“If that’s all off the record, that’s fine. We’re still running a story stating that the parcels of property have been purchased. If you want to maintain an official ‘no comment’, you’re certainly welcome to do so.”
“Yes, that is all that I can give you. And if you run that story, you jeopardize the development of a medicine which could save hundreds of thousands of lives,” he said angrily.
“I’ll tell my boss,” she said. I don’t believe a word you’re saying, she thought.
“When is the story running?”
“I don’t know yet. And if that’s all you’ve got to say, I need to get back to work.”
She reported her conversation to Mr. Brewster.
“Among the many reasons that I think that he’s lying, if there was some rare and precious flower on their property, there’s no way that he’d tell us about it, even off the record,” she said.
“I agree that he sounds like he’s lying, but we can’t force him to talk,” he said. “And he made it quite clear that we’re not welcome on the company property, so at this point it’s difficult to verify what they’re doing out there. We don’t have any proof that they’re violating the law in any way, or that they’re doing anything other than what they claim.”
“So we’re not going to run any story?”
Mr. Brewster frowned, stroking his grey-streaked beard. “I didn’t say that. I think we need to start rattling some cages. We can at least run a story in this afternoon’s paper mentioning the mysterious property purchases, and the fact that the company who bought most of the property refused to comment. And we can mention that Adrian was investigating the property purchases before he failed to show up at the newspaper, and that he’s been reported as a missing person.”
“What about the other disappearances?”
“Unfortunately, we don’t have anything to tie them in with Adrian’s disappearance. Okay, get busy. You’ve got an hour.”
Coral rushed back to her desk. This was actually exciting. It was as close to real news as she’d ever gotten so far. It was also scary; she felt the heavy weight of responsibility resting on her shoulders. Three people were missing, and every word that she wrote had the power to shed light on their disappearance, to put pressure on the authorities to act…
Stomach churning, she sat down and turned on her computer.
*
Flint pulled up in front of his office to find Rory standing on the front porch, holding a newspaper in his hand. Uneasiness rippled through him; Rory’s face was like thunder.
He climbed out of his truck and walked up to the house.
“What’s up? Trouble in paradise?” he asked.
“You’ve got to see this,” Rory said angrily. Flint grabbed the newspaper from Rory’s hand, and a jolt of anger shot through him when he saw the headline.
“Are Swampland Purchases Tied In With Reporter’s Disappearance?” Underneath the headline was a map highlighting the location of the parcels of swampland, and a picture of Adrian Freidman.
His heart thudded painfully in his chest.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “This jeopardizes our entire operation.”
“Ya think?” Rory said angrily. “I can’t believe they did that. Didn’t you try to talk her out of it?”
“As much as I could, yes, but I can’t actually tell her anything about why we’re here or what we’re investigating. If I’d been able to tell her what we were doing, I could have convinced her to hold the story.”
“Too risky,” Rory growled. “There’s far too much riding on this for you to trust a woman that you’ve just met.”
“I know. God damn it, god damn it, I can’t believe this.”
Flint pulled his cell phone from his pocket and called Coral.
“What the hell were you thinking?” he yelled.
“I beg your pardon? What are you talking about?”
“The story in today’s paper. I’ve been begging you to back off this entire investigation, damn it to hell. You’ve put a lot of people at risk, including my family.”
“How did I put your family at risk?” she sounded baffled. “We’ve got three missing people in this town, and a company buying up a lot of property near the town and refusing to reveal what they want to use it for, and that’s newsworthy. If anybody, including you or the police, had at least given me a hint of what’s going on here, we might have been able to hold the story, but with the radio silence I’ve been getting, we didn’t have any other options.”
“You had the option not to print the story!” he roared, and hurled the phone against a porch railing, where it shattered into pieces.
What Coral didn’t know was that his family was also descended from Original Shifters. She also didn’t know that there had been kidnappings of at least a dozen descendents of Original Shifters, from around the world.