Джозеф Файндер - Company Man

“Cassie — Jesus, I’m sorry.” He didn’t even try to pretend he was looking for an Advil or something. “I feel like such a shit. I didn’t mean to snoop. I mean, I was snooping, but I shouldn’t have—”

“Would you snoop around to find out whether it’s raining? It’s pretty much staring you in the face. I mean, when you meet a person who was valedictorian of her high school, eight hundreds on her SATs, got into every college she applied to, and she’s basically doing fuck-all in the world, well, you’ve got to wonder. How come she isn’t pulling down six figures at Corning or working on signal-transduction pathways at Albert Einstein College of Medicine?”

“Listen, Cassie...”

Cassie made a circular gesture at her temple with her forefinger, the sign for crazy. “You just got to assume that this girl is a few clowns short of a circus.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“Would you feel better if I put on a white coat and talked about catecholamine levels in the medial forebrain of the hypothalamus? Put my science education to work? Is that less offensive? It isn’t any more informative.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“Crazy is as crazy does,” Cassie said in a cornpone Forrest Gump voice.

“Come on, Cassie.”

“Let’s go downstairs.”

Sitting together on the nubby brown couch in the living room, Cassie kept talking. “Full scholarship to Carnegie Mellon. I wanted to go to MIT, but my stepdad didn’t want to spend a red cent on me, and even with financial aid it was going to be a stretch. Freshman year was tough. Not the course work so much as the classmates. My sorority house burns down freshman year, and half the girls are killed. Blew me away. I mean, I came back here and didn’t want to leave my room. Never went back to college.”

“You were traumatized.”

“I also got addicted to cocaine and Valium, you name it. I was self-medicating, of course. Took me a few years before I figured out I had ‘bipolar tendencies.’ Was hospitalized for six months with depression. But the meds they put me on worked pretty well.”

“Better living through chemistry, I guess.”

“Yeah. By then, of course, I’d wandered off the Path.”

“The Path? That some religious thing?”

“The Path, Nick. The Path. You went to Michigan State, studied business, got a job at the Vatican of Office Furniture, and you were pretty much set so long as you kept working hard and kept your nose clean and didn’t piss too many people off.”

“I get it. And you...?”

“I got off the Path. Or I lost my way. Maybe I was in the woods and a big gust of wind came and blew leaves all over the Path and I just headed off in the wrong direction. Maybe birds ate the damn bread-crumb trail. I’m not saying my life lacks a purpose. It’s just that maybe the purpose is to provide a cautionary tale for everyone else.”

“I don’t think the world is that unforgiving,” Nick said.

“People like you never do,” Cassie said.

“It’s never too late.”

Cassie stepped over to him, pressed herself against his chest. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” she murmured.

Noyce called Audrey into his office and asked her to sit down.

“I got a call from the security director at Stratton,” he said.

“He can’t have been happy.”

“He was ripshit, Audrey. About both him and Conover.”

“I can’t speak for Roy, but I know my team was as careful as can be. We didn’t trash the place.”

“I don’t think Bugbee was as careful.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. Mine was a consent search. Roy had a warrant.”

“And Roy is Roy. Listen.” He leaned forward, rested his elbows on a bare patch of desk, rested his chin on his hands. “Rinaldi hit me with something we have to take seriously.”

“They’re threatening us with legal action,” Audrey said, half-kidding.

“He knows about Leon.”

“About Leon.”

“I’m surprised, frankly, it took him this long. But he obviously did some looking into you, and Leon’s name came up.”

“You knew Leon was laid off from Stratton. I didn’t keep that from you.”

“Of course not. But I didn’t really weigh that as carefully as I should have. It didn’t occur to me, frankly.”

“Everyone in this town’s got someone in their family who’s been laid off by Stratton.”

“Just about.”

“You start taking everyone off this case who has any connection to Stratton, and pretty soon there’d be no one left. I mean lab techs and crime scene—”

“This is always something we have to be hypersensitive about.”

“Jack, I was assigned to this case randomly. My name came up on the board. I didn’t request it.”

“I know.”

“And when I started it, there was no connection to the Stratton Corporation.”

“Granted, but—”

“Let me finish. Leon’s situation has nothing to do with this. I’m following the leads here. I’m not on any witch hunt. You know that.”

“ I know it, Aud. Of course I know that. But if and when this comes to trial, I don’t want anything fucking it up. If I go to the prosecutor, he’s going to say he doesn’t want you involved — this has to be clean and pristine. And he’ll be right. Any DA is going to worry that this’ll look like payback on your part.”

She sat up straight in the uncomfortable chair, looked at her boss directly. “Are you taking me off the case?”

He sighed. “I’m not taking you off the case. That’s not it. I mean, maybe I should. The Stratton security guy is demanding it. But the fact is, you’re one of our best.”

“That’s not true, and you know it. My clearance rate is pretty darned mediocre.”

He laughed. “Your modesty is refreshing. I wish everyone around here had some of that. No, your clearance rate could be higher, but that’s because you’re still getting your chops. You tend to use a microscope when binoculars are what you want.”

“Pardon me?”

“You do waste time, sometimes, looking superclose at evidence that doesn’t lead anywhere. Going up blind alleys, barking up the wrong trees, all that. I think that gets better with experience. The more cases you do, the more developed your instinct gets. You learn what’s worth following up and what isn’t.”

She nodded.

“You know I’m your biggest fan.”

“I know it,” she said, feeling a surge of affection toward the man that was almost love. Maybe it was love.

“I pushed you to apply for the job, and I pushed you through. You know how many hoops you had to jump through.”

An abashed smile. She remembered how many interviews she’d had to do. Just when she thought she’d clinched it, someone else asked to interview her. Noyce had steered it all the way. “The race thing,” she said.

“The woman thing. That was really it. But look, a lot of people are waiting for you to fail.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“I do, and believe me, I know. A good number of people around here are waiting for you to trip and fall flat on your face. And I don’t want that to happen.”

“I don’t either.”

“Go back to the Leon issue for a second. Whether you say it’s an issue or not. We’re all susceptible to being driven by unconscious biases. Protective instincts. I know you, and you have a lot of love in your heart, and you hate seeing what your husband’s going through. You hate seeing him hurt in any way.” Audrey started to object, but Noyce said, “Hear me out. My turn, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You’ve got a forest of facts, of evidence and clues. You’ve got to find a path through that forest. I mean, the stuff about the hydroseed — that’s damned good police work.”