Termination Man: a novel (42 page)

TP Automotive didn't want to waste any time
in
firing the two embezzlers on the loading dock. I emailed the photos to Beth Fisk when I returned to the office, shortly before lunchtime. King and O’Rourke found themselves in
the
cl
utch
es of corporate justice by mid-afternoon.

The company sequestered O’Rourke prior to summoning Nick. Beth told O’Rourke that his name had come up for a random drug test. If O’Rourke was worried about a drug test, he didn’t show it. Like Nick King, apparently he was clean in that respect, at least. He had no idea
of
what was actually waiting for him.

Nick King was summoned shortly after that, and Bernie had decided to open with a full frontal assault. “Nick, you’re here today because the company has decided to terminate your employment. It has come to our attention that you’ve been stealing company assets.”

“Bullshit,” Nick said. The poker face. He leaned back nonchalantly in his chair. A man like Nick King had spent a lifetime in confrontations like this. He was used to telling authority figures to go fuck themselves. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then maybe you’ll understand this,” Beth said. She opened a folder that contained screenshots from the AS/400, copies of the relevant bills of lading, and the photos I had taken in Nick’s garage.

I had taken around twenty photos at Nick’s ramshackle house. There were photos of the stolen goods from every possible angle, and they left no margin for doubt regarding Nick’s guilt. The photos of the joint in the kitchen ashtray were also thrown in for good measure.

Nick was initially dumfounded by the evidence spread out before him. Per the account that was later relayed to me, the manifestation of a sinking feeling spread across his face. It was the resignation of a man who had been caught red-handed.

But that was quickly replaced by what might be called the false bravado of righteous indignation.

“You guys have been in my house,” he said. “That’s fucking illegal!”

“Maybe,” Bernie said, unruffled. “
And maybe not. Y
ou’re going to have a hard time proving that, when you consider your position, and how careless you’ve been. Maybe these photos were forwarded to us by a concerned third party. Perhaps one of your girlfriends, Nick. A woman you did wrong—a woman who wouldn’t mind sticking it to you. Or maybe one of your buddies, who noticed the stolen items when he was visiting your house, drinking and getting high. Maybe that friend isn’t such a friend after all.
Maybe he’s secretly jealous of you, making all that under the table money illegally at your employer’s expense.

“Here's what it comes down to Nick: we've got you from three different
directions
. First of all, there are the AS/400 screenshots that don't match the bills of lading. Then there are the photos that establish the existence of stolen company property in your personal residence.”

Bernie paused, as he prepared to deliver his
coup de
grace.

“What's the third direction?” Nick asked. His tough guy façade was fading fast.
How many Nicks had I seen crumble like this over the course of my career?
At least a dozen, I would say. That's the problem with blue-collar crooks. They’re all bluster. They come up with half-baked schemes like this; and then they fail to fully consider all of the relevant angles. Guys like Nick King should leave white-collar crime to people with accounting degrees and MBAs.

“Well,” Bernie began. “Your accomplice has already confessed that the two of you have been running a theft operation. With the evidence that we already have, combined with O'Rourke's confession, we have more than enough to prosecute you.”

Nick pounded his fist once on the tabletop in front of him. “Son of a bitch! I'll kill that fucking O’Rourke!”

Nick King apparently didn't know it, but he had just fallen victim to one of the oldest tricks in the book:
the prisoner's dilemma
.
What should a criminal do when told that his accomplice has already ratted him out? Should he stick to his denials? Or should he confess himself, and try to cut the best deal that he possibly can?

The prisoner’s dilemma is standard fare in a subfield of economics called
game theory
. In case you didn't take that class, the prisoner’s dilemma is a stratagem that forces the guilty to calculate the probability that their accomplices are loyal. The prisoner’s dilemma is designed to extract a full confession. And confess is what most people do when maneuvered into such a pickle.

“We have no desire to prosecute you, Nick,” Bernie said. “We are trying to run a company here. The last thing we want to do is spend a lot of time with law enforcement agents and prosecutors. But if you try to deny this, Nick, you will leave us no choice. We have irrefutable evidence that you've stolen from us. We have O’Rourke’s confession, and your own confession in so many words.”

“I ain’t admitting nothin’!” Nick shouted.

Bernie gave Nick a pained expression. “Come on, Nick. You’re a smart guy. You can read the writing on the wall here. This only ends one way. The only question is:
How bad do you want to make it on yourself?
”

“So what do you guys want?” Nick’s eyes were pleading now. I know what he was thinking: he was thinking about the inside of a jail cell. That is a possibility that every guilty man dreads to contemplate. He was completely in TP Automotive’s hands now. He would have gladly signed away his life to the company if Bernie had demanded it.

Bernie produced a contract from the folder that he had carried into the meeting. He slid the contract across the table to Nick, along with a fountain pen.

“We want you to acknowledge your misconduct––your crimes––in writing. And we want you to furthermore acknowledge in writing that you will take no actions against TP Automotive that could result in any form of litigation. Don't worry: You don't have to actually write any of that. It’s all written down in this document. All you have to do is sign. And in return, TP Automotive will suspend our current plans to file criminal charges against you.”

Nick snatched up the proffered contract. After making a brief attempt to read it line-by-line, he quickly gave up on deciphering the legalese, and skimmed through it. Then he signed his name, along with the date.

“Very good, Nick,” Bernie said. “A member of our security team will see you out now.”

Fifteen minutes later, Beth and Bernie went through a similar routine with Michael O’Rourke. The song and dance was basically the same, only now they could truthfully say that their perp’s accomplice had confessed.

After the firings were complete, Beth and Bernie called me into a meeting room to thank me for a job well done. It was nearly five o’clock. The operation against King and O’Rourke had been completed with remarkable speed—even for the Termination Man. Less than forty-eight hours had passed since I had begun my investigation on the loading dock the previous Sunday.

“I’ve got to hand it to you,” Beth said. “I had some real doubts about—the methods employed for this—but I can’t argue with the results.”

Bernie smiled as he examined the signed termination contracts.

“That’s the end of those two crooks,” he said.

But that prediction turned out to be very wrong.

For the first time since the start of my undercover work at UP&S, I actually stayed late because of my “duties” as a member of the purchasing department. I did it to help Lucy, really. Since Alan had been gone, her workload had increased; and I was by no means pulling the full weight of a real purchasing agent.

What had to be done this particular night was some simple data entry that would feed the inventory report that Shawn Myers so despised. I remained until shortly after six to help Lucy. It was the least I owed her, given everything that had happened, and everything that would happen. We were going to engineer Lucy’s departure from the company within a matter of days.

When I finished up and walked out into the darkened parking lot, I immediately noticed the woman standing beside my Camry, waiting for me. As soon as I got within shouting distance she hailed me.

“Craig Parker?” she said. “It’s Tina Shields. I met you at Applebee’s last week.”

The parallel between this encounter and my first meeting with Donna did not escape me. I determined that I should now beware of women waiting for me in the UP&S parking lot.

The last time I had seen Tina Shields she had been drunk. At the end of the evening, she had acted anything but dignified, passing out in my arms as I guided her into a motel room. But now her demeanor was almost formal, and more than a little apologetic.

“I’m sorry about the way I acted,” she said. “And for putting you through so much trouble. It's the drinking, you see. I—”

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “And it was no trouble at all.”

I paused, waiting for her to go on. She did not seem to know how or where to begin.

“But what can I do for you this evening?” I asked at length.

“Donna said that you were helping her with her Shawn problem. And she said that you know how to handle a man like him.”

“Donna gives me far too much credit.”

“Well, there’s more to it than what you know about. This is what I was trying to tell you the other night—when I passed out. Here: It might be easier for you to understand if you see it written down.”

She removed a yellowed newspaper clipping from her pocket and handed it to me. I could see that it was
from
The Columbus Dispatch
,
dated November 17, 1996. The clipping
contained
an article about the
murder of two Ohio State coeds named Carla Marsh and Jill Johnson.

“This is unfortunate,” I said. “Tragic for these girls and their families. But this newspaper clipping is more than 15 years old. I don't understand––wait a minute. Were these young women friends of yours?”

“Sort of. No, not really what you would call friends––more what you would call acquaintances. I had been in a class with one of them, and I saw them around campus a lot.”

“I don’t understand. Why are you showing me this?”

“I saw these women in a bar near campus the night they were killed. I saw them talking to a young man, a young man who appeared to be making sexual advances at them. And not in a nice way. He looked at them––looked at them like he wanted to kill them. I can still remember that expression on his face. You see, it was like a wolf's expression. It wasn't like his feelings were hurt. It was like he had already decided to kill them.”

“And did you share this with the Columbus Police Department?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I didn't even know about the murders until several months later, after Shawn had raped me, and I had been through the ordeal of seeing him go free. I ran into a mutual acquaintance one day, and she asked me if I'd heard about Jill Johnson and Carla Marsh. And of course I said no; I was bad about reading the newspaper in those days, and keeping up with what was going on around me. I was trapped in my own little world. And this was before the Internet really existed, and long before you could get news on your cell phone. But I was shocked. Shocked that Jill and Carla had had a confrontation with that man and turned up dead the very same night.”

“You still could have gone to the police, even if a few months had passed since the murder,” I said. “They still could have benefited from your information. Even if you would have been unable to identify the young man you saw in the bar arguing with them, you might have given them a lead that they could have followed up on.”

I scanned through the article. It was obviously written shortly after the young women's bodies had been discovered. “Were these murders ever solved?” I asked. I still didn't grasp why Tina was showing me this. I figured that she was trying to make a point about how traumatic that year of her life had been. Or maybe she was trying to convince me that I should do everything I could to help Donna and her daughter, because bad things often happen to women. But I didn’t see any relationship between the two.

“Did you tell anyone about what you saw?” I pressed.

She stepped closer to me. I could smell her perfume. She began to breath heavily, and her exhalations caused the edge of the clipping to flutter in my hands.

“You haven’t put it together—have you, Craig? The man I saw in the bar that night, talking to Carla Marsh and Jill Johnson, was Shawn Myers.”

My God
, I thought. How obtuse
was
I? I allowed myself a moment to take in the scope of this. If what this woman said was true, then my situation here at UP&S was far more dangerous than I had imagined up until now.

I had known all along that Shawn Myers was a bully—and possibly an opportunistic rapist. This was all disturbing enough. But Shawn seemed to be a man full of dark surprises. Now I was being told that he might also be a double murderer.

If
Tina Shields’s information could be trusted. The clipping proved that two women had been killed in Columbus fifteen years ago. So far as I knew, Tina’s recollections were the only factor that connected Shawn to the killings; and Tina had admitted to a drinking problem. I had observed her drinking problem with my own eyes.