Extreme Exposure Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 verycloak-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