Extreme Exposure Read Online Free PDF Page B

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