by Dale Mayer
Even if she were a human cancer patient, with some rare form of the disease, and somebody had a medical trial running, she would do everything she could to get that last chance too. It was hard to blame anybody who wanted to get their pets and other animals, much less their family, in on a special deal. How strange to think about that here, in the context of her new job in a new state. When she first took this job, she had hoped to never deal with death in any way.
She was technically an ER nurse but had burned-out almost eighteen months ago now. After some of her friends had come in after a car crash one night, she had done everything she could to save them, but they both had passed away within twenty-four hours. She realized that all her nights of overtime and covering shifts on her days off had gradually resulted in her frequently working seven days a week, with long and highly stressful shifts. She had walked away and gone to jobs that didn’t have the same emotional devastation.
The hospital had tried to get her to stay, but it had been almost impossible for her to even talk to her boss about the inciting event. When he realized she was too traumatized, he’d set her up with a therapist and had explained that he was completely okay with her doing whatever she needed to do to deal with this. She had thanked him and had attended the therapy sessions, initially doubting what they could do.
Yet, one of the best things she had done for her own soul and sanity was pick up a paintbrush through her art therapy appointments. It had taken her a long time to get out of the darker colors, and her therapist had been quite delighted with her progress, explaining that the dark colors were just evidence of the depression, dealing with the death that she had witnessed over and over and over again.
The words of her therapist rang in her ears. Remember. Not everybody deals with death on a daily basis. As an ER nurse, you certainly did. You dealt with it more than most people do. Those sessions had gone a long way to getting Joy back on her feet. She finally had to admit that, sometimes, death wins—even when Joy had done all she possibly could.
Her medical knowledge had given her a step up into this position in the pharmaceutical world. And here she was, after a year off, after finally landing this job, finding herself sitting here, looking down the barrel of a position that wasn’t what she thought it would be.
If she hadn’t discovered a missing case of ketamine in her paperwork, it wouldn’t have been any big deal. She’d found other drugs unaccounted for as well, but it was like a bottle here or a syringe there. And stuff like that went missing from hospitals all the time. The administrators tried not to have missing inventory to explain, but it was almost impossible to keep track of every little thing, especially in the hectic ER environment. Saving the patient was paramount. Doing the paperwork? Not important on many levels.
But a whole case of ketamine? That bothered her. When the coffee was done, she poured herself a cup and slowly made her way back to her office. A few people had arrived, but not everybody all at once, and she was surprised at that. James, her boss, appeared at the front door to her office, just as she was passing through.
“Did you have a good weekend?” he asked with a smile.
“Excellent, thank you,” she said in a cheerful voice.
He looked around as he took off his jacket and threw it over his shoulder. “Hardly anybody’s here yet. What’s up with that?”
“I know a lot of heavy traffic is downtown,” she said, “so, depending on what route they’re traveling, this one could be bad for anybody getting in on time.”
His expression clearly said he doubted that suggestion, but he nodded. “That could be it. Otherwise it’s lazy Monday attendees, and we’ve gone a long way to stop that from happening.” With a frown, he turned and left.
She rushed to her desk, grateful that he didn’t know she had walked in a couple minutes behind schedule too. She didn’t want to make a bad impression because this could turn out to be a great job. And maybe the problem was her. After all that time off getting her shit together, it didn’t seem like she was together, and this job was looking to be more onerous than she had thought. She was looking for something stress-free, where she could show up and put in her hours, get a paycheck, and go home with none of this on her mind.
Just as Joy sat down, one of the other women came rushing in, as if she were late.
Doris looked at the clock on the wall across the room. “No matter how hard I try,” she said, “I’m always five minutes late.”
Joy looked back at the clock to see it was 8:05 a.m. “Sorry,” she said.
“And you’re always early,” the woman replied.
“I thought I was a couple minutes late this morning,” she said. “At least I thought the other clock said so.”
“They do that on purpose,” Doris snapped. “The one in the main hall is set forward a little bit to keep everybody racing, as if they’re behind.”
“Well, we’re definitely behind on some things in here,” Joy said, “but that is a dirty trick with the clock.” She’d have to remember that.
She brought up her email again and found a couple things she needed to deal with. With those done, she returned to the project she had been working on last Friday and dove back in. She wondered if her conversation with Kai would bear any fruit because that missing case of ketamine definitely bothered Joy. But, if Kai gets in trouble over it, then Joy didn’t want Kai to deal with it either. Joy hadn’t been working for more than fifteen minutes when her phone buzzed. She picked it up and answered. Her section boss, James, ordered her to his office. He hung up before she had a chance to even respond.
Slowly she put down the receiver, grabbing paper and pen. She stood, wondering if she should grab her purse and her sweater too, and headed to her boss’s office.
As she walked into James’s office, he frowned at her. “I don’t know what your connection is, and it would have been nice if you had told me in the first place,” he snapped. “We don’t like employees keeping stuff secret from the bosses.”
She frowned at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He motioned behind her at two men she didn’t recognize. One reached out his hand and introduced himself as Johan and said the other one was Galen. Just then a third guy walked in, happy and bustling.
“Good, good, good. Everybody arrived.”
Her boss immediately stood to attention. “Sir?”
“These men are here at my request,” he said.
Confusion crossed her boss’s face. “I don’t understand.”
James looked at her, and she shrugged. “Don’t look at me.”
“Not at all,” the new arrival said, as he reached out a hand. “I’m Edward Thornton.” He introduced himself to Joy, as she shook his hand. “I’m on the board and have decided to open up an investigation into our inventory issues,” he said with a warm smile.
She was dumbfounded. She didn’t know if this was a result of her questions to Kai and wondered if she could even make something like this happen so fast. Joy didn’t understand.
Edward motioned her to the chair. “Sit down, sit down.”
She dropped in place, rather than sitting ladylike.
Johan and Galen stood off to the side, their arms crossed over their chests. They looked more like private security than investigators, but maybe it was the same thing; she didn’t know.
Edward turned to her section boss, almost wringing his hands in delight. “One of the issues we’ve always had is the comptroller’s concerns regarding the accounting of the inventory,” he said. “So I want these two guys, who are specialists in this field,” he said, with an expansive arm thrown toward the two men, “to go through our inventory processing and to look at our inventory database to see if everything is up to snuff.”
Her section boss struggled to keep his jaw closed as he muttered, “I didn’t think there were any problems with the inventory,” he said.
“No, but I’m certain you are aware that new regulations are coming out on how medications ar
e stored and accounted for,” he said. “I want to start now because, as soon as that directive comes through, we’re meant to be in compliance within thirty days.”
“Normally we get months and months, if not years, for compliance,” her boss muttered, frowning.
“Usually that’s true,” Edward said. “In this case, it’s not. So I want to get a jump on it now.”
Her boss sat back and frowned.
Edward nodded. “You don’t like the fact that I’ve done this?” he asked. “You should be happy I involved you in the process.”
Her boss’s face immediately cleared, but she could see the effort it required of him. “I just, well, if I’m not doing a good job,” he said, “it would be nice to know.”
“Oh my,” Edward said. “Where would you get that idea? This is all about compliance and making sure that our processes are okay. I could have brought in a process engineer, but I thought maybe we wanted to do something much more low-key.”
She slid a glance at the two men, who looked like perfect candidates to be bouncers at a bar, and wondered just what the hell low-key was—because these men were anything but.
Chapter 2
As soon as Edward finished giving his orders, she was asked to take the men back to her office and to show them exactly what they were doing. She frowned at that and said, “I don’t have an office to myself, and the addition of two more people will undoubtedly disturb the other two women.”
Edward looked at her in surprise, then to her boss.
James frowned and shuffled papers awkwardly on his desk and said, “Other offices are on that level, so I guess we could move you two investigators to one of those for the duration of this process.” He looked from the two men to Edward. “How long is this likely to take?”
“No clue,” Edward said.
The first man, Johan, spoke up. “With any luck, just one week.”
Her boss nodded, seemingly a little more relaxed at that. “Well, a week would not be too bad then,” he said. “We obviously want to keep the disruption down to as little as possible.”
“Whatever that means,” Galen, the other man, murmured. But his gaze was intense and watchful, almost as if he were recording everything going on around him.
She wasn’t sure what to think of them. Both men had very fair blond hair, heartily tanned skin, and prominent cheekbones with strong noses. There was just something about them. They weren’t fools, but she highly doubted they were inventory process investigators though. They looked a whole lot more like thugs, the presentable kind. Then she laughed at her own musings. As soon as her laughter crept out, she immediately gulped it back, realizing how inappropriate it was.
Smiling, she got to her feet and said, “Well, we could either move the other two women out to have the men in my office, or you can put me and the investigators in another separate area. Or, you could give these guys an office near mine, and I can work there with them as needed,” she said, speaking gently.
Edward nodded. “You know what? I like that last bit best because the investigators will need privacy too,” he said. He looked at her boss and said, “Make it happen, James.” And, with that, the same gale-force wind that blew him in now blew him right back out again.
The two men stood at the doorway and eyed James, never giving him a chance to back down from the orders that had been given him.
James shook his head and said, “In that case, I guess we’ll set you up in an office.” He rose, looked at Joy, and asked, “What about the office beside yours? Is that one empty?”
“I don’t know,” she said. To say yes would imply that she’d gone in and checked it out, which wasn’t in the scope of anybody who had just started a new job. Sure, she’d been there for maybe six weeks now, but it was hardly appropriate for her to search for empty rooms.
He sighed and said, “Come on then. I’ll have to get IT to give you computers.”
“We have our own laptops,” Johan said, his tone calm, yet brusque.
James frowned at that. “We do have heavy security here.”
“Obviously,” Galen said, as if James had no clue how much security they had or what and how much these men knew about it.
It was an odd conversation, but James was obviously the loser every time he opened his mouth. She didn’t want to be happy about it, but she kind of was because he hadn’t taken anything she’d said seriously, and that really bothered her. How could he be so dismissive when a case of missing ketamine could be all kinds of major bad news? But now she had to fall in line as they all left James’s office. She studied her boss’s rigid back as he strode down the hallway. Whatever was going on was something he hadn’t expected, and he was obviously not impressed by having something pulled over on him.
As far as Edward went, Joy liked him. He had made things happen, and that was good.
James took them all down the elevator to her floor, and then they walked to her corner of the building, passing many closed doors, basically a series of small rooms, one after the other.
After opening several doors, James nodded and said, “This one’s got a double desk. No windows though,” he said, with an airy wave of his hand, as if to say they didn’t need one anyway.
“That’ll be fine,” Johan said.
James nodded. “Good then.” He stopped, looked at the two men, and said, “You need anything else?”
“I’m sure we can get what we need from Joy,” Johan said with a nod in her direction.
She raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.
Her boss snorted. “Good. That’s perfect,” he said. “The least interference in the rest of this department is best.” He stopped, turned, and said, “I don’t have to reiterate how private all this information is, do I?”
“Not at all,” Galen said calmly. “This is what we do.”
Her boss didn’t look very sure about that answer, but he nodded, turned, and walked away.
The three of them stood in the hallway and watched until James turned the corner. Then the men looked at her. This time she saw real smiles.
Johan said, “Kai says hi.”
Immediately she felt relief wash through her. She rushed into the small room, waiting until the men closed the door. As she went to open her mouth, one of them held up a hand, pulled something from his pocket, and proceeded to check the room for something. It took her a few minutes to realize he was looking for listening devices.
“Seriously?” she asked.
When Galen had searched the room and found nothing, he nodded and stowed away the small box in his pocket. “Absolutely.”
She sagged and sat down at one of the desks. “Kai really thought this was serious?”
“Didn’t you?” Johan asked.
“I did,” she said. “I just didn’t know how bad it potentially was.”
“Exactly,” Johan said. “So do you want to fill us in on what’s going on?”
She snorted. “I was about to ask you that same question.”
“Too bad,” Galen said, “we got it in first.”
She glared at him, but he just responded with a grin. She shook her head. “First, before I forget, when I signed in this morning, my computer didn’t go to a log-in screen. As if I didn’t sign out on Friday evening.”
The guys exchanged knowing looks but didn’t say anything.
Frustrated at their silence, she asked, “Do you have laptops? Are you doing anything here?”
“Oh, we’ll do something,” Johan said. “Kai went to Ice, and Ice went to Bruce who then included Edward.”
She knew about Ice because Kai had been full of admiration for her. In fact, she’d raved constantly about Ice. Kai obviously really liked the woman. It took a lot for Kai to respect anybody. “And Ice just picked up the phone and called Bruce?” Joy asked.
“That’s Ice, for you,” Johan said with a big cheerful rumble. “Bruce was horrified and brought Edward in to handle this, and both, by the way, were horrified.”
She sagg
ed in place and closed her eyes briefly. “Well, I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “Is there any regulation coming down the pipeline that we must be in compliance with?”
“No clue,” Galen said cheerfully. “We’re not concerned about what’s coming down the pipeline. We are more concerned about what may have gone out of here through that pipeline.”
She frowned at that, thinking about it, and then realized he meant other medications, drugs, and anything else that may have left the building. “I hadn’t considered that,” she said. “I was just so stunned at my boss—James, whom you just met—considering it to be some clerical error.”
“Is it possible?” Johan asked.
“Well, I guess,” she said, “but I’m not sure. When you think about it, I suppose it’s possible.”
“Not only possible,” he said, “it’s very probable. And is this just the tip of the iceberg? Or else, somebody has just gotten started.”
“Or it’s a clerical error,” she said drily.
He looked at her, and even Galen stared at her steadily.
She raised both hands in frustration, wondering what those shared looks meant. “Or not,” she said. “I presume you guys will find out one way or the other.”
They beamed. “We certainly will,” Johan said. “Now, we’ll need the password to get into the network, or I guess we can just hack our way in.”
