Reckless Touch

by Veronica Larsen

  "Leverage? Of what?"

  "Everything."

  That one word, she speaks triumphantly. Like she's been waiting to say it out loud, in this very context. Like the everything she's referring to is the crown jewel in her possession.

  To me, it is. Even before I know what it is, I want it. So much that my pulse races in my ear. And I know I need to focus. I know I need to play this right or this lead will slip past my fingers.

  "Are you willing to give me what you have?"

  "I need something in return, first."

  I drag a hand over my tired face. Of course she does. Nothing ever comes easy. Nothing real, anyway.

  She goes on without prompting. "He has leverage against me, too. He has…photos of me I want returned."

  "Susan, I think you're aware that there's no getting back digital photos—"

  "They're Polaroids," she cuts in, then snaps, "I'm not a complete idiot."

  Emily clasps her hand over her mouth to stifle a snort. I glare at her and she bows her head in a silent apology.

  "Where are the pictures, then?" I ask Susan.

  "In his office," she says and just as my brain works quickly to devise an excuse to visit the mayor's office again, she adds, "His home office."

  Damn it. That complicates things.

  "How do you know he hasn't already made copies?"

  "Because he's overly confident. He doesn't think of holes in his own armor. He thinks there's no way those pictures are leaving his possession."

  "And how are you so sure they're there?"

  "He'd call me late at night and talk about them, about how he'd…" She clears her throat in discomfort. "He'd do things after his wife went to sleep…I—look, they're in there, okay? Trust me. I know him and I know that's where he'd keep them. His wife knows not to go into his office. And he wouldn't keep them at City Hall."

  "Right," I agree. "Mayor's too classy for that."

  Emily slaps my arm and I cringe at my tone. I shouldn't have made light of her situation. But Susan doesn't seem to take offense. She actually laughs, a small, bitter laugh.

  "He's so much worse than you could ever imagine."

  "Susan, if I'm going to agree to do this, you need to tell me exactly what you have on him."

  "I kept my own records of all his transactions, all his meetings. A ledger with times, dates, amounts, names—"

  "Why haven't you gone to the cops?"

  "The cops?" she scoffs. "Because I'm not stupid. The mayor's got the chief of police in his pocket. Look, I've got everything, Amelia. Everything you'll need to bring him down. I just haven't been able to use it before now because I want to make sure my name is nowhere near this. You can do that, right? You can keep my name out of it?"

  Holy fucking smoking gun.

  "I can. And I'll get you those photos," I say.

  "Good, because I'm dying to see that motherfucker burn."

  Emily and I share a look.

  Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Reed

  I LEAN BACK AND the old, worn office chair emits a groan of protest. Four squares of black and white video play out on the screen before us.

  The footage from the day of the latest attack doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know. Amelia Woods enters the building. She ambles around the newsroom, disappearing occasionally when she settles behind her desk and out of view. She's one of the last people to leave the building, walking into the parking lot and right out of the video frame, where we know her attacker waits. The next time someone exits the building, it's a light-haired woman in a cardigan, and we know she's the one who found Amelia passed out behind the wheel. We don't catch so much as a single frame of anything useful to our investigation.

  "The beauty of security theater," O'Brien says from beside me, feet propped up on the conference room table. She keeps both hands occupied by holding a container of fries with one while pointing a single fry at the screen with the other. "Four cameras, four completely useless angles. These companies care more about the illusion of security than actually achieving it. Okay, let's move on. We've got a lot of ground to cover." She clicks around on her computer and the video on the television changes to reflect the new view from her laptop screen. "This is from a bank one street over. I also have footage from three ATM machines and stoplights. But if he fled on foot like he did the night we caught him on that gas station footage, then we're bound to get him from at least one of these cameras."

  This is going to be a long night.

  I reach for some of O'Brien's fries, but she pulls the container farther away from me.

  "You got your meal without fries and now you have to live with your poor life decisions," she tells me.

  I sit back in my chair again and stare at the screen, where long stretches of inactivity play out before us. But O'Brien's still looking at me.

  "What? No come back, nothing? You won't even fight for the fry? It's like you—" She cuts off, head tilting a notch. "Hey, isn't your meeting with the attorneys tomorrow? It's late, you should go get rest."

  "Let's finish this up, then I'll head out." I glance at my watch, not realizing until this moment what a long day it's been.

  She shakes her head. "You know what I don't get? It's been over a year, why is he coming back for you now? What's changed? And why would he go through all of this trouble when he knows he'd lose a trial?"

  "I don't know."

  "Have you…seen her again?"

  There's a curious glint in O'Brien's eyes. She's always been nosy, always probing around my personal life even when she hates revealing details of her own. There's always a double standard with O'Brien. Like when she accuses me of making other people's problems my own, but she does the exact same thing.

  "You know I haven't."

  "The ironic part is she never pressed charges against him, yet here you are dealing with this bullshit. "

  "She was the real victim that night, let's not forget that."

  "Give me a break. She stood right next to him during one of those press conferences. You expect me to feel sorry for her? I can't, Reed. I can't begin to understand that mentality."

  I remain silent, but my jaw gives an involuntary twitch. Luckily for O'Brien, she's never been in the position of needing to understand why a woman would go back to her abuser. I, on the other hand, struggled with that very question from the time I was a kid, under vastly different circumstances.

  "This entire situation pisses me off," O'Brien says.

  "Yeah? Me too."

  Her tired face lights up for a moment with humor before sinking back to concern.

  "Okay, really. You go, I'll finish the rest of the footage, there's not much left to look through."

  I get to my feet, but there's a nagging in the back of my mind.

  "Hang on, pull up the Union Tribune footage again."

  O'Brien takes a sip from her soft drink before pulling the footage onto her laptop screen again. The image appears on the television, which is easier to look at since it's a larger screen.

  I point at the square with footage from the parking lot.

  "We know the camera angle cuts off half the lot. This guy is either really smart or really lucky. He's avoided being captured in the act. But look—"

  Leaning forward again, I tap the bottom right square, which shows the Union Tribune newsroom from the perspective of an ultra-wide camera lens. A large, open room with rows of desks. We lose sight of Amelia Woods each time she sits behind hers.

  "Her desk is just out of sight, here. Coincidence?"

  O'Brien watches the screen for a moment.

  "Looks like it just sits right at the far edge of the frame and gets cut off."

  "I can buy him prowling the edges of store parking lots, where the security cameras don't reach, but here's an interior camera pointed so that the only view of our victim is obstructed? That doesn't bug you? How far back does this footage go?"

  She sets down the containe
r of fries and dusts off her hands. "It goes back two months, anything before that will take a few days for them to send over."

  We roll back the footage, causing the minuscule people to move backward at warp speed around the newsroom until we reach the very end of the feed.

  "Camera angles haven't changed," O'Brien says, shredding the suspicion I didn't voice. "Does that make you feel better?"

  It should.

  But it doesn't.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Amelia

  THE STREET RUNNING ADJACENT to my place slopes downward, stretching out for miles, cutting through downtown San Diego and ending at the bay. This morning, a thick fog fills the air outside, obscuring my view of the distant city buildings. Obscuring my view of anything farther than a few hundred yards away. Fog isn't unusual this time of year, moisture clinging to the air in a hazy, low lying cloud. It's been like this almost every morning this past week, but today feels different. Today I'm different. There's a stillness in the air that makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.

  [Leaving now. Be there in ten.]

  Kathleen sent this text twenty minutes ago. I keep expecting her silver truck to pull up in front of my place, but the longer I stand on my front steps, the more I get the peculiar sensation of being watched. But that's ridiculous. Nothing stirs in the street. Not a car, not a single person. There's no one out here but me.

  "Get it together, Amelia."

  I whisper this to myself. I say it aloud like there's another me inside my head, waiting for instructions on how to feel, on how to act. Am I really ready to go back to work? It's barely been a full day since my attack, and I can't even entertain the thought of getting into my own car. I've put myself in the position of needing Kathleen, of counting on her promise to carpool with me.

  Each second I wait, the more my unease builds. I run a hand over the back of my neck as though my discomfort is a bug I can swat away. But I can't. Something inside of me is at odds with the very air around me.

  This is how I used to feel on an almost daily basis when I was younger, sitting in the lobby of the funeral home and waiting for my father to finish his work. I remember thinking he wasn't good at his job, because he often seemed rattled by it. He cared too much and felt too deeply. Tending to the dead festered a fear within him. A fear of the world and everything in it. Maybe this fear was the driving force behind the stories he'd share with me during our drives home. Awful stories of the ways in which lives end, tragically and much too soon. And maybe I was too young to hear these things, but he never sheltered me from the harsh realities of the world, never sugarcoating a thing. Even then, I didn't want to feel safe. I wanted to know what there was to fear so I could protect myself from it.

  [Where are you? I'm leaving in a few minutes if you don't show up.]

  I send the text and the electronic swoosh marking its delivery erupts from the speakers of my phone. As though ignited by the sound, a sudden thought sparks in my head. The thought comes in the form of a small, snide voice in the back of my mind.

  Kathleen…she's playing me.

  She never intended on carpooling. She's just using what happened to ridicule me. And I fell for it. Someone I know for a fact doesn't like me offers a hand and I take it without a second thought? Couldn't I have been a little more suspicious at her sudden change of heart? I second-guess every damn thing, except, apparently, the things that seem to really matter.

  The warm wash of embarrassment floods me. I'm the world's biggest idiot. Kathleen is probably already at work, settled comfortably behind her desk.

  Fuming, I call a cab and shove my phone into my pocket. The cab arrives in minutes, yet still I stride forward with an undeniable surge of angry energy. I push open the gate and let it slam behind me with a loud clang that echoes down the street. Seeing the figure of a man in the driver's seat makes me pause. I can't see his face at first, and I'm reluctant to even open the door.

  Then he looks over his shoulder and I spy an old man, greeting me with a polite smile. I slide into the back seat and tell him where I'm going. The whole ride to work, I imagine Kathleen's smug face. I thought the tension between us was a harmless office rivalry. But this? Is she really petty enough to pull a high school antic like this on me? Will she enjoy watching me stroll in late, knowing I waited outside my house for her?

  When the cab finally pulls into the parking lot, he circles around to the front. I try but fail to spot Kathleen's truck. It's typically parked in the shady area under the trees. Today, Caleb's red Buick occupies that spot.

  I'm too riled up to think too much about this.

  I pay the driver and ease out of the cab. It's early morning, the lot is filled with cars, and every inch lit evenly by daylight. Yet, I still feel a trickle of apprehension as I leave the car, scanning my surroundings and walking faster than I normally would toward the building entrance.

  Inside, Dale stands behind the front desk, head bowed as he tears through the edges of a package with a letter opener. Dale is young, but his security guard uniform goes a long way to convey the authority he lacks. Lucky thing he never has to do any real policing since nothing ever happens around here.

  Except for that time something did happen. To me.

  When the doors shut behind me, Dale's attention snaps up. His mouth parts and his already round eyes widen further beneath his uniform baseball cap. He makes his way to the front of the desk, his movements carrying the ghost of a limp I've come to expect from him.

  "Amelia, are you all right?" he asks. "I thought you were out for the week."

  "Yeah, I'm okay and…nope, I'm back."

  How many times will I have to say this phrase today?

  I want to smile at him, but I find my irritation is still too close to pull it off effortlessly.

  He stands there, staring at me, waiting for me to say something else to break the silence. I don't know why I don't walk away. Instead, I say, "I've never seen you here this early."

  "It's, uh, a temporary thing. Until everyone feels comfortable again."

  "Ah," I say, pretending I'm not aware I'm the reason everyone needs reassurance of their safety. Dale looks uncomfortable, too, as if he doesn't know quite what to say.

  Then, after another lull, he blurts out, "I should've walked you out that night."

  "Stop," I say, cringing internally at the way his large eyes fill with regret.

  "I shouldn't have let it happen…"

  Dale doesn't carry a gun and his frame suggests he wouldn't bode well in a serious confrontation. I think of the force of my attacker and decide Dale would've just gotten himself hurt.

  He moves forward, clearly wanting to say something else, but his right leg knocks against the side of the desk. A soft clang rings out, metal against wood, and he goes stiff.

  Awkwardness radiates from him.

  Still, maybe I'm not being fair. Dale's limp is evidence he's seen more than his share of hard times. He lost his leg at eighteen serving for the Army in Iraq, ending his military career almost the moment it started. I shouldn't know this. He's never divulged this personal detail to me, but sometimes hoarding information means knowing things about people they haven't yet chosen to share with you.

  "It's not your fault." I manage a weak smile then break eye contact. "I've got to get going."

  I make my walk down the hall without waiting for his response. Once in the newsroom, I have to weave between the rows of desks on my way to my own. Everywhere I move, eyes dart up at me, a few people call my name, ask me if I'm all right. I keep my answers short to avoid being pulled into another discussion.

  When I reach Duncan's office, I stand at his door and knock, waiting for him to call me inside. He glances up at me from behind his desk with a resigned expression.

  "You're stubborn as hell, Amelia," he says. He turns his attention back to his screen and continues typing, as though he isn't surprised to see me or in the mood to argue. Staring at his screen, he adds, "I told you to stay home for the rest of the week
."

  "Ah, but this place is so much like home, just being here and seeing your face makes me feel all warm and fuzzy," I say in a flat tone.

  His reply is equally unenthusiastic. "Your Connolly story didn't go to print. The files are missing. How's that for warm and fuzzy?"

  I try to seem surprised when he looks up at me and adjusts his glasses.

  "Damn."

  "Yeah. And I've pushed all your other assignments until next week."

  "Well, it's a good thing I've got something else to work on."

  He must see a glint in my eye, the promise of a killer story, because he starts to speak. Before he can say a word, I hold up a hand, and add, "I'll come back when I have more to tell you."

  "Wouldn't invest too much time on something you haven't gotten approved, but go ahead, give me more dreams to crush." He waves me away like my stubbornness is exhausting him.

  I head back out to my desk and settle into my chair. Being back at work brings an odd sense of satisfaction. As usual, there's a cup of coffee left for me at my desk. Seeing this familiar sight, along with Duncan's typical dismissive attitude, all makes me think, for a fleeting moment, that nothing's changed.

  My desk phone rings and I answer it instinctually.

  "Ms. Woods," the smooth female voice says, "this is Jennifer Wright with the mayor's office."

  I go still.

  "Yes?"

  "The mayor would like to meet with you. He has an opening tomorrow morning if you're available."

  Speak of the devil.

  I solidify the meeting. When I hang up, electricity dances in my veins. Adrenaline. This impromptu meeting in the middle of his busy campaign schedule smells a lot like fear. And a fearful politician just makes me more certain that I'm closing in on a bigger story than the one I'd originally planned.