Kitabı oxu: «Headline: Murder»

With thanks to all the amazing writers, editors and others I’ve had the joy of sharing a newsroom with. You all stretched and inspired me so much.

Most especially Doug, one of the best newshounds I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. Peace to you and Margie on your journey.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

Bible Verse

Dedication

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

EPILOGUE

Dear Reader

Extract

Copyright

ONE

Shock rippled like a wave through the crowded Toronto courtroom, leaving a rumble of anger seething in its wake. The crown attorney had just announced that Brian Leslie, sleazy owner of Leslie Construction, was going to walk out the door a free man, despite stealing hundreds of thousands from both the government and his own employees. Which meant the construction crew he’d left both unemployed and broke had just seen their best hope for justice go up in flames.

Reporter Olivia Brant tightened the grip on her notepad. Her green eyes grew wide. That man’s sloppy, reckless attempts at tax evasion had made headlines across Canada. How could the authorities possibly think it was “in the public interest” to let a thieving creep like him go free? Growing up, always shuffling from one lousy rented apartment to the next, she’d seen all too well how working for really bad bosses could tear someone’s family apart.

Well, even if I don’t succeed in saving my own position at Torchlight News, at least the last story I write will be about something I care about. 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. The scene unfolded in front of him through a haze of smoke and fire. Just moments ago, he’d been sitting there trying to pray for Brian Leslie—an endlessly unpleasant man who he’d briefly called his brother-in-law a very long time ago.

Then Brian walked into the garage, three masked men surged from the shadows and the world erupted in fire.

A car bomb. A weapon fired. A bullet through Brian’s chest.

It was like Baghdad, Manila and Damascus all over again.

Here. In Toronto.

Just moments ago he’d seen a woman running toward Brian. Now her screams echoed through the flames.

Instinctively, Daniel yanked open the glove compartment to feel for his bullets and gun. It might be too late for Brian. But he could still save the beautiful stranger from the line of fire.

His hand came up empty. There were no bullets. He had no gun.

Reality hit—Daniel wasn’t a bodyguard anymore. His handgun was long gone.

He was just a regular guy back home in Canada, a place where it was incredibly difficult for a personal bodyguard to even get a license to carry a handgun. This wasn’t his first firefight. But this time he was unarmed and unprotected, without even an armored vehicle to shield him.

His hand gripped the door handle. His eyes rose in a split second of prayer.

Lord? What do You want me doing right now? Can I still save her?

More gunfire now. Sounded as though only one of the masked men was firing. But he couldn’t see either the shooter or the target, just a series of bangs and flashes in the billowing smoke.

The woman’s screams fell silent.

He’d never once run from danger. But like it or not, his hero days were over. Daniel had given up being a bodyguard four years ago, because his former stepdaughter had no one else to turn to. I made a commitment to be Sarah’s legal guardian. With her uncle Brian’s death, the teenager was now the last remaining member of the Leslie clan. For all he knew, whoever had killed Brian would now be coming after her, too. He needed to be there for her. He needed to protect her.

How can I risk my life to save a stranger? The woman might not even still be alive.

Reluctantly, Daniel turned the engine over. He grabbed the gearshift, ready to drive. Then, through the smoke, he saw a flash of red hair. She was running toward him, beautiful and terrified, like a phoenix rising. Dark lashes fringed eyes wide with fear. Auburn hair tumbled loose around her face.

He couldn’t just leave her to die.

Daniel threw the door open. “Here! This way! Run to me—”

A second explosion shook the air and tossed her onto the ground. Daniel leaped from the truck. He pelted across the parking garage—toward the flames, the chaos and the woman now lying still on the concrete. In moments, Daniel had reached her side. Her eyes were closed. But when he clasped her wrist, he felt that her pulse was strong. He scooped her up into his arms—bag, camera and all—and cradled her up against his chest. He ran for the truck. A huge, faceless brute of a man loomed out of the smoke and yelled at Daniel to stop. He kept running. Bullets ricocheted in the darkness behind him. Prayers poured from his heart over his lips, “Please, God, guide me now!”

He climbed into the driver’s seat, not letting his strong arms loosen their grip on the woman’s body for an instant. As he slid her off his lap and into the passenger seat, her press pass caught his eye—Olivia Brant, Torchlight News. He reached across to buckle her seat belt. Her cheek brushed his shoulder. Luminous green eyes fluttered open, inches away from his own.

“Olivia? Hey, my name’s Daniel. Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay. You’re safe here with me.” He glanced up and counted three masked, black-clad figures in the haze. The brutish one now had a gun in each hand. A short man was fiddling with a small box. An extremely thin one barked orders at them both. The big one raised both guns toward the truck. “And we’re getting out of here.” Daniel slammed his door. “Right now.”

He hit the gas and swerved a hard left, narrowly steering the truck between the thin man and a concrete support pillar.

“Daniel?” Her voice beside him was faint. “Who are you? What are you?”

Thank You, God! She was both conscious and able to talk, which hopefully meant no serious injuries, even though her mind was probably reeling and her ears would be ringing. No doubt she wanted to know what kind of man had just scooped her into his truck. But now was no time for long answers. The short version would have to do.

“I used to be a bodyguard.” He focused his eyes on finding an exit. “Spent a decade overseas. War zones and danger spots mostly. Getting someone safely from point A to point B like this was kind of my specialty. Now I’m just a carpenter.” One who apparently could still swerve around an obstacle course of parked cars and concrete at full speed.

“Carpenter?”

He couldn’t tell if that was really a question or if she was just repeating back the only word she’d managed to catch. Depending on how hard she’d hit her head, she might not even remember any of this. “How are you feeling? There’s a hospital only a few blocks from here. That’s where I’m taking you. If you’ve a phone handy, please call 9-1-1. We’ve got to let the police know what happened here.”

He couldn’t begin to guess how much of the garage was actually covered by security cameras or how security would respond to whatever they saw. Sometimes surveillance only covered the stairwells and exits. For all he knew, they’d just seen smoke and were treating it like a car fire. Instead of...what exactly? A terrorist attack? Some kind of organized crime hit on my former brother-in-law?

There was no answer from Olivia. Daniel risked a sideways glance. Her eyes had closed again. There was a cell phone in his jacket, but that was in the backseat and he wasn’t in any position to reach it. Could he afford to stop, grab his phone and call the police before he reached the hospital? No. He had one task right now and one task only—saving the life of the person in his care.

“Thank You, God, that we’re both still alive,” he prayed aloud. “Please have mercy on everyone else who might be in danger. Please prompt someone else to alert the authorities. Any help and guidance You want to give me right now would be awesome.”

An engine roared behind him. The sound echoed off the concrete walls. There was the crack of a gun being fired and the clang of a bullet hitting his tailgate.

He raced up the final ramp. Another shot was fired.

His truck’s rear window exploded in a spray of glass.

TWO

Glass hit the back of Daniel’s seat and fell down around them like rain. He clenched his jaw, pressed the gas pedal to the floor and forced his mind to block out everything but the growing space of sunlight ahead. The ticket barrier was unmanned, and he wasn’t about to stop at the machines to pay for parking. He just had to hope some security guard somewhere had seen this all go down on a monitor and called the police.

He swerved around the barrier and clipped the edge of the wood. Then he was outside, blinking in the bright summer sun. Smoke poured through the tunnel behind him. A few passersby were stopping to film it on their phones. A couple more took pictures of his broken back window as he merged into heavy downtown traffic. Hopefully someone had the sense to call 9-1-1. Another murmur slipped through Olivia’s lips. Delicate color had returned to her cheeks. Sunlight filtered through the window, setting her hair alight in a cascade of red and gold.

Tires screeched behind him. His gaze shot back to the rearview mirror. A black van with tinted windows shot out of the parking garage and forced its way into traffic. It was five car lengths back. No one was firing now, but the van whipped back and forth between lanes as the driver fought his way closer.

The gunmen were following.

Emergency vehicles streamed toward him on the opposite side of the street. That was one prayer answered—someone had called the authorities. But would they head straight to the garage, or would anyone notice his predicament? He flashed his lights, honked his horn and waved a hand out the window in the hopes of grabbing an officer’s attention. The cops flew past. Apparently a broken back window hadn’t been enough to raise suspicion. And he wasn’t about to stop.

The gunmen were now only two car lengths behind. He cut through a parking lot, swerved into an alley and came out on another street. The van followed. He could see the driver now. It was the tall one of the three. He’d pulled a hood over his head to keep the mask covering his face from drawing the attention of anyone not looking straight on. But Daniel could still see the mask—black, oval-like fencing gear and utterly featureless. Would they be brazen enough to open fire on a busy Toronto street? The light ahead of him turned yellow. Daniel gunned the engine and flew through. He hit the other side of the intersection seconds before it turned red. The van followed tight on his tail. The vehicle was now so close he could practically feel it tapping his bumper.

The hospital sign appeared ahead. Cars lined up to enter the hospital parking lot, but Daniel wasn’t about to wait. He aimed straight for the emergency-vehicles ramp. Two cop cars and an ambulance sat near the emergency room door. He hit the brakes beside them.

A smattering of hospital staff and police ran toward him.

The black van kept going, disappearing into traffic.

“Hey! You can’t park here!” A paramedic reached him first. “You have to go around to the lot—”

Daniel threw the truck into Park and leaped out. Shards fell from his clothes. “This woman needs help and might have a head trauma. There was a car bomb inside the courthouse parking lot. People shot at us. A man named Brian Leslie was just murdered. Wait—be careful. The truck is full of broken glass.”

Two paramedics eased Olivia out of the truck and onto a stretcher. Daniel turned to follow her. A hand tapped his shoulder.

“Sir, you’d better follow me.” It was a hospital security guard, flanked by a uniformed police officer.

“Absolutely. I want to give a statement. Just let me get her stuff first.” He turned back to the truck. The messenger bag had spilled all over the floor. He scooped the contents up quickly. Her press photo identification badge was hooked on the edge of the seat. He pulled it loose, allowing his eyes one moment to linger over the adventurous curve of her smile. “Her name is Olivia Brant. She’s a newspaper reporter.”

The security guard took her belongings from him. “What’s your connection to her?”

I’m her bodyguard.

The answer he’d have given in his former life flew through his brain automatically and he just barely caught himself before it left his mouth. “Absolutely none. I just happened to be there when the bomb exploded and saw she needed help.” His eyes glanced toward the emergency room door. He couldn’t see where she’d gone. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stay and give my statement here. Just in case she needs anything. Or at least stay until you’re able to reach her emergency medical contact, so she’s not alone.”

He had no real reason to stay. Yet something inside was urging him not to go.

“Sir?” The officer’s tone was definitely a little sharper now. He took another step toward Daniel. “I think you’d better come with me.”

* * *

Words swam in a jumble of black-and-white on Olivia’s computer screen. A pencil spun between her fingers. It had been two days since Brian Leslie had been murdered and her memory of the event was still nothing but an incoherent mess of disjointed images. She leaned back in her chair and listened to the clack of her colleagues’ fingers hitting keyboards. It was Friday afternoon and she seemed to be the only one blinking bleary-eyed at a story that wouldn’t come together. She added a few more pencil lines to the sketch in her small pocket-size notebook.

A blank oval face, like a black fencing mask, stared back at her through a haze of charcoal smoke swirls.

“Hey, can I borrow that a second?” Ricky rolled his office chair across the alcove from his desk to hers. “I want to check it against something I saw online.”

“Help yourself.” She shrugged. “It’s all I can remember of the killers. But it’s not much to go on.”

The young photographer picked up the notepad and rolled back to his computer. “I never knew you could sketch like this. Why aren’t you in the graphics department?”

She shrugged. “I really enjoy writing.” And editing, graphic design, ad layout and photography. Over the past few years she’d settled into a pretty comfortable role at the newspaper as a “bit of everything” journalist who could write one day, edit the next and field a decent classified ad page in between. But being good at a little bit of everything wasn’t the same as proving to Vince that she belonged on his new, smaller team.

Last summer, Vince had gotten into a major battle of wills with Torchlight’s former publisher when they’d tried to force him to fire crime reporter Jack Brooks over his investigation into the Raincoat Killer. So Vince had bought out the newspaper and turned it into a scrappy independent. Which was actually awesome, except that he’d warned them it would mean cutting staff. Now was no time to have a mind full of smoke and haze.

Her temples ached. If she closed her eyes, she could almost recapture the memory of the man who’d saved her—dark eyes, a voice as deep and soothing as a morning cup of coffee, chestnut hair curling ever so slightly at the nape of his neck. Daniel. But then she’d blink and he’d be gone again.

“Hey, Olivia? Come look at this.”

She slid her chair over. It was an internet web page. Three crude figures in black fatigues and featureless fencing-style masks stood in the center of the screen under the words The Faceless Crew.

The sudden reminder of how terrified she’d been sent adrenaline coursing through her. “What is this?”

“It’s a fragment of a website that was shut down a few weeks ago.” Ricky ran one hand through his shaggy hair. “Remember that car bombing in Vancouver last June that turned out to be some turf war between small-scale rival gangs? These guys tried to take responsibility for it and a few other car fires, too. They posted some stuff on various hate websites, trying to get attention as some kind of homegrown terrorist group for hire. No one took them seriously.”

She vaguely remembered Ricky bringing it up at a news meeting weeks ago. Vince had said no hard facts equaled no story and that the paper wasn’t in the business of chasing ghosts. But it seemed these men weren’t ghosts anymore. “Can you print it for me?”

“Yup, and look here.” He zoomed in. “I was able to recover some text, too.”

She read out loud, “‘The Faceless Crew are a gang of three killers. Rake is the strategist and leader. Brute is the weapons expert and, ah...assassin. Shorty is the explosives expert.’” She looked up. “They misspelled assassin. Looks to me like three brash, delusional kids who watched too many action films and decided to go start their own gang.”

“You can see why no one took them seriously.”

Right up until the moment they planted a bomb in the court garage and killed a man. Then again, an alarming number of gang-related murders, and even terrorist attacks, were committed by angry, mentally unstable young men whom no one took seriously at first.

They walked over to the shared printer and waited for the page to come through.

“Is it possible someone got them to murder Brian Leslie?” Ricky asked.

“I don’t know.” She ran both hands through her hair, then twisted it into a knot at the back of her neck. “Brian owed his crew a lot of money. They hadn’t been paid in weeks. He’d skimmed money off their checks. He had them working off the books without them knowing it, which meant they can’t even claim unemployment now. So I can imagine a lot of people wanted to hurt him. But there are far easier ways to get justice than hire contract killers with gang ties.”

The paper inched its way out of the printer. “What happens to the company now that he’s dead?”

“It’s a family business, started by Brian’s father. The only remaining member of the Leslie family is Brian’s niece, Sarah. But she’s just a teenager and can’t inherit anything until she turns eighteen sometime this fall.” It was any guess how she’d handle the mess her uncle left behind. “I’m just sorry I lost the camera. If I still had it, we’d have photographic proof that these were the guys. But it wasn’t in my bag at the hospital, so I can only guess it’s now buried in rubble. You want to come with me to talk to Vince?”