Bad Judgment

by Sidney Bell

  Coop leaned back in his chair, folding his hands together over his stomach. He still had that gleam in his eye that suggested there was only so much rationality working beneath the surface, but he seemed calm enough for now.

  “I think we got off on the wrong foot,” Coop said.

  “That depends on if you’re defining the right foot as the one that’s friendly or the one that’s accurate,” Brogan said.

  “Yesterday shouldn’t have gone down as it did.”

  “I agree wholeheartedly.”

  Coop’s cheek twitched. “I’m referring to your intervention.”

  Brogan needed time before he could respond—punching that smirk off the older man’s face was far too tempting—but eventually he said, “Ah. I was referring to the unprofessional outbreak of violence that forced my intervention.”

  “You think this is a game, son?”

  “Not remotely.” Brogan nearly added, “and don’t call me son, asshole,” before deciding that there was a difference between holding his ground and provoking trouble. His morning would probably go better if he didn’t have to kill the guy in self-defense. “I’m doing the job I was assigned. If that gives you trouble, you should take that up with your boss. He’s the one who hired us.”

  Coop waved that away with a scornful flap of his hand. “I’m not talking about Henniton. It’s true enough you’re meant to keep me from slapping him around, much as the idiot deserves it. I mean Ford.” He raised an eyebrow. “I mean the way you stood against me to protect Ford.”

  Brogan remained completely relaxed, not giving anything away. It was work, though—hearing Embry’s name set off every interior alarm he had. “You mean the way I kept you from attacking a kid half your size? Even if Ford is a dipshit, I’m not inclined to watch someone get the crap kicked out of them when I can stop it.”

  Coop pushed his coffee cup aside with a deliberate fingertip and pinned Brogan with a direct stare. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that no one’s explained to you what my job is. It’s simple really—I make sure that Touring Industries remains secure. That means keeping an eye out for potential trouble. Ford is a troublemaker. I haven’t made up my mind about you yet. So let me get straight to the point. You don’t want to stand against me, son. I’m on the right side, and the things I’m working against, well, you don’t want to be a part of.”

  The conversation wasn’t doing much to distill Brogan’s adrenaline, but he kept his expression under control—he didn’t dare let Coop know that he was emotionally invested in Embry’s safety, not when the bastard would definitely find a way to use it against them.

  Coop knocked his knuckles against the table before rising, leaving his coffee untouched. “I may not have made the best impression on you. I’m a crotchety old bastard, and I don’t hide it. But you only have to hide something when there’s a wrongness about it, and Ford’s nothing but secrets.”

  Coop nodded and collected his jacket, humming as he headed for the entryway as if he hadn’t spent the last ten minutes trying to burrow under Brogan’s skin like a cockroach, as if he weren’t trying to insult Brogan by treating him as anything less than a threat. It pissed him off enough that Coop had to have seen it, but the older man only said, “Time I was on my way.”

  Brogan trailed several steps behind him, watching for any sudden moves. He hadn’t thought it was possible to trust Coop less than he already had, but he’d found a way.

  As he opened the door Coop paused, cold morning air streaming past him. “It’s in your own best interest to watch your six. If you’re gonna have a man at your back, you want it to be me. Come and see me if you want to talk. There are things I can do for you, Smith, if you’re on the right side.”

  He shut the door behind him, and Brogan walked to the window, watching him amble down the front walk and climb into a battered, army-green Jeep. He even waved as he pulled away.

  “Prick.” Brogan locked the door, but slumped onto the couch instead of going back to bed. Giz huffed in satisfaction at having driven off an intruder and celebrated by climbing into Brogan’s lap to put his thighs to sleep. Brogan tipped his head back, played with Gizmo’s floppy ears, and thought.

  Going to Embry would be a waste of time. Brogan wasn’t sure if Coop had come to threaten him or be his new best friend—in Coop’s mind they might be one and the same—but he doubted either would convince Embry to spill his guts. Talking was not remotely Embry’s forte, and pushing would make him shut down.

  Still.

  Brogan was tired of not knowing what the hell was going on, and if Coop was going to bring this to his door—literally—then Brogan would be ready. And that meant information.

  * * *

  Not three hours after Coop’s impromptu visit, Brogan logged into the Security Division mainframe and downloaded Embry’s file onto a flash drive. Later, once he’d suffered through a relatively boring morning, he went out to his truck with his brown bag of sandwiches and booted up his laptop.

  The flash drive included two big documents. One was the official HR employee file for Embry that had been put together by Touring Industries when he’d been hired almost a year ago. It included proof of his degree, a scan of his social security card and driver’s license, his application, references, and the notice from the Department of Justice that he had passed the criminal background check and was an acceptable hire for a gun manufacturer.

  Normal HR stuff.

  He closed the Touring file and paused, the cursor hovering over the much larger file created by Security Division. There would be some overlap in the information—things like credit checks or parts of an employee’s criminal record—but Security Division would have access to things that Touring didn’t, things that were far more personal and outside of an employer’s purview.

  Brogan wasn’t technically breaking any rules by doing this, although it was unorthodox. The information was highly confidential—Touring Industries employees weren’t allowed to see it, for instance, not even higher-ups like Henniton or Touring himself, unless it proved pertinent to the case—but Brogan, as an employee of Security Division, was allowed, as long as he was currently assigned to the detail, which he obviously was. Still, he knew that Henniton didn’t want any of them poking around, and more cringe-inducing, Embry would be pissed off if he found out.

  With most clients who received death threats, Security Division investigated everyone in the target’s life. Potential threats—like Matthew Vindler, the weaselly VP—would generate massive amounts of data on everything from religious ties to political leanings—anything that might lead to motive. Those who were unlikely to be threats—like Henniton’s fifty-year-old receptionist, Suze—would simply be fingerprinted again to make sure her criminal history hadn’t changed since she’d been hired. If anything suspicious was found, it would be passed on to the cops.

  The cops that Touring had refused to call, Brogan remembered.

  This information was then summarized for the detail staff to read. Since the escorts couldn’t remember so much minutiae about so many people, they needed it reliable and short, and those summaries were included in orientation briefing packets like the one Brogan had received on his first day at Touring. However, when Henniton had thrown his fit about how deeply Security Division was digging, Timmerson had archived the thousands of loose documents that the investigators had generated. Nothing had been destroyed, but the Security Division files were uncharacteristically incomplete, and small red flags marked places where the investigators would have done more research, had they not been interrupted.

  So there might be a ton of stuff in Embry’s file—or it could be empty.

  Brogan felt guilty, but he opened the file anyway.

  There were only six documents. The first was a summary of the others, and it reiterated some of the things from Embry’s Touring file as well.


  Criminal Background ( Complete ): No convictions, arrests, traffic violations, DUIs, DWIs or outstanding warrants.

  Mental Health Background ( Complete ): No treatments, either inpatient or outpatient, for drug or alcohol abuse. No disclosed psychiatric disorders.

  Financial Summary ( Complete ): Credit score 760. No outstanding debts. He owns no property and possesses one checking account and one savings account. Subject pays his bills on time and lives within his means, although he currently lives in an apartment well beyond his budget. The client is a co-signer on his lease and pays roughly 70 of the rent. The client is also a co-signer on a credit card that is rarely used and then only for small purchases, never more than $200.

  Relationship Summary (Flagged for further investigation): Parents are deceased. Possible history of abuse. Subject is currently involved in an undisclosed sexual relationship with the client, who is also his immediate supervisor. Superficially, this relationship appears to be free of coercion. No serious previous romantic relationships.

  Employment Summary ( Complete ): Subject is technically qualified for his current position, although he has considerably less job experience in this field than those holding commensurate positions at other companies. It is likely that his hiring was based, at least in part, on his rapport with the client. Subject has never been fired. References check out and are very positive.

  Educational Summary ( Flagged for Further Investigation ): Associate’s Degree in Applied Sciences. Subject is qualified for his current position.

  Personal History ( Flagged for Further Investigation ): Legal name change in Sept. 2012. See attached.

  Risk Assessment ( Pending ): Subject initially appears assertive, intelligent, and hardworking, but seems uncomfortable in social situations. He frequently works 80 + hour weeks and his performance reviews are glowing, although these have been completed by the client despite the clear conflict of interest. He evinces no obvious red flags, but his family background and personal history raise questions.

  Final Threat Assessment: Warrants further investigation.

  Brogan noted the two details that stood out to him in the summary: first, that Embry had legally changed his name and second, the possibility that he’d been abused by his parents.

  With those points in mind, Brogan looked over the other documents in the Security Division file, which included a document from the DOJ verifying Embry’s lack of a criminal record, his college application and transcript, a copy of his credit check, and the forms he’d submitted to the State of Oregon to change his name.

  He looked at the last one first, because it seemed the most interesting. Since Embry was unmarried, Brogan had figured that he’d changed his name because he hadn’t liked his first name, but Embry’d gone a step further—where the form asked for Embry’s old name, he’d written Adam Embry Evans.

  He’d also had to fill out a form that explained why he wanted the change, which was meant to prevent people from changing their names to evade debts or legal proceedings. Embry had written: my father was abusive. I don’t want his name anymore.

  “Bullshit,” Brogan said aloud in his truck. There’d been no hint of conflict in Embry’s telling of the orchid story. No anger or bitterness in his voice, just profound, uncomplicated grief. Assuming, of course, that the orchid story was true. He read the rest of the documents carefully, hoping for more, but there was nothing else of interest.

  Brogan moved on to Embry’s transcript.

  According to the college’s records, Embry had graduated from high school two years early with twelve Advanced Placement credits and a 4.0 GPA. He’d scored a 35 on his ACTs, which Brogan looked up and then gaped at, because that put him in the top 99th percentile in the nation. By the time he turned twenty-one, Embry had earned an associate’s degree from a local community college in Applied Sciences and a one-year certificate in a Computer Specialist program—taken concurrently, the dirty overachiever—from the same school. Brogan wasn’t entirely sure what Applied Sciences were, but judging from his transcripts, Embry’d been trained in computers, accounting, business law and research methods. Which sounded boring, but what it all came down to was information. Embry knew how to find it and how to manage it.

  As Vindler had said, one should never underestimate the power of a man who knew how to work with information.

  Brogan read through Embry’s college application next, laughing when he saw that Embry had responded to the college’s essay prompt with a paper entitled Why the Evaluation of University Applicants via Essay Prompts is Inherently Flawed.

  Embry spoke fluent French, which wasn’t news, as well as Spanish, which was.

  “Twenty-three fucking years old,” Brogan said, feeling a little inadequate. A bit ashamed, too, because there was nothing here to justify the way Brogan had nosed in where he had no right.

  But then he paused. And did some math.

  Embry had graduated from high school in 2009, when he was sixteen. He graduated from a two-year program in 2014, when he was twenty-one, which suggested that he’d gotten in when he was nineteen, in 2012.

  So what had he been doing between the summer of 2009 and the fall of 2012, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen? Brogan couldn’t see Embry sacking out on the couch playing video games the whole time. He was too ambitious.

  Also strange: a kid as smart as Embry, with his scores and grades and work ethic, could’ve gone Ivy League, easy. So how had he ended up getting an associate’s degree at a community college? Not that it wasn’t an accomplishment—hell, it was more than Brogan had. But Embry should’ve been studying astro-something at MIT or law at Yale. Instead, he’d gotten a certification in computer skills so he could get a job as an assistant.

  Brogan went back through the rest of the documentation again, looking for other sources of information from that missing three-year period between 2009 and 2012.

  Nothing.

  Actually, there was nothing from before 2012 at all.

  That wasn’t hugely suspicious. There was very little to be found on a law-abiding teenager from a law-abiding household—they didn’t generate a lot of paperwork. Brogan was certain that the missing years in Embry’s file and his presence at Touring were connected, though. Those three missing years were the core of this, and whatever happened had prompted Embry to distance himself so thoroughly as to permanently change his own name before reappearing in the world.

  The bigger question was how Brogan could find out what happened during that time. He wasn’t a hacker and Embry was smart enough to keep his secrets well hidden.

  Brogan’s lunch break was over, and he hadn’t gotten through half his sandwich. He closed the laptop and pocketed the flash drive with Embry’s file. He wasn’t done yet.

  * * *

  He was home by three and spent the next couple hours on the couch with his browser.

  He started with Google. He didn’t get a single precise hit for Adam Embry Evans, but he got millions of results for Adam Embry, Embry Evans and Adam Evans, mostly in the form of social media accounts, sex offender warnings, crime reports, and lottery winner stories. That was less than helpful, since he had no way of knowing if any of those Adam Evanses were his Embry without investigating each one of them. With that many hits, it would take years.

  Uninspired, Brogan clicked on the images tab on the results page and started scrolling through pictures. Twenty minutes later, he found himself squinting at a blog where a woman had posted a picture of her high school physics club, listing her classmates by first name only. Brogan enlarged the picture, and there was Embry, baby-faced and zitty and adorably awkward, standing in a small group of similarly adolescently challenged individuals, their bodies hunched around a homemade rocket. What physics had to do with rockets was beyond Brogan—his science background stopped with a C in earth studies and the damaged remnants of a papier-mache volcano.


  Brogan went back up and added physics to the search bar next to Embry’s old name and finally struck gold. The very first hit was a short article in the Harvard physics department’s newsletter talking about the research being done by undergraduates in the program working on their concentration in condensed matter. An Adam E. Evans had written a research paper that won a department award in 2010, which put that paper near the beginning of the missing years.

  It had to be his Embry. There couldn’t be that many college-aged kids with that name smart enough to write shit like that at a place like Harvard.

  Which meant Embry hadn’t vanished after he graduated from high school after all. He’d gone to Boston, where, as Brogan had expected, he’d attended an Ivy League institution, getting at least partway through a damn physics degree. Brogan chewed on his lip, thinking.

  He’d always known he was playing out of his league with Embry, but he’d never felt it more concretely than right now. Beautiful and wicked smart and hardworking.

  “Shame about the personality and the morals,” Brogan said, and Gizmo lifted his head questioningly from where he was rooting through the garbage.

  Brogan lounged on the sofa for several more minutes as he contemplated doing something that could get him into actual trouble. He told himself all the reasons not to—if Embry finds out, he’ll kill me, this isn’t likely to give me anything helpful anyway, and there’s probably a law or something against it—and then did it anyway. He picked up the phone.

  “Hello, my name is Frank Thomas, and I work in HR at a company in Oregon,” he said to the woman who answered in the Harvard registrar’s office. “I’m trying to get confirmation of graduation and transcripts for a potential hire. How do I go about that?”

  The woman sounded bored as she said, “You need a signed release of information from the person in question and fax it to our office. We require three business days to get the required documents together.”