Termination Man: a novel (51 page)

No doubt Bruner had also seen the news of Tina Shields’s death. Being tied into the state police network, Bruner would have been made aware of it even before I was. I could accomplish nothing by rehashing my suspicions with him. He could easily counter (and quite plausibly so) that Tina Shields was leading the sort of lifestyle that made her bound to turn up dead sooner or later. The simplest explanation would be that Tina had gone home from a bar with the wrong guy, or that she had crossed the wrong person in that shadowy underworld of addiction that she had inhabited. She had lived on the fringes of the law, and she had died there. No intervention from any TP Automotive executives required. 

I looked at the heap of papers in my in-box: orders and requisitions for all sorts of items for the plant. TP Automotive had now eliminated the entire purchasing department of UP&S except for me—and I was a fake. I was handling enough of it to maintain appearances, but not nearly as much as Lucy and Alan had been doing together. The result was that work was piling up. The company’s management had shifted some of the purchasing duties to the accounting department as a temporary makeshift measure. Lucy’s suicide had now become public knowledge; and the accounting staff had made a collective expression of sympathy in the wake of her death. They had also expressed a willingness to cover the overflow of purchasing work. This was starting to wear thin on them already, though. I knew it was only a matter of time until the grumbling began over there; and I hoped that none of them would become targets of TP Automotive’s managers as a result.

I had to get out of UP&S. This place was poison. I should have known that from the start; I should have never come here.
But how could I have possibly foreseen any of this?

For now, though, I had a more pressing matter to take care of: I had to see Donna. She would find out about Tina; she would connect the dots; and I didn't want her to face that process alone.

I stood up from my desk and began to walk toward the main entrance. As I walked by, Mary Lou Hicks looked up from her desk. She was the manager of the accounting department.

“Another off-site appointment?” she asked. For a relatively new employee with a backlogged workload, Craig Parker was spending a lot of time away from the office. This had not gone unnoticed—especially by members of the department that was now shouldering most of the burden of that workload.

“I’ve got a quick doctor’s appointment,” I said. I affected the appropriate amounts of humility and subservience—like any staff-level employee would when questioned by a manager, even a manager of another department.

“Well, that’s alright,” she said. The fact that I hadn’t asked for her approval was immaterial. “We’ve got things handled for you.”

There wasn't much subtlety in that remark; and no one could have missed the underlying sarcasm. Another member of Mary Lou’s staff glanced up from her computer screen and gave me a pointed stare. In a matter of days, the redistribution of work had made me
persona non grata
among the accounting department. They didn't actually blame
me
, of course—but they blamed Craig Parker, the man whom I was pretending to be.

She expected me to make a show of obeisance in response to the thinly veiled reprimand. A real employee in Craig Parker’s position would have dutifully groveled. But Craig
Walker
had bigger fish to fry.

“Thanks, Mary Lou, I really appreciate it,” I said. Then I left before the flustered Mary Lou Hicks could respond, the stares of her and her staff no doubt boring into my back on my way out.

From our previous discussions, I knew
the location of
Donna
’s mid-morning
cleaning job. It was a little company on the northern outskirts of Columbus—a minor accountancy office that turned out to be (as accountancy offices go) extremely laid back. 

The receptionist at the front desk allowed me to enter the building when I told her that I was a friend of Donna Chalmers, and that my business constituted an emergency. The receptionist—a graying, fiftyish woman—looked at my face and apparently decided to trust me. She issued me a temporary badge and directed me to the area where Donna was cleaning.

“You’ll find her back there,” the receptionist said, indicating a hallway behind the large open office where about two dozen accountants were busy crunching numbers.

The receptionist had broken at least two or three major rules of corporate security protocol. In a Fortune 500 corporation, she would have been fired. I was an unvetted and unknown visitor; and she had just allowed me to pass into the company’s inner sanctum without an escort. I could have been anyone: Perhaps a jealous ex-boyfriend who was determined to gun Donna down while she was on the job.
Think that sort of thing doesn’t happen?
It happens all the time. It happened at a company in Michigan where I had done some consulting work the previous year. A female employee’s estranged husband walked into the office with a bouquet of flowers. No one even knew that the couple had been having marital problems. As soon as the man made it to his wife’s cubicle, he removed a pistol from his jacket, and then shot her twice in the chest.

The workplace shooter isn’t always the oddball loner who shaves his head and spends his evenings surfing neo-Nazi websites. Faced with sufficient pressure—a divorce, financial problems, clinical depression—almost anyone can snap.  This is one reason—in addition to fears of corporate espionage—that makes workplaces so stringent about visitor access nowadays. They don’t want the blood and the liability on their hands.

But I was thankful that in this workplace, at least, visitor access rules still reflected the laxity of less complicated times. I walked briskly past the accountants’ desks into the hallway where I had been told that I would find Donna.

I found her vacuuming the carpet in the rear hallway. When she noticed me, her face registered surprise at seeing me there. She immediately turned off the vacuum cleaner.

“What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

I told her: “Tina Shields is dead. Murdered.”

Even without further details, Donna was able to arrive at the question that had already occurred to me.

“Did Shawn Myers kill her?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

Donna staggered sideways, leaning against the nearest wall.

“Take me home,” she said. “I can’t drive.”

I did as she asked. On the way to her house, I filled Donna in on the rest of the story—things that I had not revealed to her until now: about the murders that had taken place in Columbus in 1996. About a very young and a very drunk Tina Shields, who had watched a man whom she believed to be Shawn Myers, arguing with the soon-to-be murdered women.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell me until now?”

“I didn’t believe her,” I said. “There is very little hard evidence to corroborate Tina Shields’s story. Is Shawn Myers a bully? A sexual bully? Sure he is. But we don’t know that he’s a murderer.”

“I feel that he is,” she said. “I feel it with all of my heart.”

“That isn’t enough to get him arrested—much less convicted.”

“Why don’t you go to the Columbus police? Tell them about Shawn’s connection to the old murders? Tell them what you know?”

“Because I can’t prove it,” I said. “The Columbus police don’t even have a record of Tina’s rape in 1997. And she didn’t talk to them about seeing Shawn in the bar with those girls who were murdered. With her dead, there is no way to even establish her testimony. Whatever she might have known about Shawn, it all died with her.”

“It all adds up,” Donna said. “Shawn must have figured out that Tina had connected him with the murders in Columbus.”

When we arrived home, Donna posed the next obvious question, one that was personal and immediate.

“What if we’re right? What if he decides that he wants Alyssa out of the way, too?”

“Then I’ll stop him. I won’t let him do it.”

And I knew, in that moment, that I was sitting on the fence no longer—I would do whatever might be required to defend this woman and her child. I would do whatever was necessary to take down Shawn Myers.

But getting off the fence was comparatively easy. The devil, as many philosophers have noted, is most often in the details.

“How are you going to do that, Craig? How are you going to prevent him from harming her, if that’s what he decides to do?”

She didn’t add that I hadn’t prevented Shawn from killing Tina Shields, assuming that he did. Nor had anyone prevented Shawn from killing the girls in Columbus, and getting away with it for more than fifteen years.

“We’ll take it one day at a time,” I said. “I know that he’s in a quarterly meeting all day today. And anyway, he wouldn’t attempt to harm Alyssa so soon after—after Tina.”

“There’s more, Craig, isn’t there?”

I paused. I had known that the impending conversation was inevitable, hadn’t I?

“What are you talking about?”

“Craig. You might think that I’m just this woman who runs a cleaning company. But I’m smarter than you might give me credit for. I can put two and two together, you know. I’ve sensed from the beginning that you aren’t exactly who you seem to be—who you
pretend
to be. If you’re just another UP&S employee, then you wouldn’t have put your hands on Shawn Myers. No one who needed his job would do that—even to protect a teenaged girl.”

I sighed, wondering how much of the truth she had already guessed for herself. “You’re right, Donna. There is more. But that ‘more’ doesn’t have any direct bearing on this problem that you and Alyssa have with Shawn.”

“So you’re saying that you’re going to keep it a secret.”

“I’m saying that I can’t tell you everything right now.”

“Fine,” she said. She turned away from me. “Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate your helping us. But it seems that everything with you is on a need-to-know basis. It makes me wonder what’s coming next.”

“Donna, I promise you that if I learn about anything that could be a threat to you or Alyssa, I’ll let you know immediately. And I’ll do whatever it takes to protect you both.” 

I decided that it was time for me to go. As an undercover business consultant, I was not accountable to UP&S managers as a real employee would be. Nevertheless, my prolonged absence in the middle of a workday would not go unnoticed. And I could count on Mary Lou Hicks to make trouble for me, after that semi-flippant response I had given her.

I told Donna that I needed to go, that I would call her later—after I’d had time to think. I needed to think about the next steps—needed to figure out how I was going to ensnare Shawn Myers without the help of the police.

I was the Termination Man, after all. But thus far, the Termination Man had only displayed a talent for getting people fired from their jobs. Protecting a young girl and her mother from a murderer was something else entirely.

I brushed past Donna on my way out of the room, and her hand caught mine. She brought her lips up to my mouth, and before I fully realized it, our bodies were entwined. Before this moment I had barely even shaken this woman’s hand.

There was too much tension in the room. The air in Donna’s living room seemed to hum with static electricity. It was a combination of everything that had been building—our shared loathing of Shawn Myers, our shared shock at the murder of Tina Shields. Her fear that Shawn would make an attempt on the life of her daughter. My determination that any such attempt would not succeed. The secrets about myself that I had not yet told her.

Not exactly the most auspicious combination of feelings for beginning a relationship between a man and a woman. But I know all too well that relationships between men and women have begun on far less justifiable grounds. Donna and I had become allies; we were drawn to each other by what we loathed and feared. It seemed only natural that we should become lovers as well.

“What about..?”

“She won’t be home for hours,” Donna said, taking my hand and leading me into her bedroom.

I would later reflect that this hour of lovemaking was an unearned reward; and it would be paid for in pain that was yet to come.

I had committed myself to protecting Alyssa Chalmers. I had told her mother that I would. And I was now romantically involved with Donna.

But Alyssa Chalmers was the person who was most at risk.

The contest between Shawn Myers and Alyssa could not have been a more uneven match: A man in his mid-thirties, who had not only money but a position of power. A man who had probably already killed three people without suffering any consequences. Against a fifteen year-old girl who was probably more timid and less experienced than most.

I despised Shawn Myers more than ever. But despising Shawn was one thing, taking concrete actions against him was another.

My next step, then, was to make a realistic assessment of my options. It occurred to me that I needed to know more about Shawn Myers. My instincts would allow me to anticipate some of his moves; but my instincts had already failed on several occasions. I needed to work against Shawn more methodically, using some of the methods of the Termination Man.