Triumph Read Free

building, Kelly intended to find it. Intuition told her that there was. Facts first , she reminded herself.
    “You might not have to explain just yet,” Laura said slowly. “I—I didn’t have official permission from the station manager to bring you and a cameraman and equipment to that building.”
    Gordon sighed. “They can’t fire me for that.”
    “But didn’t you say you took the van?” Laura countered.
    “No one was using it, and you told me we weren’t going to be gone long. Besides, I have my own set of keys for it.”
    “Stop it, you two,” Kelly said. “I didn’t sign out when I left. So we’re all in this together. Did either of you tell anyone where we were going?”
    “No.” In chorus.
    “Then we can worry about all that later. Right now we have to get a look at that tape. Gordon, which editing room?”
    “First on the left.” He led the way to a windowless room down the hall and Kelly closed the door. There were mismatched chairs in front of an array of digital equipment connected with snaking cords. He commandeered the biggest chair and pulled his laptop out of his backpack.
    He connected it to the camera, fumbling with the USB jack. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said to Kelly. “If you’re thinking this is going to be a sensation on the evening news, starring you, forget it. After your intro, I got zip.”
    “I want to see it. Beginning to end.”
    In less than a minute, he had downloaded the digital footage and fast-forwarded past the long shot of Kelly in front of the abandoned building, and the interior close-ups. In silence, they reviewed the grainy background images of the car in the parking lot as Gordon’s voice, then Laura’s, intertwined with hers. There was a dark blur behind Kelly—the first car. Then a jittery few seconds of the second car, not in focus. The camera had caught a flash of something patterned—a scarf around the neck of the woman she’d seen. After that, it was all a blur, punctuated by gunshots and garbled shouts.
    “Even the sound is crappy.” Gordon lowered the volume and zoomed in and out of video, boosting the pixels into a shifting mosaic that revealed nothing. “This is pointless.” He sat back in the swivel chair. “No way to tell what was going on out there. If we could run this through better software, we might be able to see something.”
    “What kind of software? Who has it?” Kelly tapped the pause button.
    “Not WBRX,” he answered.
    “I wonder if the men in those cars ever noticed us. I don’t think the woman did.” Kelly went back several frames to the close-up on the patterned scarf, then forward for a few. “She never got out of the car.”
    “You sure about that?” Gordon wanted to know.
    “I could be wrong.”
    “Maybe you saw something we didn’t. Laura and I didn’t get close to where the floor ended. You were practically in the weeds,” Gordon replied.
    “No, I wasn’t. And I wasn’t looking out at the parking lot for very long.”
    “It’s possible they saw you,” Gordon insisted.
    “Not only that. They could have recognized you, Kelly,” Laura said nervously. “We have to ’fess up. What if someone comes after you or me or Gordon? The police ought to know we were there. Wait a minute—do you think the man who yelled at us to get out was a cop?”
    “Maybe. Or some kind of special agent. Either way, he was undercover,” Kelly added. “Do you two remember anything about him? He’s nowhere on the tape.” There was no doubt in her mind that their rescuer had stayed out of camera range on purpose.
    Gordon folded burly arms across his chest. “Gee whiz. Sorry. I was dodging bullets.”
    “I wasn’t trying to blame you for anything,” Kelly said.
    Gordon looked a little ashamed of himself for being snotty. “Yeah, I know. Forget it.” The blunt words were somehow soothing. “I don’t think any of us are thinking straight after what happened.”
    “Kelly, that man must have been watching