My Boss is a Serial Killer

by Christina Harlin

  I was in trouble. This infraction made two days of job abandonment in a row, the second not excusable in the slightest way because I had quite purposely sneaked out of the office in the middle of my own disciplinary hearing.

  Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I will go to work and face the music, accept my dismissal like a grown-up. The thought of losing my job was not one I relished, but I’d made a choice when I decided to be Bill’s advocate in this mess. Even if it turned out that he was a mad serial killer, I was not going to regret what I’d done. He had been a good boss to me.

  Instead of going upstairs, I went down the basement hall to the great paper labyrinth that was the storage room. A building phone in there could put me through to our office, I guess so that Lloyd would always be able to call down to yell at whatever clerk was taking too long finding a file. Nah, I should be nice to Lloyd. He had actually assisted my escape earlier, and that was probably the most surprising thing that had happened all week. I called Charlene’s desk directly. She didn’t answer the first time I called, so I spent an uncomfortable ten minutes waiting on a stepping stool and then I tried her again.

  “Good morning. This is Charlene.”

  Morning? God, was it still morning? I felt as if the day were over hours ago. “It’s Carol. I’m back with your car.”

  “Okay. And where should I look for it?”

  Crafty Charlene. She knew better than to announce to everyone within six cubicles that it was me on the phone.

  “I’m downstairs in file storage. You mind coming down? I don’t think I want to come back upstairs right now.”

  “No. You don’t. Give me a couple minutes, okay?”

  I went back to my stepping stool and waited.

  *****

  As she entered the storage room, Charlene said “When he found out that you had left, Terry Bronk threw a fit. I could hear it from my desk. It was really funny.”

  I wondered at that, judging by her flat expression. “Are they going to wait until I come back to fire me officially?” I asked.

  “I didn’t hear, one way or the other. Still, it was like something out of a horror movie. I think some of his brains are still on the ceiling. I don’t think he could believe that someone just walked out of a meeting with him.”

  Yeah, I doubted Terry would believe I’d just been in the bathroom this whole time. Now there would be a new office legend. “The Time Carol Frank Walked Out of a Disciplinary Hearing to Find Her Serial Killer Boss and Terry Bronk Fired Her.”

  “Thanks for sending the police along behind me,” I said.

  “What?” She looked momentarily startled and then feigned ignorance.

  “It’s okay. It’s a good thing they came. Halfway over there, I thought I should have notified them myself, but I didn’t bring my cell phone.”

  For a moment it looked like she was going to continue denying her participation, but then she relented. “I was just worried about you and about Suzanne. Bill can get so strange when he’s stressed out.”

  “It was the right thing to do.”

  “What happened?” she blurted. Then, looking abashed, she added, “If you can tell me.”

  “Nothing dramatic. But Bill was there.”

  “You knew he would be.”

  “I just thought, you know, where else would he go?” I shrugged. “And once we got him calmed down, he went voluntarily with the police.”

  “Oh.” Charlene looked vaguely disappointed, as if she’d been hoping for a more dramatic retelling. “I figured once they arrested him, he might start flipping out.”

  “Actually they didn’t arrest him. They were calling it a voluntary interview when they ‘escorted’ him from Suzanne’s house.”

  “Didn’t arrest him? That’s surprising. After the way they tore his office apart, I thought they had decided he was guilty already.”

  I still hadn’t seen Bill’s ravaged office or my desk, but a thorough search by the police doesn’t always mean anything has been found. I knew that from television. To Charlene I said, “Oh, come on, you can’t honestly believe that Bill is capable of harming another human being.”

  “God, Carol, that’s what everybody says after they discover somebody’s been eating the neighbors. ‘Oh, he was such a nice quiet guy. Such a loner.’ And Bill is so quirky.”

  “He’s quirky six ways from Sunday, but I don’t believe that he’s hurt anyone. He’s like, the embodiment of kindness.”

  Charlene grimaced. “Well, maybe he believes that what he’s doing is kind, in its own way.”

  “He’s not doing anything.” Leaning against the counter I pushed my face into my hands, groaned loud and long. “Oh my God, I don’t know what to do next.”

  “Do? What is there to do? You got him to the police, Carol. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Short-term goal. I wanted him safely in police custody, but not so they could lock him up forever. I want them to find out that he’s innocent. I mean, clear his name, if he hasn’t already lost his reputation completely thanks to this mess. If I’m going to lose my job and be forbidden to see my new boyfriend for the foreseeable future, I at least want it to have been worth the sacrifice.”

  I looked to Charlene carefully, remembering to whom I was speaking. “You can help me,” I said. “Charlene, you remember everything.”

  “Help you? No, no. Carol, I have to get back to work. Aven’s left so many files on my desk, it looks like he’s building a fort.”

  Her job, yes. Charlene, unlike me, still had a job. And a boss. Envious of her luck, I said, rather accusingly, “I wish I’d never opened this can of worms, but I did. And you’re the one who got me started. So I don’t think it would kill you to help a little bit.”

  Charlene looked appalled. “Got you started?”

  “Yes, got me started. You told me that Adrienne Maxwell wasn’t the first client of Bill’s to commit suicide, and after I found Bonita Voigt’s chart, you were like, ‘Oh no, that’s not the right one. You have to find the one that rhymes with Hermione.’”

  Her eyes flicked away from mine.

  I went on, “So I kept looking, and found more and more of the suicides, and…” I trailed off, realizing for the first time the implications of what I had just said. “Hey. Charlene. Did you—you didn’t—know already?”

  I actually expected her to scoff a little at this. Scoff, scoff. But no. She hesitated, still not making eye contact, and then said, “I only suspected. I wasn’t sure.”

  I was a bit too curious to be completely thunderstruck, though this news should have rendered me speechless. “How long have you suspected?”

  “Well, God, Carol, it’s been happening for so long, I can’t really remember. It’s just that, you know, women would end up dead, and after a while I started thinking, ‘Wow, that’s an awful lot of suicides.’”

  “I don’t follow you. How did you know they were suicides?”

  “Because I’d hear.”

  “But Bill would never announce something like that to the whole firm.”

  “Of course not. But I’d hear it, oh, from his secretaries or from the newspapers.”

  Still my doubt must have showed, particularly because I didn’t think that newspapers were much for printing details of quiet and unspectacular suicides. I’d discovered that much in my own research. Charlene looked pointedly annoyed with me. “Obviously I heard it from somewhere, Carol.”

  “And so, how long before you started thinking that something was strange about it?”

  “Well after two or three I thought it was strange, but it wasn’t until your detective showed up, after Adrienne’s death, that I began to worry that Bill was really doing something wrong. So I just, sort of, suggested that it might be something to look into.”

  “Why me? Why not just say something yourself?”

  Charlene gave a tired little sigh. “I don’t like office politics any more than you do, but I know how they work. I couldn’t afford to lose my job. I’m too old to get a re
ally good new position, and I’d never be able to get the same benefits and pension.”

  I felt positively wounded. I actually took a step back from her, as if she’d tried to slap me.

  She said, “You’re young. You’ve only been here a couple years. I thought you could cope better with it than I could, you know, if this sort of thing happened.”

  “That’s just super. You set me up.”

  “Oh, stop it. That sounds like TV talk.”

  “I think I’m entitled to a little melodrama. I think I’m entitled to a little help from you, too.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “I promise I’ll leave your name out of it. I have so far.”

  “This is going to be hard enough on the firm without me putting my nose in the middle of it. The firm will need people like me to be the backbone.”

  “Wow, your devotion to the firm is an inspiration.”

  “You’re not hearing me. I believe Bill is probably guilty. They’re his clients. He’s the only one who makes any sense.”

  “No. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve gone through this all in my mind again and again, and it’s not logical. Just listen to me for a little bit.”

  She leaned forward and peered at me. “Carol, you’re not, maybe, in love with him or something, are you?”

  “He’s my boss and my friend. Suzanne is the one who is gaga over Bill, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the one offing all the attractive widows who come to his door.”

  “Hey, come on.” Darkly Charlene frowned. “That’s not funny. Don’t say things like that, not about someone you know.”

  “Think about it, Charlene. We’ve got a string of suspicious suicides all connected by this firm. Bill’s not doing it, I’m sure of that, so someone else must be. Almost seventy people work here—though only a handful have worked here long enough to account for all the deaths.”

  “Stop it.” Charlene looked almost disappointed in me. “I don’t feel comfortable listing my coworkers and deciding which ones are capable of crimes.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. Excuse me very much. Ordinarily I don’t come to work and try to pick out the one guy who’s likely to start a shooting spree—though that would be Howard—”

  “Oh, yes, Howard would.” Charlene nodded vigorously.

  “—but now my boss Bill is in trouble, and I can’t help but consider the other possibilities. And Suzanne’s one of them. She’s got the seniority and the motive.”

  “Motive! What motive?”

  “She’s jealous of Bill’s time and attention. What was it she said about rich women parading in here flashing their money? You were there; you heard her.”

  “I’d forgotten about that. So you really think that’s enough of a motive to murder people? I can see maybe one killing in a jealous rage, but then, these suicides are different. Whoever’s doing it obviously has some greater purpose than something as silly as jealousy over a man. That’s a small motive, and this looks like a big motive, like there’s a real meaningfulness behind it that we don’t understand.”

  She had a good point, and I was not overly surprised that she knew so much. People must have been talking a lot yesterday. I admitted, “The motive—the method—of the entire scenario escapes me, to be honest. How in the heck do you talk a reasonably healthy and financially secure woman into killing herself with no fuss?”

  “Just because they might be healthy and wealthy doesn’t mean they don’t want to die.”

  “Well I find it hard to believe that all nine of them were so clinically depressed that it only took a phone call to convince them. I can’t think of any way to do it except at gunpoint.”

  Charlene’s eyes widened. “That’s not so. You could threaten the widow, let her know that you’d kill her family or something if she didn’t cooperate.”

  “I guess that might work, for some people, but I doubt you’d get the same neat, clean suicide-look. The widows would leave a note for someone, a warning or a message of some kind.”

  “Not if they were despondent enough, they might not…”

  “Despondent?” I repeated, remembering the word from Bill’s numerous notes. “Despondent still, two or almost three years after their husbands are dead?”

  “There’s no time limit on grief.”

  “Are we even talking about the same thing? These are not suicides. Nine widows didn’t just sit down on a Saturday night and eat over-the-counter meds until they went to sleep and died. Even if there’s no trace of foul play or evidence that anyone else was there, I can only see this working at gunpoint. And frankly—because my last name is Frank, you know—I only see it working if a woman is the one holding the gun. Thus, Suzanne.”

  The gaze Charlene directed at me was cool and decidedly not amused. “Explain.”

  All right! Time to put my minor in philosophy to work and exercise the old logic skills. I began, “Um, okay. The unsub—that’s unidentified subject—goes to the widow’s house. She confronts the widow, with a gun, and says something serious but not life-threatening, like, ‘I’m going to rob your house because I need money for my dying mother’s operation,’ or something of that ilk. Then she says, ‘I want you to take this handful of sleeping pills so that I don’t have to tie you up,’ and she says, maybe, ‘I don’t want to have to hurt you.’ You know, makes it the lesser of two evils. And she probably says either that the pills are mostly harmless or that she’ll call an ambulance from the payphone down the street, as soon as she’s done robbing the widow’s house. But no ambulance ever gets called because the entire point of the exercise has been to make the widow overdose. For whatever motive. I don’t know why.”

  Charlene, to my surprise, looked near tears. Resentfully she asked, “Why does it have to be a woman?”

  “Well because,” I stated. This was obvious enough to me. “Because if it were a man, the widow wouldn’t be so willing to quietly knock herself unconscious. Would you want a man drugging you until you were helpless? I’d sure as hell put up a fight; I’d make the sonofabitch shoot me. That’s what I’d do.”

  “I suppose it makes some kind of sense. But I still think it’s just as likely to be Bill doing it.” In response to my perplexity she said, “Because it’s Bill, they know him, and they trust him. He’s their lawyer.”

  “No, doesn’t work. The widow can’t know who her attacker or see the face, because otherwise she wouldn’t be willing to take the pills. The widow would figure, ‘I’ve seen the criminal’s face and can identify her, so if she knocks me out, she’ll kill me afterwards.’”

  Charlene said, “Then it has to be Bill.”

  “God! Why?”

  “Because there’s no sign of a break-in or, what do you call it, unlawful entry. He’s the only one who could be getting in undetected.”

  I hadn’t thought of that and, in the face of my prideful logic, her argument mortified me. She had made another excellent point. Bill was the one who took the notes on their home security systems, their spare keys, their watch dogs or lack thereof. Bill was the only one who knew those things. Bill, and me, I guess.

  Or—and here my spirits lightened again—anyone else who read his notes. I felt like a dolt. Of course, anyone who read his client notes would know that information was in there. Conversely, anyone who had never read Bill’s notes would not know that information was in there. It was in that moment, when I made that logical leap, that it occurred to me that I was standing in the storage room with the serial killer.

  You know, it was not just the fact that Charlene was aware of the content of Bill’s client files. That alone would not have convinced me of anything. Anyone who worked in this office could open Bill’s files and read them, if she wished to bore herself silly. Yet this fact, accompanied now by a rush of other information my detective-show-educated brain was compiling, decided me against her. Charlene had been with the firm long enough to account for all the deaths. Charlene was a woman, duh, and I found no flaw in my logic on the point that our ki
ller was probably female.

  But more than these circumstantial logistics was her backstage pushing of me towards discovering the pattern of deaths and blaming it on Bill. It seemed to me that a person who suspected serial murder, as she claimed she had, would not wait years to say something about it merely out of fear of losing a job. The police get anonymous tips all the time. Charlene had, just five minutes ago, told me that it was only when Gus showed up at the office, investigating Adrienne Maxwell’s death, that she’d decided something had to be done. Seemed to me that panicking at the sight of a detective was the action of a guilty conscience.

  But mostly, I think the thing that damned her was when she used the word “despondent.” It’s not a patented word; you don’t have to have special permission to use it, I understand. Yet she had used it, and it was Bill’s word, and I saw what was standing right before me.

  I think Charlene knew her own truth just a fraction of a second after I had discovered mine. Something in my eyes, I don’t know—Bill had seen the same look the day before, when I’d considered the possibility that he was guilty. And now, just like yesterday, I felt sad and mystified and a little out-of-sorts, but not especially fearful. This was Charlene, my friend. Imagine this if you will: crimes don’t sound quite so criminal when they are committed by someone you like. Or perhaps that is what happens to a woman’s judgment, when she watches too much television.

  “Charlene,” I said, with concern. “Oh, you poor thing.”

  “Save it for Bill,” replied Charlene wearily. “I don’t need nurturing.”

  “It’s the despondent thing, isn’t it?”

  She looked genuinely surprised. “How did you know that?”

  “Code word,” was all I could think to answer. I was unable to stop myself from asking, “Why are you doing this?”