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When Monday morning rolled around, Haley was still awaiting word from Luke. She supposed his failure to immediately hunt down evidence against Jenna McArthur and the Moreno’s truck driver shouldn’t have surprised her. After all, the man had been up all night contemplating ways to hang the crime on someone else. He naturally needed some sleep before he could redirect his efforts to investigating a brand-new group of suspects.
But she still couldn’t prevent her disappointment. She was anxious for the police to start moving on all the arrests necessary to finally bring Michael justice.
“How is the MIT project coming?” Nexus Warren said.
Haley snapped to attention, her head whipping toward her BlackBerry where she had the department meeting on speakerphone. “It’s coming,” she said.
“Can you provide us with a progress update?” Nexus prodded, adopting the same tone he might use with a three-year-old.
Despite her best efforts over the weekend, Haley hadn’t been able to concentrate on the MIT data. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember anything about the account. The marijuana case had usurped all of her mental energy.
But she had to make up something. “I’ve completed my initial analysis and identified all major issues. My next step is to check for anomalies.”
The line fell silent. Nobody said anything for so long that Haley felt compelled to make sure her BlackBerry hadn’t dropped the call.
Finally, Nexus coughed. “Haley, please call me after the meeting adjourns. I’d like to discuss the details of the MIT account with you in private.”
“Of course.”
Haley didn’t absorb much of what transpired after that. For once, she dreaded the end of this boring update meeting. Nexus obviously wanted to berate her for something, or else he would have said whatever he wanted to say in front of the group. Maybe Stan Williams had called to complain about her again.
Too late, Haley remembered the driver data she’d told Stan she’d get to him by last Tuesday. Now it was almost a week later, and she still had yet to finish her updates.
Something clicked in Haley’s brain, sending her sitting bolt upright. MIT matched independent owner operators with businesses needing drivers. Could the file Stan had sent her contain information on the Moreno’s delivery driver? Moreno’s didn’t ship enough plants to employ their own full-time driver, and the man she’d followed Wednesday most likely wanted to maintain control of his own schedule, seeing as how he was quite possibly delivering drugs during his route.
Haley scrambled to pull up MIT’s driver spreadsheet. Then she placed the call on hold to flip through her BlackBerry snapshots without distraction. Each photograph caused her heart to jump a little, a tiny reminder of Wednesday’s stakeout. Her body tensed when she located the picture Mindy had captured of the box truck’s license plate. She squinted at the grainy image, working out the sequence of letters and numbers.
Holding her breath, she performed a search on the license-plate number within Stan’s file. When a match popped up, she actually gasped.
According to the spreadsheet, the driver was John Ramirez, a resident of Bellingham, Washington, located ninety miles north of Seattle. Haley fumbled for a pen and paper, copying down his address. She couldn’t wait to present this new lead to Luke.
Moving on, she accessed another spreadsheet, this one linking drivers to businesses. She ran a quick query to pull the subset of information tied to John Ramirez into a new spreadsheet.
It didn’t take her long to map out the driver’s semiweekly route. In addition to Moreno’s, Ramirez serviced several other MIT clients, his circuit stretching from Bellingham to Grant County, Oregon. His entire route took three days to complete, running from Wednesday through Friday and again from Saturday through Monday.
Her adrenaline pumping, Haley grasped her pen and appended the route details underneath John Ramirez’s personal data. With any luck, the information would be sufficient for the police to arrange a roadside ambush.
She was so possessed by the thought that she almost forgot her Monday meeting was still in progress.
She fumbled for her BlackBerry, hoping she hadn’t disconnected the call when she’d accessed her pictures. She doubly hoped that nobody had tried to ask her any questions in the past forty minutes.
When the voice of one of her coworkers filled the air as she rejoined the meeting, his nasal twang struck her as the sweetest sound to ever touch her ears.
She fidgeted as the call dragged on, anxious to talk to Nexus about what she’d discovered. Unfortunately, she’d have to humor him first, and whatever he wanted to discuss likely wouldn’t be short or sweet. Her efforts to facilitate another arrest might just be delayed until after lunch.
She waited three minutes after the group call ended to give Nexus ample time to return to his office from the Seattle conference room. Then she took a deep breath, located Nexus’s contact entry in her BlackBerry, and initiated the call.
He answered immediately. “Haley.”
“Hi, Nexus. You wanted to talk about the MIT account?”
He didn’t speak right away. His hesitation solidified her fear that he had something more serious to discuss. “I want to hear, specifically, what progress you’ve made on cleaning up the driver data. Stan Williams phoned earlier this morning. As you know, he’s concerned about their approaching go-live date. He doesn’t want any delays in getting the new system up and running.”
“The go-live date hasn’t slipped,” Haley assured him. “And as I explained earlier with the driv—”
“What you fed me earlier sounded like a standard line we tell our clients during sales meetings,” Nexus interrupted. “You and I both know we have a very established process for identifying common data anomalies. You should have completed that blanket analysis the same day Stan sent the file.”
Haley swallowed hard. “Yes, I finished the blanket analysis.” In reality, she had no idea how much time had elapsed between when she’d received the updated MIT driver data and when she’d analyzed it. She’d been too consumed with the marijuana case to devote much attention to the MIT project.
But, of course, she couldn’t admit this to Nexus.
“Stan says he sent you that information two Thursdays ago,” Nexus said. “Consequently, you should have completed your basic review by Friday. Tack on a couple more days to address any anomalies, and Stan should have received the final file by Tuesday. Yet here it is the following Monday, and you say you haven’t made any progress.”
Haley stiffened. “Actually, I said I have made progress. I’ve—”
“Haley,” Nexus interjected, “just tell me what you’ve been doing between Thursday two weeks ago and today.”
Haley remembered combing through Owen Moreno’s inventory records, stalking a truck driver, and snooping around Jenna’s house. Unfortunately, she didn’t think any of those activities would reestablish her boss’s faith in her.
Her thoughts shifted to her discovery of John Ramirez’s address and route schedule. She figured now would be a good time to broach the issue of turning the information over to the police. Her confidentiality contract banned her from sharing client data with anyone outside the company, but keeping her knowledge a secret struck her as an even bigger breach of ethics.
She only hoped Nexus agreed.
“I did find something interesting in the MIT files,” she began.
“Tell me about that.” Nexus actually sounded pleased. Clearly he had no idea what she was about to say next.
“MIT services one of the local businesses here. Moreno’s. It’s a gardening store.”
“Go on,” Nexus said, his tone more guarded now.
“Moreno’s distributes plants to several nearby businesses.” Haley took a deep breath. “Their driver also works with a few other MIT clients, all of them either in Washington or Oregon. He runs his route twice per week.”
“And?”
“And, well, while making these deliveries, he’s also dispersing some other product.” Haley paused. “Illegal product.”
Nexus didn’t reply.
“I’ll spare you the details,” she rushed on. If Nexus knew she’d skipped out on work one morning to follow John Ramirez around town, it wouldn’t take him long to figure out this all related to Michael and that she’d lied about moving to Sobaco for a fresh start. “My real reason for bringing it up is that this information needs to be turned over to the police.”
“You can’t divulge client data to anyone outside the company,” Nexus said. “Remember your contract?”
“I remember.” Haley wasn’t surprised by his response. She knew he didn’t have the authority to grant an exception to such a strict company policy. “I hoped you would talk to Stan Williams about having MIT release this information.”
“We’re on very thin ice with MIT as it is.”
“But this isn’t about us. It’s about one of the drivers and his criminal enterprises.”
“Regardless, Stan is not going to like this. And I’m certainly not going to approach him with such a request.”
“I can talk to him myself. Once I explai—”
“Absolutely not. You are to deal with Stan in a business capacity only.”
Haley gripped the BlackBerry harder. “I don’t think you understand the implications of this. This data can help the police nab a felon.”
Nexus hesitated, then said, “Do the police already know about this?”
“They don’t have this information yet, but they know about this man’s activities.”
“So the police are investigating this person?”
“Yes, possibly.” Haley hoped Victor hadn’t gotten wind of Luke’s secret investigation and ordered him to stop. “But they may not know the driver’s name.”
Nexus ignored the qualification. “Then I suggest you sit on what you found and wait for the proper authorities to approach MIT.”
Haley’s chest constricted. The last thing she wanted to do was sit around waiting for the police to make their move. After all, they had no reason to suspect that a company called Mitchell Independent Trucking was in possession of valuable information. MIT would skate right under their radar, which was no doubt what Nexus was hoping would happen.
“How did you discover this anyway?” Nexus said.
Haley’s mouth went dry. She couldn’t very well confess that she had deliberately scoured through the MIT data and gone so far as to map out a driver route using the confidential information her client had entrusted to her.
But when she tried to think of another, more acceptable story to feed her boss, her mind went blank.
Nexus sighed loudly enough for Haley to wince. “Haley, I know the past few months have been rough on you. I’ve granted you a lot of leeway because of your personal issues this year.”
She mustered up some saliva. “And I appreciate that, Nexus.”
“When you first suggested moving to a new place, I supported that. And I know we agreed on a six-month trial telecommuting period, but at this point I don’t believe it’s working out.”
“It’s only been a month,” Haley reminded him, a sinking feeling developing in the pit of her stomach.
“I understand that, but as things stand now, I don’t envision the situation improving.”
Haley didn’t say anything. Mentally she’d already started performing the calculations to figure out how long she could survive off of her savings.
“I don’t get the impression that this job ranks as your biggest priority at the moment,” Nexus said.
Haley certainly agreed with him there, but saying the words out loud wouldn’t deter him from canning her.
“You’re ignoring best practices that you should know like the back of your hand,” he went on. “There’s a reason why we have these standard procedures in place, and that’s to . . .”
Haley tuned out as he droned on, not inclined to listen to a lecture on best practice or how combing through confidential client data for information on drug dealers fell outside that process. As much as she agreed with him about following procedure, at the moment she found it difficult to muster up much interest.
“Perhaps it’s time to let someone else share the lead on the MIT project,” Nexus continued. “You can work behind the scenes while your partner focuses on keeping Stan apprised of our progress.”
Haley’s jaw slipped open. So Nexus wasn’t ready to fire her yet after all.
“It couldn’t hurt to have another person invested in this account,” he said. “With two people dividing the work, Stan’s concerns that we’ll miss the implementation deadline should be assuaged.”
“That sounds like a good plan.”
“I’m glad you agree. I’ll check the resource calendar to determine the best candidate. Once I’ve identified someone, you can bring him or her up to speed on the MIT project.”
“Okay.”
Nexus and Haley exchanged goodbyes and disconnected. She sat there, stunned, as she played through their conversation in her mind. She found herself more relieved over the prospect of having someone else deal with Stan Williams than she did over still having a job.
Haley pulled up the MIT driver file and ran her eyes down the rows of data, wondering whether she should bother fabricating an excuse to explain her delay in getting Stan the updates. With any luck, Nexus would have a second project lead assigned within the hour and she could leave the justifications up to her new partner.
Guilt immediately followed that thought. As much as she itched to pawn the impossible Stan Williams off on someone else, she should at least do what she could to ensure a smooth transition.
Besides, it didn’t look as though Luke Justice planned to provide her with a case update anytime soon.
Haley sighed and got down to work.
