“I will.” Michelle pressed disconnect and replaced the phone in her purse. Despite Sam confirming that Bill and Tom were legit, she was still angry at the situation. She was also angry at them and didn’t give a shit if her behavior filtered back to Sam. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
This time Bill didn’t need to steer her toward their car, and he didn’t offer to carry her luggage. Her suitcase had wheels and she tugged it along behind her as she followed Tom and Bill into the parking garage.
BILL MAYER AND Tom Elliot were thorough and efficient. The minute they arrived at the Embassy Suites Hotel, Bill escorted her to the check-in desk. When the check-in clerk (Guest Facilitator, the clerk’s name badge read; not Check-In Clerk but a Guest Facilitator; Jesus what a bullshit job title) handed her passkey over, Tom said, “If you hand that to me, I can get your bags to your room.”
“I think I’d rather have a hotel employee do that,” Michelle said, turning to the Guest Facilitator. “Does the Embassy Suites provide that kind of service?”
“Yes, Ms. Dowling,” The Guest Facilitator said. The Guest Facilitator was a young African-American woman, attractive, shoulder length curly hair, dressed impeccably in a navy blue suit coat, a white shirt and dark slacks. She typed on the computer keyboard in front of her. “If you leave your bags here I can have the concierge deposit them in your room for you.”
“Thank you,” Michelle said.
When the concierge arrived a moment later, Michelle nodded at Bill and Tom. She still had her carry-on bag—which contained her business documents and personal effects—and her laptop. “Let’s get this over with,” she said.
Bill and Tom led her through the hotel’s convention area. The hotel was large, with the first level consisting of the check-in area, the lobby, a lounge and restaurant, an indoor swimming pool and gym, and an area for business meetings. There was a lower level that consisted of a banquet and convention area that was probably used for conferences. Michelle had attended dozens of conferences in the past half-dozen years, and most hotels of this size were similarly laid out. The meeting room they were heading to was on the first level, away from the convention area, which told Michelle that Corporate Financial had only reserved a few small conference rooms for the weekend.
They walked down a short, wide hallway past several empty conference rooms. When they got to the end, Bill opened the door and beckoned Michelle inside, holding the door open for her. Michelle entered the room and the people grouped around the conference table all looked up. Michelle paused for a moment, taking everything in—the overhead screen pulled down, the projector directing a beam toward the white screen, laptop computers on the table, papers out, a pot of coffee resting on a small cupboard on the right. The dozen or so people grouped around the table were unfamiliar to her and they were all dressed in business attire. She was just about to dismiss them from her mind and find a seat and get this over with, when one of the people caught her attention. She glanced at the person in question and tried to suppress her surprise which was coming as rapidly as her shock and growing fear.
Dennis Harrington. Sitting immobile and rigid in a chair at the far end of the table. Alma Smith was sitting beside him. She remembered meeting them in El Paso, and they hadn’t made much of an impression first time around. They’d seemed typical of the young urban professionals who were in their late twenties she saw every day, driven by the singular goal to climb up the corporate ladder. Both of them were reasonably pleasant looking, dressed professionally, and appeared well mannered and spoken, but now they both looked like…
Michelle banished the thought from her mind as she quickly crossed the room and sat down at the opposite end of them. She reacted accordingly when Bill introduced her to the group. “Everybody, this is Michelle Dowling. She’s new to the group; just started out of the Lancaster, PA branch.” She heard the group murmur hellos and then she was forced to pay attention as the chair of the meeting, a guy in his mid-thirties with thinning black hair and dark glasses, quickly brought her up to speed. She feigned interest in the stuff that didn’t interest her—what the hell did she care about the behavior patterns of the workforce population? Bill Mayer was sitting next to her, notepad out, and he was jotting down notes. Michelle followed his lead and took her own notepad out and wrote, meeting, April 14, 2008 and nothing else as she listened to the chair drone on, and she tried to keep the questions her conversation with Jay had elicited from overwhelming her and tried to avoid looking at Dennis Harrington, who was sitting at the other end of the room like a goddamned zombie, like he was fucking dead, and then she was trying to fight a sudden wave of vertigo and fatigue and she yawned, trying to fake her interest in the meeting, at least keep the illusion that she was interested in what was being said, and then she was trying to figure out where that strange tune was coming from, it kept circling in her mind, unceasing, and as the chair of the meeting started the Power Point presentation she suppressed a sigh and dreaded the long night that was no doubt looming in front of her.
THEY DIDN’T GET much sleep. Donald Beck finally dropped off in the easy chair sometime after two a.m. and as far as he knew, Jay O’Rourke never fell asleep. They’d sat in front of the television in the darkened living room talking with the TV set turned on at a low volume. Jay brought him up to speed on a lot of what happened at Building Products, told him about how he’d just sort of fell into doing the kind of work he ended up being hired for (“I sure never went to school for this kind of shit; there’s dolts out there who actually spend fifteen grand or more and get college degrees and certifications to learn this shit!”) and at one point they’d stopped talking and Jay had turned the volume of the TV up. CNN was on and a news story about a massacre at an insurance company in Irvine, California was unfolding. Donald had watched silently; the reporters were calling it the deadliest office shooting to ever happen, with twenty-four people confirmed dead and another dozen in critical condition. A thirty-four year old former employee of Free State Insurance in Irvine had walked into the executive suite of the building and killed twelve high-ranking executives including the CEO and CFO of the company, with two Glock semi-automatic pistols. Then he’d roamed the hallways with a Tec 9 semi-automatic assault rifle and gunned people down. “Shit,” Jay said. He groped in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. Donald had set an ashtray out for him earlier—no sense in having him dash outside every five minutes for a smoke. Jay lit the cigarette with shaky fingers and watched the coverage and Donald wondered if the massacre had anything to do with what was going on with Corporate Financial. He’d voiced this to Jay during a commercial break. “I don’t know,” Jay said. He took a sip of coffee. “I hate to think that it does, but…”
They’d watched the news coverage for the next forty-minutes, since it was a big story on all the major news outlets—it was being endlessly recycled on CNN, FOX, and MSNBC. In that forty-five minutes they learned that the killer, Victor Adams, had been despondent over the death of his nine-year old son due to cancer, and reports were coming in that he blamed Free State for his son’s death. Adams had been laid off in an outsourcing initiative that sent his job overseas, and when he was laid off his medical insurance was severed. “He couldn’t afford to cover himself and his family,” a male, middle-aged former co-worker said, fighting back tears. “And nobody would help him and Brent. The people at Free State didn’t care, either.”