The Consultant

by Little,Bentley

  “I don’t work for BFG exactly,” Todd said. “I’ve just been hired on a contract basis. Temporarily.”

  “Well, I’m going to make sure it’s very temporary,” Craig told him. He turned back toward Lupe. “Go to lunch,” he told her. “If this little robot tries to follow you, I’ll tackle him.”

  With a grateful smile, Lupe picked up her purse and walked purposefully down the corridor toward the elevator.

  “Mr. Patoff—” Todd began.

  “I don’t give a shit about Mr. Patoff,” Craig said. “If you want to do your job properly, sit there, note the time she left and write down the time she returns. You are allowed to document how much time she spends at lunch, but that is her free time, and you are not allowed to monitor or intrude upon what she does on her lunch hour.”

  “Mr. Patoff is not going to like this.”

  “Tell him to talk to me,” Craig said. “And, by the way, you are not to follow my secretary to the restroom. Do you understand me? That’s an invasion of privacy.”

  “Mr. Patoff says—”

  “Fuck Mr. Patoff.”

  Todd’s face hardened. “I’m going to tell him you said that.”

  “You go right ahead.” Craig strode back into his office. “And stay out of my way!” he shouted over his shoulder. “You might be assigned to monitor my secretary, but you’re nothing to me, and if you do anything to impede work in this division, I’ll have your job!”

  He slammed the door behind him, breathing heavily. Part of him felt guilty for being so hard on the kid, especially since he was just a temp, but the little puke had stepped way overbounds. Craig wasn’t about to let anyone treat Lupe that way.

  Slamming the door had been a bit too dramatic, though. He had never been good at confrontation, either avoiding it completely or overcompensating by acting like a bully. He wasn’t going to apologize—his feelings were true, and he wanted Todd to be a little afraid of him—but he opened the door to show that he wasn’t unprofessional.

  The consultant was gone.

  Craig walked out of his office, looking around. Lupe’s work area was empty, as was the hallway.

  Maybe, Craig thought, Todd had gone to complain to Patoff.

  Maybe.

  But maybe he was following Lupe to lunch.

  ****

  There was an eight o’clock meeting at the Urgent Care for all shifts—weekend and weekday—in order to talk about Pam. Angie was late for the meeting because Craig had had to rush off early to work to confront a crisis, and she could not drive over until she had dropped Dylan off at school. When she arrived, nearly fifteen minutes late, the meeting was already in progress, though it stopped cold the second she walked through the door, everyone instantly gathering around to hear her version of what had happened.

  The consultant was nowhere in sight, and Angie wondered if he had been invited to the meeting. The Urgent Care didn’t officially open until nine, and she thought it highly likely that no one had told him to come in early. It was just as well; she felt more comfortable without him there.

  Very quickly, she was able to ascertain that she was the only person Pam had ordered in yesterday for a “staff meeting,” which made her wonder why the office manager had really called her. Causing even greater confusion was the fact that, according to Dr. Bashir, who had been in touch with the coroner, the time of death had been placed at 4:00 p.m., a full hour before Pam had called her. The police were still trying to reconcile that with Angie’s story, and for a brief horrifying second she wondered if that meant she would be a suspect if foul play was presumed. The second she voiced that fear aloud, however, her coworkers shot it down with a logic so unassailable that she was immediately reassured.

  But why had Pam called her?

  Had it been Pam?

  She tried to think now if there had been anything off about the voice, any little giveaway that would indicate she’d been talking to someone else. She wasn’t sure. That was not something for which she’d been on the lookout, and if it had occurred, it had been so subtle that she had not caught it. She took a deep breath. The entire situation was confusing. Everything about it seemed more than a little off, and it was not only the nurses but the doctors who were tense and on edge. Until a coroner’s report came back with a specific cause of death that was simple, rational and easily explainable, Pam’s demise would remain a mystery—and no one here liked mysteries.

  Angie thought of the terrified expression on the office manager’s frozen face and shivered.

  The consultant walked in, blinking nervously at the sight of the gathered crowd. It was clear he was startled by their presence, and it was equally clear that he didn’t know how to react. Angie could tell from the look on his face that he thought he had stumbled onto a meeting where they were probably discussing him.

  He tried to smile. “Hey,” he said nervously by way of greeting.

  Angie decided to just blurt it out. “Pam’s dead,” she said.

  Now he looked confused. “What—? I mean, are…” He took a deep breath. “Huh?”

  “I found her. She called me in, told me there was a staff meeting, but I was the only one she called, and when I came in I found her in her office, dead.”

  The consultant looked panicked. “You don’t think I was responsible?”

  “No,” Angie assured him. She heard stifled laughter from some of the other nurses, and though she, too, felt an impulse to smile, she felt sorry for the consultant. “No one thinks you had anything to do with it, Mr. Morris. In fact, it was probably a heart attack or a stroke…” She recalled Pam’s horrified face. “Probably.”

  The meeting was rudderless without Pam. The office manager was the one who usually kept them on point, and with no designated leader, the gathering’s focus meandered. The doctors were distracted, already checking out mentally, most of them on their phones, and the nurses endlessly chewed over every detail Angie shared with them. Nothing was going to be resolved here today, and as soon as she could, Angie left. She needed to clear her head.

  It was almost time for the Urgent Care to open, and outside, patients were already lining up. Had it been Pam who’d called last night? The thought haunted her. She was more unsure now than she had been before the meeting, and none of the possibilities seemed plausible. Either Pam had lied to her and called her in for a secret one-on-one meeting and had died in the interim, or Pam had intended to call everyone in and had called her first but had died before phoning anyone else, or someone had killed Pam and then called, imitating the office manager’s voice.

  What did it say about her that the last scenario seemed the most likely?

  Why, though? Why would someone do that? Because they wanted Pam’s body found immediately? Because Angie had also been a target, and she had only escaped a similar fate after something went wrong?

  Every solution brought up more questions than it answered.

  The building had exterior security cameras, and there was one in the waiting room. If anything could shed a light on what had happened last night, it should be the surveillance tapes. She assumed the police had looked at them, and she was tempted to drive by the station and see if they could tell her anything.

  Were there cameras in Pam’s office? There weren’t in the exam rooms—for privacy reasons—but she didn’t know if there were any surveillance devices trained on the hallway or the offices. She’d never had any reason to notice or check before.

  Back at home, Angie felt restless. She wanted to call Craig, but he had his own problems to deal with today. She did call her friend Irma, but Irma was busy with her mother, who had Alzheimer’s, and could only talk for a few moments.

  Seconds after hanging up, the phone rang, and Angie answered.

  “Hello!” a cheerful recorded voice greeted her. “Thank you for participating in our Perfect Practices quality control survey.”

  It was the Urgent Care consultants.

  “To continue in English, please press one now…”

>   She pressed the one button.

  “Using your touchtone phone, please indicate whether you work at a hospital, a doctor’s office or an urgent care facility. Press one if you work at a hospital. Press two if you work at a doctor’s office. Press three if you work at an urgent care facility.”

  Angie pressed three.

  “Please type in the zip code of the urgent care facility at which you work, followed by the pound sign.”

  Angie did so.

  There was a pause and a click before the recorded voice spoke again. “The following questions pertain to the consultant assigned to evaluate your facility. On a scale of one to five, with five being extremely unlikely and one being extremely likely, how would you rate the chances of the consultant murdering his mother and keeping her body in a basement freezer?”

  What kind of survey was this?

  Angie hung up. Rattled, she stared for a moment at the phone. She’d acted instinctively, but maybe she should have stayed on to hear what else was going to be asked. This couldn’t be real, could it? It had to be a joke.

  The thing was, it seemed legitimate. It wasn’t just some kid making a prank call but a prerecorded series of questions that were integrated into a working automated system.

  Did the consultant even know that this survey was being conducted? Angie wondered. Was he aware of the type of questions being asked? Whether he was or wasn’t, she felt sorry for him. He was a creep, no doubt about it, but his nearly crippling awkwardness made him somewhat sympathetic in her eyes, and the fact that he was at the mercy of the consulting firm for which he worked, a firm that was conducting a truly bizarre survey in what was probably an effort to oust him, made her more predisposed toward his position. She had no compassion for companies to begin with, and when they behaved toward individuals in such an obviously hostile manner, she automatically opposed them.

  It was time to do a little research, Angie decided. She needed to find out more about Private Practices. In the back of her mind was the idea that the firm was a subsidiary of BFG or was in some way connected to the consultants engaged by Craig’s company, but going on the internet, checking out their own website, Wikipedia and several consumer sites, she could find nothing to back that up. She read through the information: Founded in 1990 by two physician brothers…Mission: to help streamline business practices of medical facilities…No complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau…References and recommendations from over 40 satisfied clients…Moved base of operations from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1999…Supports several charities providing medical care to Third World countries…Favorable press in both medical and business journals…

  As far as she could tell, the firm was clean.

  Angie shut off her laptop, staring at the screen as it shut down. In her mind, she saw the terrible look on Pam’s dead face and heard the outrageous question voiced by the telephone survey.

  She didn’t want to think what she was thinking, but she couldn’t help it.

  The consultant did look like someone who would kill his mom and keep her body in the freezer.

  FIFTEEN

  Patoff had called a meeting, and Matthews was glad that the rest of the Board was going to be there, because he no longer felt comfortable being alone with the consultant. The weekend retreat had been a disaster, and while he’d gone along with the fiction that it had been his desire to foment some sort of interpersonal bonding between employees, the truth was that the consultant had pushed him into it. “We don’t need to do this,” Matthews had argued. “It’s a complete waste of time. Everyone works fine together.”

  “If everything was working fine,” the consultant countered, “you wouldn’t have had to call me in.”

  So they’d gone on the retreat and Patoff had remained be-hind—and Hugh Anderson and Russell Cibriano had committed suicide.

  Matthews didn’t think that was merely a coincidence.

  He didn’t think the suicides had just happened.

  What did that mean, though? Did he think the consultant had killed them?

  No, he didn’t believe that.

  But he didn’t disbelieve it, either.

  Last night, he’d had a nightmare where the consultant was standing in front of a long line of CompWare employees. The man was dressed in black and wielding an ax, and as each employee stepped forward docilely, he chopped off that person’s head, laughing happily as the head rolled to join dozens of others on the ground at his feet. Matthews had never been one to put much stock in dreams, but it was clear what was occupying his subconscious mind, and the nightmare imagery correlated perfectly with not only his personal feelings about Regus Patoff but his opinion of the consultant’s impact on his company.

  Why had he hired a consulting firm in the first place? And how could all those other CEOs have recommended BFG? Their experiences must have been completely different than his, because he wouldn’t recommend BFG to anyone.

  Matthews entered the conference room. Everyone else had arrived ahead of him, and the members of the Board were crowded around Patoff, laughing and joking. All conversation stopped as soon as he walked into the room, everyone moving to their proper places, and he wondered when he had become such a killjoy that people made a conscious effort to avoid his company.

  When Patoff arrived, he answered himself.

  At the retreat, after the debacle of the bus ride, during the first Speed Conversation exercise, he had asked the people on the opposite team what they thought of the decision to bring in consultants after the merger fell through. Most of the employees had been wary, had hemmed and hawed with non-answers or told him what they thought he wanted to hear. But Craig Horne said he thought the Board could have made decisions about the company’s future based on information gathered in-house. And on the next go-round, when the roles were reversed and it was Horne asking questions, the division head had asked whether Matthews was sorry he had hired the consultants. It emboldened him to know that others seemed to have the same reservations he did.

  Even if the Board obviously did not.

  Patoff stood at the front of the room as Matthews sat down next to the members of the Board.

  “Since we’re all here,” the consultant said, “let’s start. This is the first of what will be weekly status summaries; regular meetings to discuss our progress. We’ve found that our clients are happiest if they are kept in the loop, and sessions such as these allow us to report on current operations, explain the next steps we will be taking and address any concerns you may have.

  “Senior management has just returned from a very successful weekend retreat—”

  Very successful? Matthews thought.

  “—and we have started to conduct our work management study. Obviously, the study is still in its infant stages, but we will be expanding its scope very shortly. In the meantime, there are rules and procedures that can be implemented which will not only begin to boost your productivity but will enable you to begin transitioning your staff.”

  “To what?” Matthews asked.

  “That’s what our research and analysis will determine.”

  “But how will we know if they are transitioning in the right direction,” he said, exasperated, “if you don’t know what we’ll be transitioning to?”

  Patoff smiled. “BFG has gone through this same scenario literally dozens of times. We know what we’re doing.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “You hired them,” the gruff voice of Mitchell Lockhart intoned. “Let them do their job.”

  Matthews looked over at the members of the Board. Lockhart was scowling, and the other three were nodding in agreement. “They know what they’re doing,” Don Chase told him.

  Matthews forced himself to remain calm. “It is our job to provide oversight, so we have a duty to ask questions. And since I’m the one who started this company, I think I’ve earned the right to have some say in its direction, don’t you?” He turned away from the Board, dismissing them. “It is not your job to impl
ement anything,” he told Patoff. “Everything has to be run by me first, is that understood?”

  The consultant stared back at him with a flat unreadable expression, and Matthews tried to maintain a similarly even mien, hoping his nervousness didn’t show. Even in a roomful of people, the man made him uneasy. “Actually,” the consultant said, “that’s not true. If you read your contract, you will see that we are empowered to implement short-term measures that we deem appropriate. After we have completed our mission, then it is up to your discretion whether to adopt our long-term recommendations. But in the interim, we are required as per our signed agreement to address any problems we encounter within your organization in the manner that we see fit. And our experience with organizations of similar size and scope tells us that by gradually phasing in targeted rules and procedures, we can not only address some of your concerns immediately but can help position you to more readily adapt once final recommendations are made.” A chilly smile graced Patoff ’s long face. “Now, if we may proceed with our meeting…”

  There were only Matthews and the members of the Board, but the consultant had prepared for this meeting as though he were giving a presentation to the entire company. There was a Power-Point slideshow, a series of handouts with graphs and spreadsheets to back up BFG’s assertions, and copies of the first memos and emails to send to employees. Matthews was the only one with any questions or concerns, and after a while, even he gave up arguing in the face of the consultant’s implacability and the complete acceptance of the Board.

  “You hired him to do a job,” Lockhart repeated. “Let him do it.”

  Matthews spent the rest of the day in his office, fuming and feeling trapped, though he had no one to blame but himself for the situation he was in. At this point, if it were solely up to his discretion, he would fire BFG, consequences be damned. But he was in this with the Board. He needed their approval, and it was pretty clear he wouldn’t get it, so it was probably best to bide his time.

  Why the hell had he ever let the company go public?

  Matthews left on time for once, and in the lobby saw Patoff chatting with a group of sales associates. Their eyes met accidentally, and Matthews forced himself to wave, but the consultant turned away, laughing at something one of the salesmen said. Maybe it was unintentional. Maybe Patoff hadn’t seen him. But he knew that wasn’t true, and he strode out to the Jag, rebuffed and angry, honking at two lower level employees to get out of the way as he sped out of the parking lot.