“We’re not saying you’re responsible,” Jessica interrupts again.
“You were the last person in the office last night,” he continues, ignoring Jessica. “We have you on digital.”
My heart rate picks up. “I thought the cameras shut down. Aaron said—”
“They didn’t ‘shut down.’ There was a blip in the footage, some kind of obscuring fog. But we have enough to confirm you were the last one here,” Calvin clarifies.
Which means they don’t have me putting the money on Sue Ward’s desk. I take a deep breath. But if they’re suspicious now, once that charge hits accounting, they’re going to comb through earlier footage. There aren’t security cameras in the private offices, but the workspace video will show me entering and leaving Calvin’s office. That, along with last night, will be enough to start an inquiry.
Jessica tilts her face, apologetic, and speaks with her eyes closed. “No one is saying you did anything.”
Calvin’s thick neck reddens above the collar like a sunburned python. “Oh, for Pete’s sake.”
Jessica lays an empathetic hand on my arm. “It was a nice gesture. No one is saying it wasn’t.”
“You left Sue that money!” Calvin explodes.
My eyes widen.
“We don’tknowthat,” Jessica says, shaking her head at Calvin.
“Don’t we?” he barks.
“There’s noclearfootage,” she says as she turns back to me. “It’s just an educated guess.”
“It’s inappropriate, is what it is,” Calvin continues.
“Am I in some kind of trouble?” I ask.
“No,” Jessica says adamantly while Calvin glares at me over the broad plane of his desk. “No one’s done anything illegal. We just want to get to the bottom of what happened. It’s…distracting,” she says as though distraction carried a bad aftertaste. “It breeds a certain kind of environment.”
I can’t imagine what kind of environment she means. Afunone perhaps. I could see Jessica being allergic to fun.
“This is a place of business,” Calvin counters. “We pride ourselves on aprofessionalculture.”
I think of the Christmas party last year where Aaron drank too many vodka tonics and tried to Irish step dance on a cluster of desks as Sita took a nap on the floor of the CFO’s office. “Of course.”
“Which no one is implying that you aren’t,” Jessica affirms.
I understand Jessica’s presence, but her devotion to remaining deeply ambiguous is doing little to help my nerves.
“Save your do-gooding for when you’re off the clock,” Calvin growls. “No one has time for this. Now we have to launch an investigation—”
“An investigation?” I blink rapidly. I clearly did not think this through. I hadn’t exactly expected to be alive this morning, much less at work.
Jessica leans reassuringly toward me. “We haven’t done anything definitive yet.”
“L-leaving someone some money hardly sounds like it warrants an investigation,” I stammer. My knee begins to bounce wildly. “You said yourself it wasn’t illegal.”
“Tampering with security is a crime,” Calvin replies.
“Maybe,” Jessica corrects. “None of it is very black-and-white.”
“Whoever left that money likely had something to do with the camera glitch.” He narrows his eyes at me. “Where did all that money come from anyway?” he mutters.
I wonder if he’s noticed the missing credit card. Probably.
Swallowing my dread, I plaster a flat, innocent look across my face.Ididn’t tamper with security, it was just a stroke of incredibly good luck that those cameras malfunctioned before I started stacking hundreds on Sue’s desk, but they don’t know that. Still, it looks bad. “Well, if my power was out at the condo last night, maybe you guys had an outage as well. Have you checked with your electricity provider?”
