Triumph

by Janet Dailey

  Her dull feature story was suddenly looking a whole hell of a lot more interesting. Monroe Capp might take it away from her. If there was a link between the gun battle and the disintegrating 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 you from the second you stepped inside the building,” Laura said.

  “Watching from where? I didn’t see any other footprints,” Kelly protested. Then she remembered the slab staircase that she’d passed. And the rickety scaffolding in back. Could have been either. She hadn’t been alone in that building.

  “Maybe he can fly.” Gordon again. Sarcasm was his default mode. “No cape, though. Just that leather jacket. I don’t know why you assume he’s a good guy, by the way.”

  “I hope he is,” Kelly replied honestly. “Anyway, we just happened to be there for the taping. If no one at the station knew where we were, how would anyone else?”

  “My name wasn’t on the whiteboard,” Laura said.

  “I assumed you’d entered mine.” Gordon stared at the laptop screen as it flickered and went dark.

  “I didn’t.”

  The assignment editor listed every reporter at WBRX and where they were, hour by hour, on the all-important whiteboard. In case of breaking news, it took only seconds to find the people nearest the scene and match them up with a crew. Kelly hadn’t bothered to fill in the information, short on time after she’d skipped the afternoon story meeting, not mentioning she was heading out to tape an intro with Gordon and Laura.

  “I just thought of something else. The GPS unit in the van transmits to the station,” Gordon pointed out. “Someone around here is going to find out where we were soon enough. And then we’ll catch hell. I need a drink. A big, stiff drink.”

  Kelly caught Laura’s worried glance. The last thing they needed was Gordon shooting off his mouth at the bar near WBRX. “Go with him. I’ll cover for both of you here if I have to.”

  “I don’t drink, Kelly. You know that.”

  “Then I’ll treat you to a ginger ale from the vending machine,” Gordon offered, “I mean, if that’s okay with your mommy.”

  He looked toward Kelly, who only nodded.

  Shakily, Laura rose and followed him out of the editing room.

  Kelly sat back and tried to think.

  What, where, when—she made a mental outline. A routine location taping at an abandoned building had exploded into unexpected violence. What she didn’t know and couldn’t begin to guess at was who and why. Gordon could be right about it being gang warfare.

  Terror had fractured her sense of time. It hadn’t taken long. She’d been pinned for only a few seconds. But Kelly still tingled where the man’s powerful body had pressed against hers, held her so tightly it was hard to breathe—and risked his life to give her a chance to escape.

  He must have had backup somewhere in the half-finished building. Nobody was invincible. She hadn’t noticed body armor under that leather jacket. Just a T-shirt.

  An adrenaline rush flushed her cheeks with heat. Kelly pushed her long blond hair away from her face and wound a hand through it, avoiding the tender spot where her head had connected with the concrete pillar. She lifted the silky strands away from her neck to cool down.

  Preoccupied, she listened to the bulletins coming from the emergency response scanners on the assignment desk, trying to make sense of the brief exchanges between the speakers and remember the codes. She got the gist of it—she’d had a lot of practice.

  SUV rollover, entrapment reported, calling for door pop . . . Fire, first story commercial building, contained . . . Assault, perp fled scene, minor injuries to vic . . . Car versus pole . . .

  Not a word about a shoot-out at an abandoned construction site.

  She closed her eyes, trying to visualize the man who’d saved all of them. As the seconds ticked by, the feeling that she knew him from somewhere got stronger. Kelly had an excellent memory for faces, a knack that had been honed to a skill as part of her job. Celebrities, politicians, crooks, ordinary citizens—she had to remember them all.

  There wasn’t anything or
dinary about her guardian angel, and she’d gotten only a glimpse of his profile. But she was confident that his name would come to her. When she calmed down. Too bad they had absolutely no visual for him.

  Gordon and Laura came back in. The assistant producer held an unopened ginger ale, but the cameraman had already cracked a coke and was sipping from it. He set another on the desk for Kelly. She murmured her thanks and left it at that.

  Laura clutched her cold can of ginger ale, then rolled it over her forehead. “That man—well, I guess he wasn’t a security guard either.”

  She seemed to be trying to pull a few facts together herself. “There was supposed to be one on the site—I had it written down.” She started leafing through a notebook, but her hands were unsteady. “Somewhere. I can’t find it. The pages are out of order.”

  “He definitely wasn’t a guard,” Kelly said thoughtfully.

  “Not dramatic enough for you?” Gordon asked. “How about hit man? Or professional assassin? Skip the facts. Just get the story on the air and ask questions later. That’s the WBRX way.”

  “Gordon, don’t.” Laura’s voice quavered.

  “Just thinking aloud. For sure, he was nothing to mess with.” Gordon rubbed his chin. “He had a helluva grip on you, Kelly.”

  She waved away the comment. “Oh, shut up.”

  The cameraman obliged. For three seconds. “So what now?”

  Laura stuffed stray pages inside the notebook, giving up on organizing them. “I can take a cubicle by the assignment desk for a while and keep tabs on the scanners,” she volunteered. “No one will notice.”

  “Thanks, Laura. I was just listening to them from in here. Nothing yet. But people around here would look at me funny if I went out there,” Kelly said. In the station hierarchy, anchors ranked at the top. She’d turned reporter for a day, but some busybody would ask questions if she was seen doing grunt work.

  Kelly turned her head and listened again. The constant crackle was inescapable. Law enforcement, paramedic, and firefighter communications were monitored around the clock at WBRX, and so was an Internet scanner feed that buzzed with tips coming in day and night. When a hot story broke, the newsroom swung into action.

  The routine bulletins droned on. Laura and Gordon got quiet, listening too. Kelly heard the code for an MVA—motor vehicle accident—on a highway ramp.

  Multiple aided. Additional EMS requested to scene.

  A half minute of dead air followed. It was a slow night for Atlanta.

  Attempted robbery, liquor store. Unit en route.

  Still nothing on the shooting. She glanced up at the large clock on the wall of the editing room. A lot of time had passed since then.

  Intuition told Kelly something big had gone down in the parking lot, something she didn’t understand, and she’d gone running in the opposite direction. Why? She mentally answered the question.

  Fear, plain and simple. Concern for Laura and Gordon. The instinct to save her own skin—and the uncharacteristic impulse to obey orders from a guardian angel with rough moves and lightning-fast reflexes.

  Kelly was dying to know what had happened, and not just to him. It had been too long since she’d felt the thrill of being on the scene of an unfolding story, when nothing and no one else mattered.

  “Listen, guys, there’s something else we have to think about,” Laura fretted. “We were at the scene, we saw the cars, and Kelly and I glimpsed who was in them. Um, doesn’t that make us witnesses?”

  “Yes, it does. But you two can leave me out of it,” Gordon said.

  “I don’t make the news, I just get nifty pictures of it. Mr. Film at Eleven, that’s me.”

  “Did you put booze in that soda, Gordon? The tape can be subpoenaed,” Kelly said bluntly.

  “No one’s seen it besides us. I could erase it.” Gordon got up as if every bone in his body ached.

  “No!” Kelly’s vehemence got through to him.

  Without shutting the laptop down, he thrust it and the video camera into Kelly’s arms. She had to struggle to keep both from falling to the floor.

  “Here,” he said. “Keep ’em safe until you decide what to do. I’m going home.”

  Kelly knew how often he stopped in at the bar the staff reporters and freelancers frequented. She couldn’t ask Laura to babysit him a second time.

  “No talking,” she warned him, setting the equipment aside.

  “No problem,” he retorted. “I should have said straight home. Where I can drink in peace.”

  Startled, Kelly heard herself summoned by the squawk box on her desk. It was meant to be louder than the newsroom hum and the noise of the scanners, and it always made her jump. She swore under her breath.

  “Great. I’m on air in five minutes.”

  Laura’s hazel eyes rounded with surprise. “Are you still going to anchor after what happened?”

  “Why not?” The question wasn’t rhetorical. Not coming from Kelly.

  June Fletcher placed a light towel over Kelly’s smock-covered shoulders and started to comb her hair.

  “How come it’s so tangled today?” the makeup artist asked.

  “Did you go for a run this afternoon?”

  “Ah—yes.”

  June tsked at her. “Wish you wouldn’t before a newscast.”

  “Never again, June. Believe me.”

  June continued the comb-out, humming under her breath.

  “Kelly, did you know that the news director asked me to come up with a new look for you?”

  “No.” Kelly frowned at her reflection. She hated the way she looked in a smock.

  Monroe Capp had been in charge of WBRX for all of six months. Cutting costs, he’d fired about a quarter of the newsroom staff and word was that he was keeping tabs on the anchors’ individual ratings. After a year, Kelly had earned her popularity with Atlanta viewers, but that didn’t mean she could count on her contract being renewed.

  She almost didn’t care. Kelly was determined to move up to national news. Atlanta was a major local market, but it was still local.

  If there was a big story brewing that she could get her name on, she could use it as a springboard to bigger and better assignments: roving correspondent, weekend anchor, anything she could get here or in New York. Kelly had her sights set on the three majors and the powerful cable networks that broadcast nationally from Atlanta.

  “Any ideas?” June looked at her expectantly.

  “I’m not changing my hair. Capp can go to hell,” Kelly said firmly.

  June giggled. “You tell him that. Anyway, we don’t have time to experiment now.”

  She put down the comb and started to roll Kelly’s blond locks around a round brush, pointing a blow-dryer down at the hair for a blast of smoothing heat. She was gentle, but Kelly flinched.

  “Oops. Sorry,” June said with concern. “Did I pull too hard?”

  “Not your fault. I got clonked back there.” Kelly didn’t feel like explaining how.

  “What?” June set the brush and hair dryer aside and ran her fingers over Kelly’s scalp. “You sure did. I can feel a lump. You should’ve told me.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Kelly said.

  June shook her head. “What did you do, run backward into a wall?”

  “Sort of.” It had been more like running into a rock-solid chest with a rebound into a concrete pillar. “I just wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  The makeup artist resumed brushing, avoiding the painful spot. “Well, it won’t show.”

  She finished the styling and opened a huge makeup kit crammed with bottles, tubes, and compacts, selecting foundation first. June kept right on talking about nothing in particular.

  “I know how to cover up practically everything. Did I ever tell you about the weather reporter with a lightning bolt tattooed on her neck . . .”

  From here on in, June’s chatter didn’t require much in the way of a response from Kelly—the stylist would arrive in a few minutes with clothes, and the tw
o of them always liked to talk. Kelly kept her face motionless while her onscreen makeup was applied, waiting for an opportunity to mark her broadcast script. She reached into the pocket of the smock for a felt-tip pen and opened the folder in her lap, working around June’s dabbing and fussing.

  Kelly got through the half-hour evening broadcast without having to consult it, reading the same lines from the TelePrompTer with lively emphasis. Her producer, out of sight in the control room, murmured cues in her earbud as unmanned cameras moved in front of her, their positions determined by an unseen robo-operator using a touch screen in another room. The mic attached to her lapel transmitted straight to the audio engineer.

  Nothing to it. Her voice was direct and clear, pitched as if she were explaining something to a good friend and not a camera lens.

  With practiced ease, Kelly wrapped up the broadcast and exchanged the usual banter with her silver-haired co-anchor, Dave Maples, a favorite with viewers for his comforting baritone and craggy countenance. He delivered the sign-off and both of them looked steadily into the cameras, waiting for the tally lights to go dark. Lost in thought, she missed the signal that indicated they were no longer live.

  She jumped when a technical assistant appeared at her side to remove the small lapel mic.

  “Zoning out?”

  With a smile, she handed him the earbud. “Guess I did. Long day. Thanks, Jeff.”

  He turned to her co-anchor as she stood and exited the set, heading quickly back to her office.

  Kelly was transferring the footage from Gordon’s laptop to her own. She didn’t want it on the WBRX servers or her office computer. Not until she had reviewed it in slo-mo. She looked up when Laura came into her office with a mini-recorder held high.

  “Got it.” Laura spoke in a whisper. “The first reports came over the scanners while you were on air.”

  “Who else heard it?”

  “The assignment editors.”

  “Who did they send out?”

  “No one yet. Darla’s making calls.”