I glanced at my watch and realized that I had missed my meeting with O’Reilly. But I didn’t have time to think about him right now. I did, however, need to call my mother. She was probably worried to death after I disappeared from the hospital without a word.
Jefferson was another story. He was expecting an update following my talk with O’Reilly. But if I told him that I’d gone to Micronics to confront Rich Ferris, he would be all over me.
“I need you to do me a favor,” I said to James. “First, call my mother on her cell phone and tell her I’m okay. Then I need you to call Jefferson. If I call him, I’ll have to explain where I am. And if I do that, he’ll go nuts.”
CHAPTER 79
Ferris waited for what he thought was sufficient time for Vernetta to board an elevator, then walked briskly to the CFO’s office on the far side of the fifth floor. He brushed past Nathaniel Hall’s secretary and barged straight through the CFO’s closed door.
“We no longer have a settlement in the Randle case,” Ferris said, closing the door behind him. He was anxious and winded. His words eked out between shortened breaths of air.
Hall’s eyes hooded over, but he didn’t speak.
Ferris walked closer to Hall’s glass-top desk and quickly recounted snatches of his conversation with Vernetta.
“How in the hell did you let this happen?” Hall began pacing the length of his office, but stopped at the window on his third go-around. “Hey,” he said, pointing below, “isn’t that her?”
Ferris looked down at Vernetta standing in front of the Micronics building and nodded. “My secretary just called a cab for her. It apparently hasn’t gotten here yet.”
Hall snatched his cell phone from his desk, dialed a number, then paused, covering the receiver with his hand. “You don’t need to hear this,” he said. “Perhaps you should leave.”
“What are you doing?” Ferris said, alarmed. “Nobody else needs to get hurt.”
“You can leave,” Hall ordered. “Now.”
Ferris crept out of the CFO’s office and walked sluggishly back to his own. When he got there, he parked himself at the window and stared down at Vernetta, still standing in front of the building. He prayed that she wasn’t next on the list, but he knew that was exactly what Hall was arranging at this very moment. He reached for a cord, pulling the blinds shut. The lack of sunlight seemed to cause the walls to close in a foot or two.
He rubbed his eyes and wished that he could wake up from this nightmare. As he eased into his chair, his thoughts traveled back to the day his own greed and stupidity pulled him into this whole, deadly scheme.
About three weeks after Henry Randle first complained about fraudulent billing, Ferris was called to the office of the GAP-7 Program Manager. When he arrived, the Program Manager, Dean Timmons, and the CFO were already seated at a circular conference table.
“How can I help, gentlemen?” Ferris said cheerfully. He pulled out a chair and took a seat across from them. He assumed that the men had some high-level HR problem requiring his assistance.
“We have reason to believe that you’ve been involved in an inappropriate relationship with another employee,” Hall charged.
“What?” Ferris said, completely taken aback.
“Are you having an affair with an employee by the name of Karen Carruthers?” the CFO demanded, barely allowing Ferris time to process the first question hurled at him.
Ferris’s back went erect. They were trying to intimidate him and he was not going to let that happen. “No, I’m not!”
“Well, these pictures certainly say otherwise.” Timmons tossed a handful of photographs onto the table. “I wonder what your wife would think of these,” Hall said.
Ferris picked up the pictures, his hands trembling with rage. The color snapshots showed Ferris and Carruthers dinning at Spago’s, embracing in the lobby of the Carlsbad Four Seasons Hotel, holding hands on Rodeo Drive.
“What business is it of yours?” Ferris finally said. “My personal relationship with Ms. Carruthers does not violate company policy.”
“Well, these certainly do.” Hall placed a stack of papers on the table.
Without reaching for them, Ferris recognized the documents as copies of his expense reports.
“I’d say it was against company policy to steal company funds, wouldn’t you agree?” The CFO picked up one of the pages. “Let’s see…we traced one, two, three dummy corporations back to you. It seems you wrote quite a few company checks to these nonexistent companies. And then there were dozens of unauthorized business trips. You hit Vegas several times last year.”
Hall tossed the page at Ferris and picked up another one. “And you stayed in some pretty fancy hotels and restaurants in San Francisco. We calculated at least ten thousand dollars in personal gifts, like those diamond earrings you bought at Saks last Christmas. Counting your generous gifts, the trips and the payments to the phony corporations, we’ve found close to ninety-five thousand dollars in unauthorized expenses over the past two years. But then, our investigation isn’t finished yet.”
Ferris opened his mouth, but the only communication came from the shock in his eyes.
“I’d call this fraud, wouldn’t you, Dean?” the CFO said, turning to the Program Manager.
“Sounds more like embezzlement to me,” Timmons retorted.
They allowed Ferris to sit in shock for a good thirty seconds, then told him that if he wanted to keep his job and avoid a prison stint for embezzlement, he would have to convince Carruthers to help them with a scheme to get Henry Randle out of the company.
Ferris tried to tell them that the plan was ridiculous, that it would never work. But they refused to listen. The CFO feared that Randle’s complaints would eventually prompt a government audit of the program. Something Micronics could not allow to happen.
Everything was already planned out, Hall explained. Randle would be fired for sexually harassing Karen Carruthers. They anticipated that he would file a wrongful termination lawsuit, but defending his case would be preferable to allowing Randle to continue making noise about the GAP-7 Program. And if he claimed his firing was in retaliation for blowing the whistle about the GAP-7 Program, the sexual harassment allegation would severely undercut his credibility.
Ferris had no choice but to go along with the scheme. If they dug deep enough, he knew that they would discover that the sums he had stolen during his tenure with the company totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That same evening, Ferris took Carruthers to dinner—this time, on his own dime—and told her about the company’s discovery of his expense reports, but left out their concerns about the GAP-7 Program. She agreed to go along with the scheme, but only to keep him out of jail. Later, after the lawsuit was in full swing and she had been deposed, she had called Ferris in tears, saying that she could not go through with it. Ferris managed to calm her down, then reminded her that she had already given her deposition—which was the same as testifying under oath. Now she, too, could end up in prison. And not only for perjury, but for being a part of the entire conspiracy against Randle. The possibility that she might have to do time suddenly trumped Carruthers’s concerns about Henry Randle.
For several weeks, everything had been going along just fine until Ferris screwed up and told Carruthers far more than she needed to know. In a moment of weakness, prompted by his own guilt about what they had done, he foolishly told her the whole story, at least everything he knew. He explained how Micronics’s top executives were worried about Randle’s allegations of fraud. At that point, Ferris still had no idea exactly what an investigation of the GAP-7 Program might reveal.
But then Carruthers did something extraordinarily stupid. She called Ferris and threatened to expose their little scheme unless Micronics paid her a hundred thousand dollars. At first, Ferris had just laughed. When you only made thirty-two thousand dollars a year, a hundred grand probably felt like hitting the lottery. But Ferris was not laughing days later when she incr
eased her demand to a million dollars, claiming she now had documents that proved Micronics was guilty of providing false information to the Air Force about the GAP-7 Program. She claimed to have gotten the documents from the Quality Manager on the program, whom she now happened to be dating.
The CFO was not pleased when Ferris passed along Carruthers’s demand. It was only then that Ferris had learned about the ATPs and the real reason Micronics was so anxious to avoid a government investigation. The GAP-7 Program was both behind schedule and over budget and had run up against several minor mechanical flaws. Retesting the failed components would take years to complete. If that news leaked out, the company’s top executives feared that Wall Street analysts would immediately downgrade Micronics’s stock, jeopardizing other programs and reducing the value of the executives’ stock options by millions of dollars.
So the decision was made to ignore the failed tests scores and move forward. Phony ATPs were submitted to the Air Force, stating that the super high-tech navigation system had passed every single test with flying colors.
Recalling the string of events made Ferris want to heave. And the situation was far worse now because the GAP-7 navigation system was being blamed for the crash of that transport plane in Baghdad.
Ferris pressed the back of his head against his soft leather chair and closed his eyes. Karen was gone and Vernetta’s friend had been brutally attacked. Special Moore was not supposed to have been hurt. Ferris had ordered Cliff to search her apartment for the ATPs one more time. They knew that she had copies of the documents because they had been scanned into her laptop computer, which they’d taken during the first break-in. She had also written extensive notes about the documents on her laptop, though it was clear that she had no idea what they really were. The woman’s apartment had been empty for days. They were not expecting her to return home that night. And when she walked in on Justin and Paulie ransacking her apartment again, Paulie just went nuts.
Ferris knew that Vernetta would be next. He hurried over to the window and peered through the blinds. He watched with relief as a cab pulled up and Vernetta headed toward it.
His ethical side knew that he should pick up the telephone right now and warn her. But the other side—the survival side—said that doing so would put his own life at risk. Everything would all work out, Ferris told himself.
It had to.
CHAPTER 80
I was relieved to finally see a yellow cab roll to a stop in front of the Micronics headquarters building. “Take me to the Starbucks in the Ladera Shopping Center,” I said as I climbed into the backseat. “It’s at the corner of Centinela and La Tijera. Just go straight up Sepulveda and make a right on La Tijera.”
The cab driver nodded.
Even though my confrontation with Ferris had not elicited the information I wanted, his reaction convinced me that my concerns were much more than a hunch. I tried to plot my next move. Was there some way to unravel this mess and still keep Special and me out of it? Hopefully, James would know what to do.
It did not take long before my thoughts traveled back to Special. I needed to call the hospital to see how she was doing. I fumbled inside my purse for my BlackBerry, then remembered that it had no charge left. I closed my eyes and said another quick prayer. Special is going to make it. She has to.
Snapshots of all of the events in my life that Special and I had shared together appeared before me like a slow-motion filmstrip. We had endured so much. There was no way God could take a life as vibrant as Special’s so soon.
As the cab sped through an intersection, I glanced mindlessly out the window, watching the passing buildings but not really seeing them. After a few minutes, I realized that I did not recognize my surroundings. The cab was not on Sepulveda or La Tijera. I strained to read the street signs as we moved swiftly along.
“Where are we?” I asked with growing concern. “This isn’t the way I asked you to go.”
“Too much traffic on Sepulveda,” said the driver, a wiry black man. “I took a shortcut.”
I tried to roll down the window, but the electric switch didn’t work. I lowered my head to get a better view of the passing street signs. We were on Lincoln Boulevard, which was west of where I wanted to go. This wasn’t a shortcut!
Something inside my brain finally clicked into gear. “Let me out of here,” I yelled. I reached for the door handle, but there wasn’t one. I turned to the opposite door. No handle there either.
“Where are you taking me?” I demanded. “Stop this car right now!”
The cab made a sharp left into the parking lot of what looked like an abandoned bowling alley. I had to get out. Now! My heart pounded furiously as I scanned the backseat for something I could use to break the window. The cab came to an abrupt stop and I raised my right foot, poised to pound it against the window. Before I could, the door opened and a hulk of a man grabbed me by the ankle, pulled me toward him, then pushed me back across the seat with such force that my head crashed into the opposite door.
Pain rippled through my body and I had to struggle to remain conscious. “What’s going on? Let me out of here!”
I shrank against the door as the man slid into the backseat next to me. He slammed the door shut behind him, then reached over and grabbed me by the neck, shaking me furiously. I grabbed his wrists and tried to pull his hands away, but that only made his grip around my neck tighten.
When I let out a feeble scream, he released my neck, but grabbed both of my wrists in one of his enormous hands, then slapped me hard across the face several times.
“Shut up and sit still,” the man said.
My face went numb with pain. His grip around my wrists was so tight that I could feel my wrist bones scraping against each other. With his free hand, the man pulled a gun from his pocket and stuck it deep into my stomach.
“You and your little friend have some documents that don’t belong to you,” he said. “And I want them back.”
CHAPTER 81
Jefferson, James and Detective Coleman had been sitting outside Starbucks for nearly forty minutes.
“Vernetta should have been here by now,” Jefferson said, pounding his fist on the wrought-iron table. “Something’s wrong.”
The worried look on James’s face silently affirmed his concurrence with Jefferson’s statement. Something was very wrong. He scanned the busy parking lot of the Ladera Center hoping to spot a cab with Vernetta inside. James still could not believe the story he had heard from Jefferson and the detective. He didn’t understand why Vernetta had not told him the full story behind the documents when she’d first brought them to his house. But his mounting anxiety over her safety allowed him to put that aside.
James stood up and was about to head inside for a cup of coffee, but changed his mind when he saw that the Starbucks was packed with people. A long line of customers stretched from the counter to the glass door. To the left of the line, college students, bent over laptops and thick textbooks, occupied every available seat. Outside, on the east side of the building, a small group of black men were crowded around tables watching two chess games in progress.
“I told her not to take her ass down there!” Jefferson fumed as James rejoined them at the table. “She’s so damn hardheaded!”
“I’m waiting to hear from one of the patrol cars I sent over to Micronics,” Detective Coleman said confidently. He was gobbling down his second piece of lemon pound cake.
Jefferson glared at him. “Like I said before, you just better hope Vernetta doesn’t get hurt.”
“This isn’t exactly a good time to be passing around blame,” Detective Coleman replied, taking a sip from his Banana Coconut Frappuccino.
“Well, you make sure you let me know when the time is right because I have a whole lot of shit I wanna say!” Jefferson yelled.
The detective lowered his eyes. “Don’t you think I’m worried about Vernetta, too?”
“Based on what you said in that hospital parking lot, it sounded to me li
ke your muthafuckin’ career is the only thing you’re worried about.”
“C’mon guys,” James interrupted. “This isn’t helping. I hate to say it, but Jefferson’s right. Vernetta should’ve been here a long time ago. Considering what happened to Special, we have to assume she’s in trouble.”
Jefferson sat forward, planting his forearms on the table. “I can’t just sit here,” he said. “We need to do something.”
“I don’t know what we can do,” James said. “There’s still a chance she’s just held up in traffic.”
Jefferson checked his watch. “What traffic? There’s no major traffic around here.”
James and Jefferson stared at each other, while Detective Coleman stuffed another piece of pound cake into his mouth.
“If these guys were bold enough to break into Special’s apartment twice and nearly kill her the second time, we have to assume they’d have no qualms about snatching Vernetta in broad daylight,” James said. “Maybe they got to her before her cab arrived.”
The sound of the Bad Boys theme song rang out from Detective Coleman’s cell phone. He finished chewing before pulling the phone from his breast pocket. “Detective Coleman here.”
Jefferson drummed his fingers on the table.
“That was the patrol car I sent over to Micronics,” the detective said, closing his phone. “No sign of Vernetta or any cab.”
Jefferson reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys. “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do,” he said, “but I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”
CHAPTER 82
I sat cowering in the backseat of the cab as the man spat into my face. “We want those documents your nosy little friend stole. And if you have any copies, we want those, too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I wailed.
I had never felt this kind of fear before. It paralyzed my brain, rendering me totally unable to think. The man was still holding my wrists in a makeshift vice and my hands were numb from the lack of circulation.
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