The receptionist looked annoyed, but she pointed to a doorway at the end of the hall. “It’s through that door and down to your right,” she said.
“Good job, Bess,” Nancy whispered as they hurried down the corridor. Looking ahead, she spotted a door at the end of the long hallway. “Let’s try that door,” she said. “Maybe it leads to Kurt Milhaus’s office. He’s the president of the company.”
The two girls stepped through the door and were surprised to find themselves outside on a vast loading dock. At the far end of the dock, they could see a crew of workers loading crates into the back of a tractor-trailer truck. The entire warehouse seemed to vibrate with the rumbling of heavy machinery and the shouts of the workers. No one seemed to notice Nancy and Bess. They stood in the doorway and quickly surveyed the scene.
“The trucking business seems like such a plain-Jane kind of operation,” Bess whispered. “Why would a company like this want to bribe a politician?”
Nancy pointed to the truck that the workers were loading. “Hal told me that Milhaus wants to avoid complying with safety laws and pollution controls,” she said. “So he bribed Gilbert to write exemptions into the legislation.”
“So that’s why I got a lungful of black smoke as we drove in here!” Bess said indignantly.
Nancy nodded. “I still want to find Milhaus’s office,” she said. “Let’s see if we can locate it before the receptionist realizes we’ve disappeared.”
Nancy and Bess skirted around some huge packing barrels, heading back toward the door to the main office. Suddenly, Nancy heard a low rumbling behind her, followed by a screech of brakes.
She whirled around and looked up in horror. A forklift, loaded with heavy wooden boxes, was bearing down on her and Bess. In the next instant, the forklift slammed to a halt.
Nancy gasped as the crates tumbled from the forklift, heading straight for her and Bess!
Chapter
Nine
LOOK OUT, Bess!” Nancy cried, shoving her away from the wall of falling boxes.
Nancy barely managed to leap aside herself and fell hard on the concrete floor. A split second later one of the crates crashed onto the spot where she had just been standing. The heavy wooden crate splintered apart with a sickening crack.
“Nancy, are you all right?” Bess’s face was white with shock as she came over to help Nancy to her feet.
“I’m okay, but I can’t say the same for my panty hose,” she joked, brushing some dirt off her torn stockings.
The forklift driver, who was wearing a foreman’s hard hat, leapt off his vehicle. “What are you girls doing in this area!” he shouted.
“We took a wrong turn,” Nancy replied, half-truthfully.
“Accidents happen when you go snooping around where you don’t belong,” the foreman continued angrily. “I’ll bet that’s your Mustang I saw outside with the Channel Nine sticker on it! We don’t want any more reporters poking around here!”
He certainly wasn’t acting apologetic! Nancy thought. In fact, it was almost as if he had deliberately tried to run them down with the forklift.
“But of course it was an accident,” another voice smoothly interrupted the foreman’s tirade. “Right, Merrick?”
Nancy turned to see a well-dressed businessman who looked about twenty-five years old. He was standing in a doorway to the office building and was carrying a leather attaché case.
“Right, Mr. Milhaus. Of course I didn’t see them,” the foreman said, tugging at his hard hat.
“You can go tell the crew to clean up this mess,” Kurt Milhaus told Merrick, gesturing toward the heap of broken crates.
“Yes, sir,” the man replied. He glared over his shoulder at Nancy and Bess as he headed toward the back of the warehouse.
Milhaus turned to face the two girls. “I’m sorry about Merrick’s bad manners. He tends to be a hot-under-the-collar type, but he’s a good foreman. I hope neither of you was hurt.”
Bess, who still appeared to be in shock, said nothing. Nancy shook her head. “We’re all right, except for getting quite a scare.”
Milhaus motioned for them to follow as he opened the door to the main office building. “This area is off limits to visitors for safety reasons just like this,” he explained. “The receptionist told me you had gone to the ladies’ room. How did you wind up out here?”
“We must have taken a wrong turn,” Nancy said.
Milhaus nodded thoughtfully. “I guess that could happen to anybody,” he said slowly. “You said you had an appointment?”
“Well, we didn’t exactly have an appointment,” Bess said, springing back to life. She gave Kurt Milhaus her most appealing smile. “We were just hoping you might be able to make time to see us.”
Milhaus chuckled as he glanced from Bess to Nancy. “I have a meeting in a few minutes, but I guess I can squeeze in the time for two attractive young ladies.”
Good going, Bess, Nancy thought. She followed Kurt Milhaus down a second hallway and into his private office. She and Bess sat down in the office’s green leather chairs, while Mr. Milhaus leaned casually against his desk. Above the desk was a picture of him with Steve Gilbert at some sort of ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“Now, what did you want to see me about?” Milhaus asked pleasantly.
“I’m working as an intern at Channel Nine,” Nancy explained. “We’re just doing some fact-checking on a story about trucking deregulation.”
“Fact-checking, huh?” Kurt Milhaus leaned back in his chair and clucked his tongue reprovingly. “Look, I don’t hold this against you personally, but I had a very unpleasant interview with one of your reporters, Hal Taylor, about a month ago. He implied all sorts of slanderous things about this company and about me in particular. I’m prepared to sue the station if he broadcasts any of those lies. There’s a ‘fact’ that you can tell him for me.”
“I can understand why you’d be upset,” Nancy said sympathetically. She spotted a pen cup on Mr. Milhaus’s desk. Taking out her reporter’s notebook, she pretended to search for a pen. “I’m sorry, I can’t find a pen. May I borrow one of yours, Mr. Milhaus? I just want to take a few notes for Hal.”
The man nodded and handed her a novelty pen with the KSM company name on it. It was exactly the same as the one she had found at the station and in Steve Gilbert’s office.
“This is so cute!” Nancy gushed, turning the pen over so that the truck ran back and forth. “It even has your company name on it.”
Smiling pleasantly, Mr. Milhaus said, “We had those custom-made to give to friends and clients. Handing out little gifts like that is good for business.”
I’m sure it is, Nancy thought, thinking of the cash “gifts” that Kurt Milhaus had given to Steve Gilbert. She smiled brightly and said, “I’m sure I saw one of these pens just the other day, over at Channel Nine. Does one of your friends work there?”
Milhaus’s face reddened slightly. “Certainly not,” he replied. Nancy thought she could detect a slight nervousness in his voice. “These pens—we hand out so many. They could end up anywhere, I suppose.”
Nancy found herself studying the businessman’s face. She was certain that she had never met him before, yet there was something oddly familiar about his appearance. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she had run into him before.
“I have to get to my other appointment,” Mr. Milhaus said, checking his watch. Nancy and Bess rose, and he escorted them to the door. “I hope you can convince Hal not to run that interview he shot here the other day. He’s way off base.”
“I’m sure he’s only interested in telling the truth,” Nancy replied carefully.
For just a moment, the mask of congeniality dropped away from Kurt Milhaus’s face. A hard, calculating look came into his eyes. Then the look was gone, and he smiled. “That’s good,” he said evenly. “Tell Hal we’ll meet again soon.”
Nancy was taken aback by the man’s tone. Was that a threat? She resolved to ask Hal about the exact nature o
f his dealings with Kurt Milhaus when she returned to the station.
• • •
“What do you think, Nancy?” Bess asked as the two girls got back into Nancy’s Mustang.
Nancy turned on the ignition. “I think Kurt Milhaus is pretty nervous about Hal’s upcoming story, but that doesn’t prove he’s behind the attacks,” she said, backing out of the parking lot.
“I got the feeling that the foreman was deliberately trying to scare us—or worse,” Bess said with a shiver.
“They certainly aren’t fans of Channel Nine,” Nancy said. “Milhaus obviously knows that Hal is implicating him in his story. That could explain the foreman’s reaction.”
Her blue eyes narrowed thoughtfully as she headed toward downtown River Heights. “So far the only tie-in I have between Milhaus and the attacks is that KSM Express pen I found in the tape booth—and that isn’t much to go on,” she admitted. “But there’s something else that bothers me about Milhaus.”
“What is it?” Bess asked.
“I’m not exactly sure—it’s something about his face, I think,” Nancy answered. “He looks very familiar to me.”
“That’s odd. Is there any way you two could have met or seen each other before today?”
Nancy shook her head. “No. I have a good memory for faces. With those bushy black eyebrows of his, I know I would have recognized him if I’d ever seen him before. So I can’t understand why I have this eerie feeling that we’ve met.”
Bess opened her purse and pulled out a compact. “Maybe you’re having déjà vu?”
“Maybe,” Nancy said. “But I can’t help feeling that if I could figure out why he looks so familiar, it would help solve this case.”
Seeing a convenience store just beyond a highway overpass, Nancy signaled, then pulled her car into the parking lot. She stopped next to a pay phone outside the store. “I’m just going to call Mr. Liski to check up on Hal and let him know I’m heading back,” she told Bess. “I’ll drop you at the restaurant on the way so you won’t be late for work.”
“Okay,” Bess said, sighing dramatically. “I guess I’ll just have to wait another day for my big chance to meet Hal Taylor.”
Nancy laughed. “Believe me. As long as Marilyn Morgan is on the scene, you’re better off staying miles away from him!”
She opened her door and started to get out. All of a sudden, the quiet afternoon was shattered by the shrill blast of a truck’s air horn. Nancy barely had time to turn around when she heard the sickening sound of metal crashing against metal.
“Get down, Bess!” Nancy cried, ducking back inside the car. The next thing she knew, the car was rocked by a powerful explosion!
Chapter
Ten
LOOK OVER THERE, BESS!” Nancy pointed toward the nearby highway overpass.
Two huge trucks had crashed into each other on top of the bridge. One of them, a tanker truck, was engulfed in flames. The other truck had smashed through the road barrier. It was dangling precariously over the edge of the bridge.
“Wh-what happened?” Bess tentatively raised her head to look where Nancy was pointing. “Oh, no!” she cried. “Someone is trapped inside that truck!”
Nancy could see the driver waving frantically. “It could fall over the edge any second,” she said tensely. “We’ve got to call for help!”
She was relieved to see a police car parked outside the convenience store. The officer inside must have heard the crash, too, because he came racing out, a half-eaten doughnut in his hand. He immediately got into his car and started talking on his police radio. Nancy and Bess assumed he was summoning emergency vehicles. Then he gunned the motor of the patrol car and raced out of the parking lot.
Nancy leapt out of her car, digging in her purse for some change. “I’m telephoning the station,” she told Bess. “This is the sort of thing they need to know about right away.”
She sprinted to the pay phone and dialed the station’s number. When she described the crash to a newsroom assistant, Otto Liski quickly came on the line.
“What have you got?” he asked in his no-nonsense style.
Already, Nancy could see fire trucks and ambulances pulling up to the crash scene. A column of smoke was rising from the tanker truck. Crews were attaching steel wires to the other truck in an effort to keep it from falling off the bridge. She described the scene and the explosion to the producer.
Mr. Liski put Nancy on hold briefly, then came back on the line. “Nancy, all our other reporters are on assignment a good ways from that area,” he said. “I know this isn’t part of your case,” he added quietly, “but I want you to go over there and gather the facts about what happened. Krieger’s on his way, but we may need the information sooner for our afternoon broadcast—we go on the air in less than fifteen minutes.”
“No problem,” Nancy replied. “I’ll get right on it.”
“One of our camera trucks is around the corner from you, getting a weather shot, so I raised the crew over the two-way radio and told them to meet you,” Liski added. “When they get there, direct them to take pictures of whatever looks important. We’ll need all the footage they can muster, and quickly.”
Nancy hung up and jumped back into the Mustang.
“What do they want you to do?” Bess asked.
“They need me to work as a reporter, at least until a real one shows up,” Nancy said as she grabbed her pen and reporter’s notebook. “You’d better stay here, though. It could be dangerous.”
“Don’t worry—I’m happy to watch from a safe distance,” Bess replied. She looked nervously back at the two trucks, which were shrouded in smoke and flames. “Be careful, Nancy.”
Nancy jogged over to the crash site, taking care to stay out of the way of the emergency vehicles that were beginning to cluster on the scene. Paramedics and fire fighters had already rescued the driver of the burning tanker truck. So far they’d been unable to reach the other driver, though, who was still trapped in the cab of his truck, which was dangling off the edge of the bridge.
No one objected to Nancy’s presence at the emergency scene—they were too busy concentrating on the task at hand. She found a police sergeant who seemed to be directing the emergency operations.
“I’m with Channel Nine news,” Nancy said, showing her ID and opening her reporter’s notebook. “Can you tell me what happened here?”
“It looks like one of the drivers fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into the other truck,” the sergeant replied. “It turns out he’d been driving for seventeen hours without stopping. He just passed out.”
“The state legislature just dropped some legislation that would have prevented truck drivers from working such long hours,” Nancy commented angrily as she made her notes. “That legislation would have prevented accidents like this.”
The police sergeant nodded. “If the public knew about the dangers of overtired drivers, there’d be a lot more safety regulations, I can tell you.”
Nancy looked up and saw the Channel 9 news van pulling into view. Marcus Snipes and Danny McAnliss jumped out of the van. Without a word, Danny quickly assembled his camera pack and began shooting the scene.
“Hi, Nancy,” Marcus greeted her, looking at the dangling truck. “Wow! Looks like we’ve got a big story here.”
“Liski wants this to go on right away,” Nancy told Danny and Marcus. “We’ll need your pictures of the crash scene, Danny. Marcus and I can interview the police sergeant I was talking to earlier, so we’ll have him on tape. Let me call Liski again now and see what else we should do.”
Mr. Liski spoke rapidly when Nancy called him over the van’s two-way radio. “Nancy, we’re going on the air shortly, and I heard that the other stations have their crews on the way to the scene,” he said, his words tense. As he spoke, Nancy spotted a news van from a rival station coming up the road toward the crash scene. “I’ve assigned Krieger, but he’s still fifteen minutes away. Do you think you could handle a live shot?”
/> A live shot! Nancy thought. That meant she herself would appear on camera, describing the disaster as it happened for thousands of Channel 9 viewers.
“I’ll do my best,” she replied. She tried to sound calm despite the butterflies in her stomach. “How long do you need me to speak on camera?”
“About a minute and thirty seconds,” came Liski’s reply. “You’ll open with a description of the explosion and crash. Then Hal will ask you a couple of questions from the anchor desk.”
“No problem, Mr. Liski,” Nancy replied, wishing she were really that confident.
“Great. I’ll have Danny set up the dish for a live shot,” Mr. Liski said, referring to the small satellite dish that sat on top of the news van. He quickly described the way the dish worked—it would transmit live pictures of the scene to the station’s remote broadcast tower. From there, the tower would beam the pictures into thousands of homes.
Nancy handed the phone to Danny, then quickly got to work. She interviewed the police sergeant again, this time with Marcus taping them.
“Great interview, Nancy,” Marcus said after they wrapped up the filming and were headed back to the van. “I can already tell you’re a natural reporter. This will be a great debut for your career, if you want one.”
“Thanks,” Nancy said sincerely. She appreciated the compliment, even though she had no intention of taking up reporting.
While Danny set up his camera and angled the satellite dish for the live shot, which would be aired together with the taped report, Nancy walked back to her car to make some notes about what she would say in front of the camera.
“What’s happening?” Bess asked anxiously.
“Bess, I need to borrow your compact mirror,” Nancy said. “I have to go on the air in a minute.” She quickly retied the belt of her coat. “Thank goodness we went out and bought all those new clothes!”
“You’re going on live TV?” Bess exclaimed. “Nan, that’s so exciting!”
Nancy was too nervous to answer. She quickly ran a comb through her hair and dabbed on some lipstick.