The Consultant (8 page)

He chose to take the high road. “Tyler’s a good worker.”  

Patoff pressed a key on his laptop and the recording started up again. “Craig Horne’s a douche.” The frame froze on Tyler Lang’s expression of contempt.  

“We need him,” Craig said, unfazed.  

The consultant shrugged. “It’s your call. But we’re going to have to trim the workforce somewhere, and if you want to keep Mr. Lang on, we’re going to have to find somewhere else to cut.” He brightened. “I think what we need to do is conduct a work management study.”  

Craig had no idea what that was, but he wasn’t going to give the consultant the satisfaction of admitting as much. “Fine,” he said.  

Matthews and the other members of his management team nodded.  

Patoff smiled. “Very well, then.”  

Matthews stood. “Thank you for coming,” the CEO said formally. “And thank you for your input, Craig. We all appreciate it.”  

He was being dismissed, and it was like something out of a movie. Matthews had always been precise and punctual, well-organized to a fault, but this sort of theater, with the single chair facing the row of executives and the high-handed dismissal, was not like him at all. Patoff had staged this, and as Craig stood and walked out, hearing the consultant talk about Bob Tanner, the next person to be summoned, he wondered if the other division heads would be faced with choices similar to the one he had been urged to make.  

“Isn’t it going to be awkward working with him now?” Lupe wondered once he had told her what happened in the meeting. “I mean, you’re still his boss. Isn’t that going to make things…weird?”  

“A little,” Craig admitted. “It’ll definitely be harder for me to be objective now. But maybe it was hard for me to be objective before, since we were friends.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”  

“I just think it’s going to be tough for you two to work together. It’s going to be tough for
me
when I see him. I used to like Tyler. Now he seems like a two-faced rat.”  

“He doesn’t know that I know. That
we
know. We keep acting the way we always have, pretend like nothing’s changed, and things should be fine.”  

“Do you think you made the right decision?”  

“He’s a good programmer. And it’s my job to fight for my team.”  

Lupe smiled. “That’s what I like to hear.”  

“I told you,” he reassured her. “As long as I’m here, you’re here.”  

“I like to hear that even more. Oh, by the way, I need to take an early lunch today. Rebecca’s setting up a
Biggest Loser
thing and we all need to weigh in and chip in ten bucks. The person who loses the most weight gets the cash.”  

He looked at her. “Rebecca I can understand. But why are you doing this? You’re thin.”  

“I’m starting to get a belly. I want to nip it in the bud.”  

“You’re not going to win, you know. And those other women are going to hate you. Some of them need to
lose
as much as you
weigh
.”  

She laughed. “I know. But it’s an incentive. I need the pressure or I won’t do it.”  

“Take whatever time you need,” he told her.  

“Thanks, Boss.”  

Craig spent the rest of the morning doing very little work, mostly staring out the window and thinking about the changes coming to CompWare. Always before, he had viewed corporate downsizings and restructurings from the outside, but it was quite another thing to be in the middle of it, and even if he didn’t have such severe reservations about the consultants the company had hired, he was not sure he would agree that CompWare needed to undergo any drastic transformation. Yes, they’d had a few flops, but those weren’t
structural
problems. In fact, as several people had suggested, if they gradually shifted focus from business software to gaming, the financial situation would probably take care of itself. But Matthews and the other executives, panicked after the failure of the merger, had opted to focus not on their products but on their procedures and had seemingly put the company’s fate in the hands of a consulting firm known for gutting the workforces of their clients.  

There was no way this didn’t end with blood on the floor.  

It was an overcast day, and the grayness of the sky outside mirrored the gloom he felt here in his office. Down on the campus, he saw a woman carrying a box in two hands, heading toward the front of the building and the parking lot. Had she been fired? He doubted it—the next division head was probably just getting to the conference room right now; there’d been no time to fire anyone—but Craig definitely saw her as an omen of the future, and he watched as she made her lonely way along the path and moved out of his sight.  

He had a late lunch with Phil, the two of them heading over to a Chipotle several miles away from CompWare so they could speak freely. On the way, Craig described his early morning meeting.  

“He pulled the same exact shit with me. Tried to get me to fire Isaac Morales.”  

“You didn’t fall for it?”  

“Hell, no.” Phil was driving and pulled into a parking space. “But then again, they didn’t have Isaac on tape trashing me.” He shook his head. “What’s up with that? I thought you and Tyler were buds.”  

“I did, too. And I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of why he might be mad at me or resent me or whatever, but I can’t come up with a thing.”  

They got out of the car. “I’m just wondering how he kept it so hidden,” Phil said. “You didn’t even have an inkling?”  

Craig shook his head. “I just talked to him yesterday. Everything was fine. Or I thought it was.”  

“I blame BFG.”  

“I wish I could, too. But I’ve looked at it from every angle, and I just don’t see how they could be behind this. For sure they’re exploiting it, but I don’t think they caused it.”  

“I still blame BFG.”  

They went inside, ordered, then found a table by the window and sat down.  

“Regus Patoff,” Phil mused. “I know that name from somewhere. I tried searching it the other day but didn’t come up with anything. The only references to him I found involved BFG.”  

“Did we ever figure out what that stands for?”  

“No clue.”  

Craig took a sip of his iced tea. “I need to ask you a question. And answer me honestly. Do you think we hate BFG because they’re consultants and their word could end up getting us laid off, or do you think there’s something particular about BFG that bothers us? I’ve been thinking about this. I mean, would we hate
any
consultants who CompWare hired or just them?” 

“Them? The only person I’ve seen from BFG is Patoff. As far as I know, he’s the only one
anyone’s
seen. And remember what that asshole said to Dylan? No, it’s definitely not just consultants in general that we hate. It’s
him
.”  

“Maybe we should complain.”  

“To who?”  

“You don’t think Matthews would want to know?”  

“Honestly? I don’t. He’s looking to pull this company’s wiener out of the fire, and if some toes get stepped on along the way, I don’t think he cares. He’s the one who brought in BFG. He knows their reputation, and he’s all in. This is the way he’s decided to go, and my guess is that anyone who rocks the boat will be thrown overboard. The goal is to downsize anyway.”  

“What if we catch him in some unethical behavior?”  

“It has to be cut-and-dried, and we have to have proof. I mean, what do we have so far? Acting creepy and conducting some odd interviews? He hasn’t actually done anything wrong. You saw those executives this morning. They’re behind him.”  

Craig picked up his burrito. “This isn’t looking good.”  

“No,” Phil said, “it’s not.”  

****  

“Tyler?” Angie said incredulously after Dylan had gone to bed and Craig had told her about his day. “I don’t believe it.”  

“I can’t believe it either. And I
saw
it. I keep trying to figure out if there was some way the consultant could have goaded him into it or tricked him into saying what he did.”  

“Do you think that’s what happened?”  

Craig sighed. “No. I want to think that. But no, I don’t.”  

“I thought he was your friend. Why would he trash you like that?”  

“I have no idea.”  

“At least they’re taking your side instead of his.”  

“Unless they’re trying to build a case against me.”  

Angie smiled. “Now you’re just being paranoid. They didn’t want to get rid of you; they wanted to get rid of him.” She paused for a second, looked into his eyes. “Maybe you should have let them.”  

He shook his head. “Even if Tyler for some reason hates my guts, he’s still one of my strongest programmers. And I need him on that OfficeManager project.”  

“Well, you don’t need to be bosom buddies to work together. You just need to be professional.”  

“And I think we both can be.”  

“Speaking of consultants,” Angie said, “they’re hiring some to look at the Urgent Care.”  

“What for?”  

“That’s what we want to know. We’re already making do with half the budget we had five years ago—and we have twice the number of patients. They got rid of half of the salaried employees in favor of the per diems, who flake out on us almost every weekend. If they’re looking to cut, I don’t what more they can do. And it’s a complete waste of money. We don’t have to hire consultants to ‘study’ the Urgent Care. All management needs to do is talk to the doctors and nurses who work there.
We
know what needs to be done.”  

“You think they’ve already made their decisions and are just looking for consultants to back them up?”  

“You know I do. Those gutless wonders obviously plan to screw things up even more than they already have, only they need to have a ‘study’ they can point to in order to justify their actions when we raise hell.” She sighed. “Their mission statement is that everything is for the patients, but they compromise patient care every time they cut our budget or do things like waste money by hiring consultants.”  

Craig was silent for a moment. “You don’t know the name of the consultants they’re using, do you?”  

She smiled. “I knew you would ask that. And I wondered myself. So, yes I do. I asked Pam when she called, and she said it’s some healthcare-related consulting firm called Perfect Practices.”  

He let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “At least it’s not BFG.”  

“That doesn’t mean these guys are any better,” she pointed out.  

“I think it does,” he said.  

****  

Something was up.  

Craig knew it even before he went upstairs to his office. He didn’t talk to anyone while coming in from the parking lot, but there was a weird energy in the lobby, an almost tangible tension that reminded him of the day the A.I. merger hadn’t gone through and half of senior management had jumped out of the crashing plane with golden parachutes.  

As he rode up the elevator to the sixth floor, sharing part of the journey with a silent woman he didn’t know who got off on the fourth, the feeling did not go away, and when he saw half of the programming staff crowding the open area in front of Lupe’s desk, he realized that whatever had happened, it obviously involved his division. His mind began running down scenarios as he approached. Mass layoffs was the scariest, and not one he could automatically dismiss.  

But he was not prepared for the news that greeted him.  

“Tyler Lang’s dead,” Lupe announced before anyone else could say anything.  

He looked from his secretary to the programmers, part of him hoping irrationally that this was some sort of prank, though he knew it wasn’t, and he asked, “What happened?”  

Lupe started to talk but was drowned out by the programmers, who all answered at once. “He was electrocuted—” “It was a freak accident—” “—at his desk.” “He was—” “—the OfficeManager updates—” “—working after hours.”  

Craig raised his hands. “Hold on a minute. Hold on. One person at a time.”  

Lupe pointed to Huell Parrish. “Huell talked to Tyler’s wife.”  

The programmer was apologetic. “I’m sorry. I know I should’ve called you first, but—”  

“Don’t worry about it,” Craig interrupted him. “It’s fine. Just tell me what happened to Tyler.”  

“Well…” Huell took a deep breath. “I guess he stayed late yesterday to work on those OfficeManager updates. Lorene and I had come up with some code that we gave him to look over, and I guess that sparked something because Bev, his wife, said that he called to tell her he wouldn’t be home until seven or eight. He still wasn’t home by eight-thirty, so she tried calling his cell phone but got his voice mail. She tried his office number, same thing. Then, around nine, she got a call from, I don’t know, the paramedics, the police, the hospital,
someone
, saying that Tyler was dead. She thought it was a joke at first, but obviously it wasn’t. One of the nighttime custodians had found him at his desk, slumped over, and it looked like he’d just fallen asleep, but when he got closer, the janitor smelled something burning. He’s the one who called 911. Tyler had been electrocuted.”  

“Oh my God,” Craig said.  

“Yeah. Somehow, he’d knocked over a pitcher of water on his desk—maybe he
had
fallen asleep—and the water puddled on the floor, where the power cord to his desktop had been worn through and live wires were exposed. Tyler had kicked off his shoes and was barefoot, and…he was electrocuted.”  

“He was dead when the janitor found him?”  

“Yeah.”  

Craig turned to Lupe. “How did you hear about it?”  

“From him,” she said, nodding toward Huell. “But I called Human Resources, and they were already aware of what happened.”  

Craig realized that he didn’t know the protocol for death. Was it his responsibility to inform the higher ups in the company if one of his employees died? No one had called
him
. How was he supposed to find out? Via email? Like he had here, from office gossip? Nothing like this had ever come up before. Maybe, if someone in his division died and he was the first person in management to learn about it, he was supposed to call Scott and let the department head take it from there, pass the buck up the ladder. He
would
call Scott after he got through here.