Lisa Gardner - Touch & Go

They’d covered the basics by phone beforehand. Justin Denbe and his family were missing—Lopez had already been aware of the situation, no doubt called by either Denbe Construction or the Boston cops, probably both, during the initial search phase. Lopez reported last seeing Justin at a 3:00 P.M. meeting on Friday afternoon in the corporate office. Hadn’t spoken or met with him since. As for the family, the house, Lopez hadn’t seen them or visited Justin’s Boston town house in months. Too busy on a job down south.

Tessa wasn’t having this conversation because she thought Chris Lopez could lead her to the Denbe family. She was interviewing Chris Lopez as part of the next step of the missing persons’ process—developing a victimology report. Who was Justin Denbe? And who were the winners and the losers when a man like him vanished into thin air?

“You know construction?” Lopez asked her now.

She shook her head, taking out her phone and holding it up for inspection. When he grudgingly nodded permission, she tapped the recording app and set the phone on the table between them.

“Denbe Construction is a major player. We bid on projects that cost at least tens of millions and often hundreds of millions. Think prison construction, senior care facilities, military barracks, et cetera. Big money, significant timeline, make-it-or-break-it kind of risk.”

Tessa decided to start with the basics. She got out her notebook, turned it horizontally and presented it to Lopez. Here was a trick she’d never learned at the police academy, but had come up day one in corporate security school.

“Org chart,” she asked. “Major players.”

Lopez rolled his eyes but took the paper, her offered pen and drew the first box on the top of the page. Justin Denbe, CEO. Made sense to her. Beneath Denbe came three boxes. CFO Ruth Chan; COC Chris Lopez; and COO Anita Bennett. Tessa recognized Bennett’s name, as she’d been the one to contact Tessa’s boss bright and early this morning. Now, beneath the chief of operations’s name, Lopez drew two more, smaller boxes: MIS Tom Wilkins and Office Admin Letitia Lee.

“COC stands for chief of construction,” Lopez explained, tapping the box bearing his name. “Anita Bennett and I act almost as cochiefs of operations. She handles business affairs, while I manage the building gigs. So admin reports to her, while the tradesmen report to me.”

Lopez didn’t draw any more boxes. He pushed the org chart back and Tessa frowned.

“That’s a pretty small corporate structure for a hundred-million-dollar company,” she observed.

He shrugged. “First rule of construction: It’s all about the subs. Especially these major projects, no way you can provide all the boots on the ground, not to mention it’d be too expensive to maintain that kind of overhead in down cycles. We partner. Think of Denbe as being the head of a centipede. We develop the RFP—”

“RFP?”

“Request for proposal. How these big jobs start, especially if they’re government funded. The agency involved—”

“Agency involved?”

Lopez sighed. He leaned forward, placing his forearms on the tiny table while explaining: “Say we’re bidding on a hundred-million-dollar project to build new barracks for the navy. Obviously, that RFP is generated through military channels. Then there are hospitals, which can come through private or state channels. Or prisons, which might come through the Bureau of Prisons, depending on whether we’re talking a county, state or federal facility.”

“But it sounds like you mostly do government work?”

“True. There are firms out there who specialize in major hotel projects, conference centers, casinos, that sort of thing. The hospitality industry. In comparison, we’re the opposite end of the spectrum—the institutional industry.” Lopez chuckled, pleased at his own irony.

“Why?”

“Government game is connections, and Justin has connections. That’s one of his strengths. The man knows how to work a room, and when you’re competing against a dozen other firms for an RFP worth hundreds of millions of dollars, personally knowing the senator on the appropriations committee, or having had the head of the Bureau of Prisons over to your house for dinner, isn’t a bad thing. Some firms even employ lobbyists. We attend some key conferences, get to know the major players and Justin will take it from there.”

“So you get to know the key people who are issuing RFPs for these major projects. In New England?”

“We build nationally.”

“Okay, national building projects. But these projects are for hundreds of millions of dollars, and must take, what, years to complete?”

“Just the on-site build will tie up a couple of years,” Lopez clarified. “But take a major prison project we just completed. Took us ten years, start to finish. Our client’s the government, right? And governments don’t move fast.”

“I get it. So, on the one hand, you’re landing projects in the hundreds of millions, but on the other hand, it’s taking you up to ten years to complete them. Big money, big risk, like you said. But Denbe’s a second-generation firm, right? Started by Justin’s father. Meaning you guys have longevity on your side.”

“We are not the new kids at the party,” Lopez agreed, “but nor are we resting on our laurels. When Justin took over after his father’s death, he became obsessed with growing the firm. Way he saw it, the industry was at a major turning point, where the big were gonna get bigger, but the small, smaller. He didn’t want to get smaller. Of course, the challenge in construction is how to grow a company without growing your overhead. We’re a boom-and-bust industry, right? We increase our staff, double our costs during the boom, and suddenly, we can’t survive the bust. Hence, Justin’s centipede model: Denbe Construction provides the leader for each segment of the build process—the best project manager, the expert tradesmen, et cetera, for guidance and troubleshooting. Basically, we provide the generals, our subs provide the troops. Meaning Denbe can staff lean, while still being a leader in the industry.”

“So does that make you the expert on the experts?” Tessa asked Lopez. “After all, if your guys are the best of the best, and you’re the overseer of the best of the best…”

Lopez rolled his eyes. “I don’t know if I’d say I’m that smart, or just that stubborn. Look, I can draw you all the pretty pictures you want, but basically large-scale construction means large-scale headaches. First, I gotta hand-hold dozens of subs to put together one coherent RFP. Except putting together a building proposal is a lot like a political campaign. All the subs put on their best faces and make their brightest promises, hoping you’ll pick them for your winning team. But maybe, when the HVAC subcontractor was campaigning that hard, he forgot to read the fine print on the spec sheet. Or he mistook the number seventy for, say, the number seven, so he underbid the project by quite a lot. Most subs will try to weasel out of such mistakes. My job, three years later when we’ve actually started building, is not to let him. On a good day, that can mean forcing a sub to eat an error worth tens of thousands of dollars—no big deal when the sub’s total contract is for fifty million. On a bad day, however, when the error runs into the tens of millions, meaning the sub is now losing money on a project I’m not letting him quit—a quote is a legally binding contract—that can mean threat of lawsuits or even death. Hey, it happens.”

Tessa was impressed. “So you’re the company bad cop. Does that make Justin the good cop?”

“Pretty close. Justin is strategic. When a sub sends us twenty sets of boots on the ground, but the overall timeline of the project clearly demands forty, he sorts it out. When the electrical plan manages to violate four basic codes, he’ll get on the phone and hash it out. When an RFP gets tied up in a committee, he does some schmoozing and pulls it out. Justin’s not just smart, he’s useful smart. He not only gets things done, but makes you happy to have done it. Guys like me, we respect that.”