Headline: Murder. Maggie K. Black
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Although hopefully, if she acted fast enough, this would turn out to be the one big news story that actually kept her from losing her job.
Olivia tightened the clasp holding back her fiery red mane and leaped to her feet. The camera that she’d nabbed off a coworker’s desk clattered to the floor. She scooped it back up and pushed through the rows. The courtroom was packed to the seams with former Leslie employees eager to see Brian pay. Now that justice wasn’t coming, the room felt like a mob waiting to surge. A large bald man with a hawk tattoo on his neck cursed and gripped the seat in front of him until his knuckles cracked. Beside him, a woman with spiky hair cried loudly.
Brian sat alone and was grinning so widely he might as well be gloating. The only other living member of the wealthy Leslie family was Brian’s teenage niece, Sarah. Much to the media’s dismay, the seventeen-year-old heiress hadn’t agreed to any interviews about her uncle’s arrest and hadn’t attended his trial. Didn’t look as though any friends had shown up to offer Brian support, either. Olivia wondered if the rumors of his gambling addiction and drug use were true.
Any moment now, he’d walk out of the courtroom, head down to the private parking garage and drive out as a free man into the hot summer air.
When he got to his vehicle, she’d be waiting.
Dear God, please help me get this interview with Brian Leslie. Or at the very least a picture and a quote to make my article solid enough for the front cover. I really don’t want to lose my job. The newspaper’s the only place I’ve ever really felt at home.
Prayer slipped through her heart like an instinct. It was funny, no matter how many times she tried to put her childhood faith out of her mind, whenever stress hit she could feel it pushing back in at the edges. Not that all the desperate prayers she’d prayed as a child had ever kept her dad from losing one job after another. While Vince, her editor at Torchlight News, was one of the most dedicated people of faith she knew, that still didn’t alter the fact that recent changes at the paper meant he was going to have to lay off almost a third of the staff by September.
Her phone buzzed with a text message. It was from Ricky, a young photographer at Torchlight who was probably facing the chopping block, too.
Hurry back! Vince is looking for you. Also, you seen the camera? R.
Guilt dripped down her conscience like a nagging cough she couldn’t clear. She hadn’t told Vince she was covering the Leslie Construction trial. There were dozens of potential stories like this in Toronto every day. Torchlight could only afford to send reporters out to so many. Newspaper policy was that writers brought their article ideas to the weekly story meeting, like treasure hunters piling their maps into the middle of the table. Vince would then decide which stories would get reported on and who covered what. Getting a good, hard crime story meant a chance at seeing your story hitting the front cover. He’d never given her that chance.
Maybe Vince won’t like that I just took the initiative and jumped on this story without asking. But if I pull it off, it’ll prove I have what it takes and he’ll think twice about letting me go. Or at least, it’ll give me a great story on my resume to help with my job search.
Her fingers slid over the handle to the stairwell door.
“Hey! Where do you think you’re going?” A large hand landed on the door in front of her. She turned, coming face-to-face with a young man in a dark blue police uniform and a bushy blond beard.
“I’m sorry. I was just—”
“You can’t go down there.”
Olivia rolled her slender shoulders back and stood tall. Sure, she was only five foot two, and this man was easily twice her size. But she’d worked in a newsroom long enough to know police couldn’t just block public access somewhere without cause. This belligerent officer hadn’t even flashed her a badge.
She flashed him her media credentials. “I’m a journalist with Torchlight News and, yes, I can. This is a public stairwell and you have no legal reason to detain me.” His eyes narrowed. In her experience, while most cops were amazing, a handful of them got just a little too used to throwing their weight around and expecting the public to obey. Not the type of cop a reporter ever wanted to tangle with. What was worse was this cop had even covered the badge number on his uniform, so she wouldn’t be able to report him—an illegal but sadly not unheard-of practice that the chief of police had been clamping down on hard. She raised the camera, hoping the thought of being caught on film would be enough to make him back down. He just scowled.
“Is there something else going on here that I should be reporting on?” she asked.
A loud crash came from behind them, along with a whole lot of yelling. She turned. A muscular dark-haired man was being forcibly ejected from the waiting area. He was putting up such a fight it took multiple guards to handle him. The blond officer snickered.
Olivia ducked under his arm and dashed down the stairs.
“Hey!” The questionable cop’s voice bellowed through the staircase like a freight train. “Stop!”
Her feet pelted down one flight of stairs. Stopping wasn’t an option. But maybe a route change wasn’t a bad idea. She hit the second floor, slipped through a side door and came out on an administration level. Her footsteps sped up, weaving through rows of people waiting for their trials to be called. She went down one more staircase and came out on the opposite side of the parking garage. The officer was gone. A slight smile crossed her lips.
The garage was dark, lit only by the eerie glow of yellow fluorescent lights. She readied the camera. The state-of-the-art equipment would just keep snapping once she pushed the button, taking hundreds of pictures a minute. She only needed one of the pictures to be usable, so the odds were in her favor. Brian’s car was to her right.
That was when she noticed the truck. The bright green pickup was parked a few spots away, looking like a flash of sunlight on a fresh spring leaf compared to the sea of concrete around it. Her breath caught. There was a man in the driver’s seat. He was tall and rugged, with broad shoulders and a faded plaid shirt. Strong arms rested on the steering wheel. His head was bowed, showing a mop of chestnut-brown hair that curled slightly at the neck. He looked nothing like a lawyer. Bit too casual for a journalist, at least from anywhere reputable. A member of Leslie Construction’s crew, perhaps? But then, why would he be down here instead of in the courtroom?
He glanced her way. His eyebrows rose. She looked down at her camera.
The door to the staircase flew open. Her camera started snapping. Brian Leslie walked through. He glanced around the garage, turned back toward the stairs for a moment, then hurried to his car.
“Mr. Leslie!” Olivia started across the parking garage toward him. “Olivia Brant, Torchlight News. What do you have to say to your former employees? Are they ever going to see the money you owe them?”
“Seriously?” He laughed and yanked his car keys from his pocket. “You heard how those ungrateful jerks booed me in court today? As if my family didn’t keep them working for years. You tell them that I’ll be dead and buried before they get one more cent of money from the Leslie family. Tell them fat chance winning in civil court now.” He pressed the button on his key fob to unlock his car. The car didn’t respond. He frowned and jammed his finger on the button. Nothing happened. “Stupid waste-of-money car.”
Then, it was like everything happened at once.
A stairwell door banged open to her right.
Three figures in black fatigues and blank featureless masks ran toward Brian.
Three men without faces.
A gunshot split the air. Olivia screamed.
Brian wheeled around. Blood spread across his chest.
His car exploded in flames.
* * *
Daniel Ash froze with his hands on the steering wheel.