He has an older sister who lives in Alaska now. A photographer. A free spirit. Georgina said she wondered how someone like that and someone like Brett came from the same parents. He is tightly wound, she says.
Rowan gets every detail. How they spend their days compiling data and hunting down facts about customers, things they fail to disclose, like prescriptions for ED medication they got online, which could mean they have other problems like sleep apnea or alcohol abuse. Or maybe not. They have statistics for everything.
“Brett was very good at his job. Meticulous. Patient. He ran the department.”
“And the department is just the four of you?” I ask.
“Down to three now. They decided to cut costs, so they promoted someone from our team to replace Brett and then didn’t fill his position. His name is Pete. Anyway, we may be small, but it’s a small company. Which makes every decision that much more important.”
She becomes defensive, so I shut up and let Rowan lead again.
“So how did all of this start?” he asks. “The events that led to his termination?”
Georgina looks at the floor, swivels back and forth in her chair.
“I know this is difficult,” Rowan says. “Why don’t you start by telling us how you came to work here?”
We haven’t told her why we’re investigating her former boss. What interest we have in the man who sat four feet away from her in this back office, making models and predictions about people’s lives.
So she starts at the beginning. How she was hired after spending three years at an accounting firm downtown. Better pay and benefits, she tells us. Less stress because there really are no clients. Just the company. No tax season to wreak havoc, no filings that could be missed throughout the year. “It was a lot to worry about. And too much pressure. This seemed much morenine-to-five, you know?”
I look around the small, windowless room with the beige carpet and white walls and sterile desks, and picture Brett Emory barely fitting through the doorframe. I picture him towering from the seat of hisstandard-sizeoffice chair and having to slump to see his computer screen where he sat for eight hours every day, crunching his numbers and searching for human defects that might make a policy more risky to underwrite. I picture him seeing Georgina with her bright white smile and alluring glow. I picture him smelling her perfume and hearing her bubbly voice and the desire creeping into his mind.
As if I knew him well enough to picture him doing anything.
“One day it just started. Little innuendos that I laughed off. Like he was testing the waters, you know? ‘Nice dress,’ he would say. Or ‘How was your weekend? Any hot dates?’ Then he would chuckle, or wink even. When I got coffee, he would join me and then keep us there, lingering in the break room, always asking me questions about my personal life. My friends. Where I liked to go out. What I liked to do. How I kept so fit and did I belong to a gym or do yoga or run. And each time I let something go, another thing would follow, slightly more personal. It felt like he was creating a file in his mind about me. Like a mental database. He remembered everything I told him...”
“And then he reflected it back,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “How did you know?”
I shrug and lie. “It’s a type, that’s all.”
I think about the way he pulled me in so easily. Effortlessly.
Rowan keeps it moving. “So what pushed it over the edge from flirtations around the coffee machine to the complaint filed with HR?”
The report was sparse, which is common. It spoke of conduct that made Georgina “uncomfortable” and that was “inappropriateunder the circumstances.” Always a caveat. The young man at HR there had been charmingly evasive.
Georgina offers little more. She’s been coached, and Rowan and I both see it.
“I just started to feel strange when I was here. Afraid to get coffee. Afraid to get lunch. Afraid to go to the ladies’ room. I wanted to stay at my desk, with Josh and Pete at their desks—they’re the other guys who work in the department.”
“Josh and Pete—are they at lunch?” Rowan asks.
“They should be back by two. We only get an hour.”
Rowan shoots me a look. We need to follow up with them. See what they saw. Check all the boxes.
“Were you afraid because he followed you when you did those things—going for coffee, lunch, even to the bathroom?”
She hesitates. We both catch it. Her eyes look away, and she draws a quick breath. Then she shakes it off, whatever it is she’s not supposed to say. I feel an urgency to reach inside her and pull out the truth, but I don’t. I sit back and let Rowan work his magic.
First, he gets up and closes the door. Next, he turns off his phone and motions for me to do the same. “It’s just us now. What you say stays in this room, between the three of us.”
But it’s not that easy.
“There’s nothing to say, really. Just what’s in the report. What I told them in HR. They spoke to him twice and the behavior didn’t change, so they fired him.”
