Dangerous Lies (Shades of Leverage)

by Claudia Shelton

  Mitch crossed the room to stand toe-to-toe with him. “Well, the second either one of you want to bail, there’s the damn door. Don’t let it hit you on—”

  “Mitch,” Josh warned. “Crank it back.”

  Reese didn’t move away from the counter, but he did cross his arms over his chest, clearly fighting the impulse to punch back with his words or his fists. Instead, his nostrils flared, but he never looked away from the confrontation.

  This was exactly what Mitch had worried might happen if he let his feelings for Liz materialize. And, if places were reversed, he’d be the first one standing in Reese’s position, laying everything out plain and simple. Still, Mitch wouldn’t back down.

  “What’s going on?” Liz’s voice, coming from the living room, made the two men blink.

  “Nothing.” Mitch stepped away, more than glad she’d slipped on a cover-up.

  “There must be something going on”—she slid onto one of the stools at the counter—”because you two look like you’re about to explode.”

  “Just two guys and a bunch of bull.” Reese winked at her, then unfolded his arms from over his chest and headed toward the door.

  Mitch swallowed hard. Instead of playing everything cool, he’d let his ego make the play. Neither one of his teammates had deserved that. “Reese.”

  Reese stopped, glanced over his shoulder.

  “Agreed,” Mitch said.

  “Thanks. I’ll unhook the PWC trailer before I head out to see what’s going on around here. Call if you need anything.”

  “Do you need some help with the trailer?” Mitch asked.

  “No, I got it.” Reese stepped out the door, closing it behind him.

  “I better get out of here, too,” Josh called from the computer.

  Liz sucked in a breath then leaned across to see the screen. “I didn’t know you were there, Josh.”

  He nodded. “I’m here. But I need to get some work done on this end before we talk again later.”

  “Let’s hope we hear something definitive by twenty-one hundred.” Mitch clicked off the computer.

  “Hear about what?” she asked.

  “CT might have eyes on us.”

  “Here? At the house.”

  “Maybe. We’re confirming our info. But rest assured, this place is wired with the latest in security and surveillance.” He made sure his tone was confident enough to ease any doubt she might have.

  Until Drake had Russ in hand, Mitch wasn’t going to give Liz any hope by telling her bits and pieces. He still needed her to work on everything she could remember about the publisher. Giving her hope might subconsciously cause her to hold things back.

  …

  Liz had no idea what she’d walked in on in the kitchen, and she could tell none of the men planned to make her any the wiser. That could mean only one of two things. Either there was really bad news. Or, the conversation had been about her. Bad news could always wait.

  “I think I’ll go clean up and start on that info you asked me to compile about my former boss,” she said.

  “Sounds good. There are pens and paper and sticky notes in the media room. A whiteboard if you work better that way.” Mitch walked over and looped his arm across her shoulder. “Want me to get those for you?”

  “Thanks, but I’ll get what I need.” He was being nice with the offer, but she needed to face her demons head on. After all, what was walking into a windowless room compared to making love to a man she had no chance of holding forever? “You guys were arguing, right?”

  Moving to the other side of the counter, he braced his hands on the granite. “Difference of opinion, that’s all. Don’t let it worry you. Doesn’t worry me.”

  She couldn’t quite seem to make her gaze meet his, never mind fidgeting her fingers like a child caught in the cookie jar. Except in this case, the cookie jar had been a big, round chaise lounge. And, the cookie was the blue-eyed, sexy man standing in front of her. The one who’d caressed her with every breath he took as he stroked her body. That had probably been a mistake on both their parts, but she didn’t care.

  Before long, he covered her hands with his own, bringing one to his lips. “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “I think you all were arguing about me.”

  He didn’t answer, just kissed her hand once again.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have…” she whispered.

  “Well, I guess we could forget about everything that happened this afternoon. Or…” Leading her to the end of the counter, he turned and wrapped her in his arms, placing his hands against her bottom and pressing her tighter and tighter against him.

  “Or what?”

  He released her and started up the steps. “Or, we can go upstairs and see how that seahorse pillow in your room feels beneath my head. Your choice.”

  She waited till he got to the top of the stairs before she slowly made her way up. Forgetting was never going to happen. So there was really no choice, unless… “Or, we could see how I look wrapped in that soft red throw you’ve got on your bed.”

  He crooked his finger and laughed. “We’ll save that for another time. Right now, I think the seahorse deserves a ride.”

  Arguing with that would be like refusing a million-dollar lottery ticket. And she’d never refused a sure chance in her life. She wasn’t about to start now. By the time she walked into her bedroom, he was already in bed with the seahorse pillow under his head.

  She felt a slight warmth on her face as he pulled her across his body, positioning her with his touch while she raised her arms, slipping off her swim cover. The past few days, thinking about him and her together, she’d only imagined this would be about good sex. Suddenly she worried she might be headed for love.

  Two hours later, she was satisfied, showered, dressed, and standing at the dining room table, legal pads and pens stationed in front of a chair. Mitch had set the entire house’s double security system so she could wander anywhere she wanted, and he wouldn’t be following. Stacked on the counter were assorted sticky notes she’d brought from the media room. She planned to color-code her thoughts and happenings from her magazine assignments during the past months.

  The logical place to start would be at the beginning. The fastest way to track down what had happened in the past week or so would be the day she was fired. The day the company’s security team took her badge and credentials before escorting her out of the building. She hadn’t even had a box to carry her belongings out, because she’d kept only a bare-bones cubical, since she traveled most of the time. Even when she was in town, she mainly worked on her laptop in her apartment.

  How could she simplify this task? Make her brain flow backward, day by day? People…she’d start with the people trail. Meticulously writing down everybody she encountered for the past couple of months, she soon had the entire dining room table covered in tiny stacks for each day. Thankfully, when Drake had sent her new phone with her dad’s texts, he’d also included her calendar setup.

  The slow going was tedious, but she forced herself to stay focused. She knew from experience that the only way to tell a story was to put in the work for accuracy. Accuracy and research were her forte. Slowly, she seemed to be making headway.

  She heard Mitch come down the stairs a second before he walked up beside her.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “These are my days for two months.” She splayed her hand in a sweeping gesture above the table. “This stack is about the main people at the publishing house. You know, like the publisher, admin assist, CEO, CFO, editor, people like that.”

  “I’m scheduled to talk with Josh and Reese again in about thirty minutes. Can I take that paper upstairs with me? That way, I’ve got something they can be working on.”

  “Sure—better yet. I saw a printer in the media room. I’ll make a copy.” She tore the pages on the publishing house hierarchy off the pad and ran to make the copy.

  When she came back to the table, Mitch was tapping on a coupl
e of stacks, back and forth, back and forth.

  “What do you need?” she asked.

  “Can you get me something on the people in these two stacks?” He tapped the papers again. “In thirty minutes?”

  “You mean the day before I was fired, and the day before that?”

  “Right.”

  She shoved the copy she’d made for him in his hand. “Sure. You go back upstairs, and I’ll run something up before your call time.”

  “Thanks.” He headed up the stairs.

  She quickly wrote out who the people she’d interacted with that day had been in relationship to her assignment. There were only five for the two days. Four of the people had been the same on both days. The one person who was different on the day before she was fired was the informant. The woman who had wanted to talk to her off the record.

  After making a copy of her notes for those two days, she hurried up to Mitch’s office. The three men had already started talking, so he quickly scanned in her notes.

  “Wait here.” Mitch motioned to the other chair in the small room. “Josh may have questions once he does a quick run of our name recognition program.”

  Nodding, she picked up one of the computer panels then tried to zone out the men’s ongoing conversation. She was tired and ready for some sleep. Her afternoon nap had helped, but she wanted to be fresh and alert in the morning. She still had a lot of names, places, and happenings to put together.

  “Got a problem,” Josh said, glancing between Mitch and her.

  “Do you need more info on one of the names?” She’d put down the bare details, figuring she’d expand the descriptions later.

  Josh sighed. “This woman you said wanted to talk to you off the record, what did she say?”

  “I never got to talk to her, because I was called back to be fired. We can try to contact her and find out what she wanted to tell me.”

  “No, we can’t.” Josh shook his head. “She’s dead. She was killed the day you were fired.”

  Bright white orbs flashed in front of Liz; nausea made her hold her head down as she bent over. Mitch grabbed her hand, and, when she looked into his face, she couldn’t read his expression. Part of it looked like a man who’d been hit upside the head with a two-by-four and was still standing, dazed and pissed. The other part held a layer of anger and calculation, with a film of consolation trying to cover his conclusions.

  None of them said anything until she had regained her composure and sat back up. “Could you check again?”

  “I already did,” Josh said.

  Reese cleared his throat. “Where did you meet this lady?”

  “I assumed she was an employee at the company I was doing an article on.” Liz played the day through her mind. “I was walking down the hall, getting ready to leave, when she slipped something in my hand as she passed. The note said to meet her in the parking lot the next afternoon. She’d talk off the record.”

  “That’s all the note said?” Mitch asked.

  “That and her name.”

  Josh clicked up a photo. “Was this her?”

  Liz’s eyes filled with tears. She’d seen the woman’s face for only a moment that day, but her flawless complexion and strikingly high cheekbones had stayed in her mind. The woman had been beautiful. “Yes, that was her.”

  Mitch appeared to be searching for more clues on the computer, bouncing the side of his hand against the keyboard every time he paused to read. He’d even narrowed to where her last assignment had been—Arizona. “So, you never saw the woman again? Never talked to her? Nothing?”

  She shook her head. “When I contacted my editor back at the main office in Chicago, he said she didn’t sound like a reliable resource.”

  “Why?”

  “He always checked out the leads I had. Informants who randomly showed up. Made sure I wasn’t going into a dangerous situation. Evidently, he pulled up something that flashed red to him.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Mitch took on the demeanor of someone sitting down to read a good book or watch a serious movie. “What did you do when your editor said no?”

  His easy-peasy tone was totally out of character. She’d bet money this was a trained move, one meant to ease the tension in the meeting. One asking her brain not to be afraid to answer. She wasn’t a fool. She used some of the same techniques in getting her stories.

  “I…I told him I’d be staying an extra day in the area. That there were a couple of local historic sites I wanted to see before I left.” She felt the weight of the words in the realization they’d been a death sentence.

  “Was he okay with that?” The tone was still the same, soothing.

  “No. He practically ordered me to come back. But…”

  “But what, Liz?” Josh asked.

  She bit her lower lip. “Well, I’d already been doing some rumor verifying around town. Talking to people. Taking some photos. Being extra careful because, I have to admit, I even thought I was being watched a couple of times.”

  The side of Mitch’s mouth quirked a bit, his eyes narrowing with those words. “Watched? How?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t know, and yes that sounds strange. I really never saw anyone following me, just felt an uncomfortable vibe. I convinced myself I was being paranoid. But I’ve been in sticky situations before when doing research, and this time I had the hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling. The kind a woman gets the moment she meets some men.”

  “Not us, I hope.” Reese slightly laughed, then winked at her.

  She shook her head. “No. You guys aren’t weird. You’re all just crazy…nice crazy.”

  The men seemed to sense she needed some space, so they went back to their computer research, while she walked over to the door leading out to Mitch’s bedroom deck. She pulled back the blinds, allowing her a view of the Gulf’s slight glow from the half-moon. Mainly it was dark, though. At least she didn’t feel so trapped if she could see outside. Trapped led to panic, and she couldn’t afford to let that happen. She hadn’t had a panic attack in years, then again, she hadn’t felt trapped in years, either.

  “Liz?” Mitch said quietly from across the room.

  “Yeah?”

  His expression said he was evaluating her, trying to see what was going on. “We were wondering if there’s anything else you can tell us about the business you were researching in Arizona?”

  She wouldn’t let him see her nerves wreaking havoc on her insides, so she forced a smile. “Sure. It may not amount to much, but I can try.”

  For the next few minutes, they all talked about possibilities involving CT and her assignments. The men seemed to have cemented part of the tie-in together, but the three of them had also agreed that this CT leverage case had a kink in it. Where and what seemed barely out of reach.

  Mitch blew out a long sigh. “Short and sweet, tell me again the basis for your trips to Arizona.”

  “My publisher kept sending me with new ideas for the article. In fact, this made the fourth time I’d been sent to the same company.” She gave her own version of an exasperated sigh. “Always on the idea of a series about growing a business in the Southwest. Always the same people to talk to. Never anything new or exciting or challenging. Nothing to make a story out of. It was as if I was covering an event, but the event wasn’t happening.”

  “I’m not quite understanding you. Can you be a little more specific?” Mitch asked.

  Shaking her head, she couldn’t believe how little she’d actually gotten in the three times she’d talked to the people in charge. “I don’t know. I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing. That’s why I planned to stay till the next day and talk to this woman. She might have been what I needed to break the story wide open.”

  Mitch leaned back toward the computer, his jaw clenched, veins on his arms tight and raised beneath his skin. “That’s why you became a problem. They knew you were on the verge of blowing them wide open as you say.”

  “Why didn’t you stay?” Reese asked.r />
  “A couple hours later the editor called. Said what looked like a Pulitzer-winning story had been called in. Said they really thought it was my story to run with. Could I be on the first flight out the next morning?” She blinked, realizing what those words had done to her ego. “I said yes. By the time I got to the airport, my ticket to Chicago was waiting at the counter.”

  Gradually, the men fell into talking among themselves, each seeming intent on their own computer search. They were communicating with jargon she’d never heard. Jargon they probably used on a lot of assignments. Ultimately, they all finished their individual searches.

  “Results?” Mitch asked.

  Josh keyed up two more photos. “I pulled these men’s pictures from the web. Had the same names as the editor and CFO you gave me names on, because they have disappeared from the company employee list. That’s if they ever were there in the first place.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?” She pounced on his words.

  Mitch waved his hands in front of her. “Calm down, Liz. That’s not what he’s saying.”

  Evidently, she wasn’t thinking with an investigative mind. After all the research she’d done in her career, none of this made sense to her. Maybe she should stay quiet and let them do their own thing. Sooner or later, they’d tell her their conclusions…she hoped.

  “I’ll go next,” Reese said. “The company in Arizona shut its doors the—

  “Let me guess. The day I was fired!” She didn’t know how to keep her mouth shut.

  “Newspaper reports that people said a couple of big trucks pulled up in the middle of the night. By the next morning, the only thing left was a pile of smashed equipment.”

  Clicking away on his keyboard again, Mitch practically growled then leaned back in his chair. “Bingo. One of your publisher’s biggest, and possibly only, investor has a direct link back to Coercion Ten. The path runs through ten other companies and five other cities, but the end line is CT.”