A gusty breeze lifted Laura's jacket and blew her hair as she approached the glass-and-steel headquarters of Taninger Enterprises. That first week in October, a restless autumn wind pushed through the city, sweeping out the warm temperatures from a lingering summer.
Laura felt impatient, too, as she walked through the arched entrance of Taninger Enterprises, glancing overhead at the stone engraving of her grandfather's motto: Find the truth wherever it hides. Almost another month had passed since attorney Sam Quinn had filed an appeal to her original Public Disclosure Request. Walking into the building through the revolving door, she felt as if she were on a kind of merry-go-round, stretching to grab a brass ring that was just out of reach.
She walked across the lobby, greeting the guard at the security desk. Behind the guard's station she saw the familiar portraits of her family members, who comprised the executive management of Taninger Enterprises. This day, however, the portraits struck her as sitting ducks to be shot down by a pernicious sniper. How many of them have been hit now? Irene lost the Pinnacle contract and a chance at record ratings for her station. Billie is mired in re-dos and delays for the Slammers' new stadium. And now they're trying to pick off Kate! The thought of her kid-sister as the victim of vicious attacks—a college student whose portrait had not yet even made it to the executives' wall—made Laura doubly impatient to get answers from the Bureau of Elections.
For what purpose were these cruel attacks unleashed on her family? And was James Spenser's murder the deadliest hit of all by the same sniper?
Her mind buzzed with unanswered questions as she headed toward the elevator. She was impatient to see all communications and documents relating to IFT, which the Bureau of Elections was required to provide in response to her appeal. On the elevator, her phone chimed. She found a text message from Sam:
Received BOE's response. It's on your desk.
She dashed out of the elevator and across the busy newsroom of Taninger News to her office.
She expected piles of paper. After all, this was a significant contract. Surely the trail of correspondences and documents would be massive. She would have to pull various members of her staff together to delve through it all.
She reached her office, saw her desk, and froze in her tracks. Sitting on her desk were not mounds of paper, or even a small collection of pages. There was just one page. She felt a shocking disappointment. Is that it?
She picked up the document and examined it. The paper was a memorandum written on official letterhead bearing the seal of the Bureau of Elections. The subject was: IFT to Perform Updates and Patches on SafeVote. Except for the first line, the rest of the text was redacted in heavy black marker. The name and signature of the official at the Bureau of Elections who signed the document was also redacted.
The unredacted first line was the whole of her mother lode. She carefully read and reread it. The sentence contained new information that identified the organization. IFT was a company based in Ireland whose full name was Integrated Foxworth Technologies. Its president was . . . she gasped . . . Frank Foxworth.
She slowly dropped the document on her desk. A memory from the caverns of her mind resurfaced to confront her. A mortally wounded man lay before her. She desperately tried to stop a tsunami of blood flowing from his chest, spilling onto her clothes, and staining the pavement red. He grabbed her collar, weakly pulled her closer, and tried to tell her something, but he could barely whisper one word before his eyes closed and his head fell with a sudden finality.
"Fox," he seemed to mouth to her in his last breath.
She now posed a question to the man who could no longer answer any inquiries: James, did you mean Frank Foxworth?