that read “Nursing is nurturing.” Only company policy, which restricted the paper’s use of photographs of employees’ family members, had kept that photo off the front page.

  “Alton, what’s on your plate?” Tom had the irritating male habit of calling everyone by his or her last name like a football coach.

  Sophie looked up from the notes she’d been poring over and tossed her sleek auburn hair over her shoulder. With freckles, a bright smile, and baby-blue eyes, she had an all-American, outdoorsy look that immediately set people at ease, and Kara knew she used it to her advantage. “There was another murder at the state prison last night. Some young kid was put in a cell with two lifers. They eviscerated him.”

  “Good God!” Kara’s expression of disgust joined the others.

  “What is that? Three prison killings this month?” Tom was the only one without a look of shock on his face. But Kara knew he’d heard and seen it all during his thirty years at the copy desk.

  “How much space do you want?” Syd Wilson, the managing editor, sat with a calculator, tried to figure out how to make all the news fit.

  “Can I get twenty inches?”

  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.”

  KARA 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 strip
ped 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

  * * *

  REECE 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.

  KARA 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.