by Marie Astor
***
Dennis Walker sat behind his desk with a smile glinting on his face. He had stopped by Janet Maple’s office for a casual chitchat, but when he noticed the papers on her desk, Dennis knew he had struck gold. Dennis considered himself to be in possession of many unique and valuable traits, but the trait that had proven to be exceptionally beneficial to him was a photographic memory. He could literally glance at a page in a book and be able to reconstruct the image in his mind afterwards. This quality had been most useful in his college days and in his career as a trader, but it became invaluable in Dennis’s role as an investigator.
As he pretended to look at his computer screen, Dennis reconstructed the details of the data he had glimpsed on Janet’s desk. He had only managed to steal a few quick glances, but even that had been enough. Dennis remembered with vivid clarity the cluster of orders from Emperial, Creaton, and Rigel. They were all centered in the company had been in the news lately for sharp decline in its stock price. He had only seen a snippet, but he was fairly certain that the rest of the data would show a similar pattern.
Dennis had been trying to get his hands on this information for a while, but all his attempts to gain access to it had failed. Who would have thought that the firm’s legal department would have access to such nitty-gritty data? Normally, the legal folks deemed themselves too important to mar their hands with anything other than legalese mumbo jumbo. Janet Maple, however, did not mind getting her hands dirty, which made Dennis like her all the more. Now, he had a valid reason to get to know Janet better.
Chapter 13