The Hunted. Rachel Lee
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reform bill winding its way through committee,” she said. “Among other things, it has a three-strikes rule. Get popped for fraud three times and you’re out of the government contractor pool.”
“Like that will ever pass,” he said.
She shrugged. “It might. There’s a lot of support for it in the Netroots.”
“Huh?”
“The blogosphere,” she explained. “More and more, online communities are learning how to lean on government to get things done. When it rose from the traditional media we called it a grassroots movement. When it happens online…”
“I get it,” Jerrod said. “But how much influence do those people really wield? Yeah, they can get a story from the outhouse to CNN, but these contractors give huge sums to congressional campaigns. They’ll hold a hearing or two and talk about how something has to be done, and then some lobbyist will remind them that they’d shut down a big chunk of the government if they passed a law like that. Hell, we’ve farmed out so much of what government does, it’s not as if we can just turn off the spigot.”
“Spoken like a former contractor,” Georgie said with a playful grin.
“Hey,” he said. “I was just a grunt for hire. Don’t go lumping me in with those people.”
“Whatever,” she said. Lightning flared so bright that it washed out the room, followed by a sky-rending crack. Jerrod looked out the window again, noting that heavy rain appeared to be sweeping closer. Rush hour was going to be a mess.
“So…what? You came in here just to cheer me up?” he asked, swiveling his chair to face her again. “Or did you actually have something in mind?”
“Just to tell you this is probably our one chance,” she said. She handed him a printout. “Apparently the good folks there like Houston.”
He scanned the page. It was a blurb from one of her many online newsfeeds. “MMG buys Houston Examiner. This matters to me…how?”
“MMG,” Georgie said. “Mercator Media Group. Say goodbye to one of the last independently owned newspapers in Texas.”
“Interesting,” Jerrod said. “But again, how does that matter to me?”
“Erin McKenna broke the Mercator story when she was a freelancer for Fortune.”
He nodded. Georgie’s other vice was drawing out a story just to the point where he wanted to strangle her. She knew he knew Erin McKenna. They’d never met, but her story in Fortune had been so thorough as to be a blueprint for his investigation. “And?”
“She’s not a freelancer anymore. The Houston Examiner hired her as an investigative reporter.”
“And now Mercator owns the Examiner,” he said. The pieces came together. He let out a long sigh. “Oh shit.”
“Maybe you need to go to Houston,” Georgie said. “It would be bad to come this far and lose a key witness.”
Jerrod looked at the file on his desk, the paltry window onto a life too short. Or a life that had been turned into a living hell of slavery.
“More than the Mercator case seems to have followed you from Houston. Cold case?” Georgie asked, following his gaze.
“Not quite.” He hated to leave it. But he couldn’t allow anyone to tamper with witness testimony. Reluctantly, he reached for the phone.
He was going to Houston. Maybe he could nose around on the missing-child case some more while he was there. Two birds with one stone.
Regardless, he needed to find out what was going on with Erin McKenna.
2
Erin McKenna climbed the stairs to her third floor apartment, a small box of personal belongings under her arm. As her feet hit each tread, a curse escaped under her breath.
Fired. Just like that. Oh, they called it a staff reduction, but she was too much of a reporter to believe it. Since word of Mercator Media Group’s purchase of the paper had begun to filter down, she’d known she was in the crosshairs. She’d expected pressure not to testify in the trial. The pressure had never come, and she’d gone off to Federal Court this morning and testified without one whisper of a suggestion that she reconsider.
Then she had come back to the office to find the news editor and her managing editor standing over her desk, her belongings already in a box, with the happy news that she had just become part of a staff reduction.
Hah!
Something in Bill Maddox’s face had communicated the truth. She’d been investigating Mercator again, and only Bill, her news editor, had known. In theory, anyway. And his face said as plain as day that this was no simple staff reduction.
Damn! She slammed her foot down hard on the next riser, so angry that she was grinding her teeth.
Effing giant corporations. Damn money men. Damn the whole corporate plutocracy that America was becoming. They figured money and power meant they were above the law.
She stomped down even harder on the next step. They’d taken all her files, of course, because anything she did on the job belonged to her paper. They’d taken her business laptop from her car and demanded to know if she’d kept any business-related information anywhere else.
To do so would have been a violation of the paper’s strict policy. So of course she had lied through her teeth and said she hadn’t.
Damned if she was going to tell them about the anonymous online file storage she’d started when she learned about the MMG purchase. She’d even gone so far as to go to a cybercafé to upload the info so there would be no record on any computer she used.
So the bomb was still out there, despite their best efforts. At the moment, that was the only satisfaction she had, and it was a grim one. She could still nail Mercator to the wall once she finished her research.
Reaching the landing outside her door, she leaned against the wall to hold the box in place while she fished through her vest pocket for her keys. Cell phone, extra pens, package of gum and, as always, way at the bottom, keys.
She pulled them out, sorted through them and then pushed the proper one into the lock. Or tried to. The door swung inward even as she slid the key into the hole.
Her heart froze. Someone had broken into her place. She stepped through the doorway and saw her things tossed about as if a raging tornado had blown through.
She stood stunned, barely able to believe her eyes. At that moment, a man, his face hidden behind a ski mask, burst out of her bedroom. She dropped the box, one part of her mind questioning the utter absurdity of wearing a ski mask in Houston, and charged toward him, ready to head-butt him or knock his legs out or…well, something…but before she finished her first step, she knew she’d made a mistake.
She’d exposed her back.
A rustle behind her was all the warning she had. An instant later, stars burst before her eyes; then everything went black.
She came to slowly, aware first of the excruciating pounding in her head, then, slowly, that she wasn’t alone. Hands felt gently around her head. She could feel warm goo on the back of her skull, and somewhere in her befuddled mind, the word blood registered.
But in the instant between the dim recognition that she was bleeding and full consciousness, awareness of those hands sparked a surge of fear. Someone was touching her. With her sore nose pressed painfully to a rug that had never offered much of a cushion, she tried to gather her scattered thoughts.
Break-in. Someone had hit her from behind. The fact that she could remember that much was a good sign. The concussion couldn’t be too bad.
As she lay frozen, she tried to decide what to do about the person who was with her. If he was the one who had attacked her…
Could