“They do that on purpose,” Doris snapped. “The one in the main hall is set forward a little bit to keep everybody racing, as if they’re behind.”
“Well, we’re definitely behind on some things in here,” Joy said, “but that is a dirty trick with the clock.” She’d have to remember that.
She brought up her email again and found a couple things she needed to deal with. With those done, she returned to the project she had been working on last Friday and dove back in. She wondered if her conversation with Kai would bear any fruit because that missing case of ketamine definitely bothered Joy. But, if Kai gets in trouble over it, then Joy didn’t want Kai to deal with it either. Joy hadn’t been working for more than fifteen minutes when her phone buzzed. She picked it up and answered. Her section boss, James, ordered her to his office. He hung up before she had a chance to even respond.
Slowly she put down the receiver, grabbing paper and pen. She stood, wondering if she should grab her purse and her sweater too, and headed to her boss’s office.
As she walked into James’s office, he frowned at her. “I don’t know what your connection is, and it would have been nice if you had told me in the first place,” he snapped. “We don’t like employees keeping stuff secret from the bosses.”
She frowned at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He motioned behind her at two men she didn’t recognize. One reached out his hand and introduced himself as Johan and said the other one was Galen. Just then a third guy walked in, happy and bustling.
“Good, good, good. Everybody arrived.”
Her boss immediately stood to attention. “Sir?”
“These men are here at my request,” he said.
Confusion crossed her boss’s face. “I don’t understand.”
James looked at her, and she shrugged. “Don’t look at me.”
“Not at all,” the new arrival said, as he reached out a hand. “I’m Edward Thornton.” He introduced himself to Joy, as she shook his hand. “I’m on the board and have decided to open up an investigation into our inventory issues,” he said with a warm smile.
She was dumbfounded. She didn’t know if this was a result of her questions to Kai and wondered if she could even make something like this happen so fast. Joy didn’t understand.
Edward motioned her to the chair. “Sit down, sit down.”
She dropped in place, rather than sitting ladylike.
Johan and Galen stood off to the side, their arms crossed over their chests. They looked more like private security than investigators, but maybe it was the same thing; she didn’t know.
Edward turned to her section boss, almost wringing his hands in delight. “One of the issues we’ve always had is the comptroller’s concerns regarding the accounting of the inventory,” he said. “So I want these two guys, who are specialists in this field,” he said, with an expansive arm thrown toward the two men, “to go through our inventory processing and to look at our inventory database to see if everything is up to snuff.”
Her section boss struggled to keep his jaw closed as he muttered, “I didn’t think there were any problems with the inventory,” he said.
“No, but I’m certain you are aware that new regulations are coming out on how medications are stored and accounted for,” he said. “I want to start now because, as soon as that directive comes through, we’re meant to be in compliance within thirty days.”
“Normally we get months and months, if not years, for compliance,” her boss muttered, frowning.
“Usually that’s true,” Edward said. “In this case, it’s not. So I want to get a jump on it now.”
Her boss sat back and frowned.
Edward nodded. “You don’t like the fact that I’ve done this?” he asked. “You should be happy I involved you in the process.”
Her boss’s face immediately cleared, but she could see the effort it required of him. “I just, well, if I’m not doing a good job,” he said, “it would be nice to know.”
“Oh my,” Edward said. “Where would you get that idea? This is all about compliance and making sure that our processes are okay. I could have brought in a process engineer, but I thought maybe we wanted to do something much more low-key.”
She slid a glance at the two men, who looked like perfect candidates to be bouncers at a bar, and wondered just what the hell low-key was—because these men were anything but.
Chapter 2
As soon as Edward finished giving his orders, she was asked to take the men back to her office and to show them exactly what they were doing. She frowned at that and said, “I don’t have an office to myself, and the addition of two more people will undoubtedly disturb the other two women.”
Edward looked at her in surprise, then to her boss.
James frowned and shuffled papers awkwardly on his desk and said, “Other offices are on that level, so I guess we could move you two investigators to one of those for the duration of this process.” He looked from the two men to Edward. “How long is this likely to take?”
“No clue,” Edward said.
The first man, Johan, spoke up. “With any luck, just one week.”
Her boss nodded, seemingly a little more relaxed at that. “Well, a week would not be too bad then,” he said. “We obviously want to keep the disruption down to as little as possible.”
“Whatever that means,” Galen, the other man, murmured. But his gaze was intense and watchful, almost as if he were recording everything going on around him.
She wasn’t sure what to think of them. Both men had very fair blond hair, heartily tanned skin, and prominent cheekbones with strong noses. There was just something about them. They weren’t fools, but she highly doubted they were inventory process investigators though. They looked a whole lot more like thugs, the presentable kind. Then she laughed at her own musings. As soon as her laughter crept out, she immediately gulped it back, realizing how inappropriate it was.
Smiling, she got to her feet and said, “Well, we could either move the other two women out to have the men in my office, or you can put me and the investigators in another separate area. Or, you could give these guys an office near mine, and I can work there with them as needed,” she said, speaking gently.
Edward nodded. “You know what? I like that last bit best because the investigators will need privacy too,” he said. He looked at her boss and said, “Make it happen, James.” And, with that, the same gale-force wind that blew him in now blew him right back out again.
The two men stood at the doorway and eyed James, never giving him a chance to back down from the orders that had been given him.
James shook his head and said, “In that case, I guess we’ll set you up in an office.” He rose, looked at Joy, and asked, “What about the office beside yours? Is that one empty?”
“I don’t know,” she said. To say yes would imply that she’d gone in and checked it out, which wasn’t in the scope of anybody who had just started a new job. Sure, she’d been there for maybe six weeks now, but it was hardly appropriate for her to search for empty rooms.