My Boss is a Serial Killer

by Christina Harlin

  I felt this many years after escaping him. A dropping dread fell in my stomach, because I was asked a question for which I didn’t have a good answer. I felt prickling in the skin on my shoulders, I felt the urge to snap at Bill, I was ready to fight. The psychotic sadist would probably be pleased to know that, all this time later, I still cringed at reminders of him.

  With an unexpected amount of effort, I managed to answer Bill’s question as lightly as I’d been speaking only a moment before. “He really couldn’t talk about the case. I got just the barest details.”

  Bill raised his eyebrows and looked interested.

  “Only that the medications weren’t something she had in the house. They don’t know where the pills came from.”

  “Pills can come from anywhere. She could have gotten them from a friend. And you can order just about anything you want online. I wonder why it’s significant.”

  “Like I said, he couldn’t give me details. He did seem sorry that he couldn’t, though. Maybe after their investigation is over, I can get him to tell me more.”

  “Yes, that would be interesting.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I was apologizing as much for thinking he’d ever be as unfair as the psychotic sadist as I was for having a lack of information.

  “What? Oh, no, it’s not a pleasant talk to have on a date anyway.” Bill looked at the same piece of mail he’d already checked. His mind was elsewhere, I could tell.

  *****

  I’d rather lost interest in thumbing through Bonita Voigt’s file, now that my first date with Gus had passed successfully and we had more than suicide to talk about. Since I had gone to the trouble (or rather, Lloyd had gone to the trouble) of getting it out, though, I pulled out Bill’s notes to see what the last few entries had been.

  Yes, it was all as I expected. His maniacal attention to note-taking and details was never more beneficial than in hindsight, as Bonita’s file was meticulously rounded out. Bonita Voigt was rather like Adrienne Maxwell in that she came to Bill as a recent widow who wanted to redo her will and estate documents to better suit her new circumstances. Bill’s written notes from her meetings mentioned, “Client is despondent over loss of her husband and is currently unwilling to make plans for the future.” Poor thing.

  Bonita Voigt had apparently taken her own life a few months after her last appointment here. No accompanying newspaper article or anything, because Bill wasn’t into scrapbooking and he didn’t like how newsprint faded and smeared. I was hoping to uncover a cause of death, actually. I knew she’d killed herself, but how? With a gun? Slitting her wrists? More pills, like Adrienne? Or maybe she had thrown herself from a bridge? Finding a real newspaper article was a silly idea on my part, considering that the self-inflicted death of an elderly woman probably wasn’t even considered newsworthy. Well, unless she really had thrown herself from a bridge. There was a copy of her funeral announcement that, of course, said she’d passed away but not how or why. What surprised me was that Bill’s notes didn’t mention her method of suicide. Normally he wrote down everything. The only reason I could propose for his neglecting that detail was tact. Maybe he thought it would just be tacky to write a notation about that.

  I put the file aside. Then, just because Charlene had piqued my curiosity about the suicide she claimed to recall, I went back to the computer’s archive files. My search criteria for the previous week was still stored on my word processor. I searched for file type “Letters”, file owner “Bnestor,” key word search “sorry”. I ran it again and the same letters appeared. Again I eliminated the men, and this time, I went beyond Bonita Voigt’s name. Here was one in 2001, Bryony Gilbert. Bryony rhymed with Hermione; that’s why it caught my eye.

  I picked up my necessary “look busy” pen and pad of paper and walked purposefully to Charlene’s cubicle. She was on the phone when I approached, and I paused outside her cubicle walls so as not to appear overly nosy. Still, I really wanted to stay and listen. I could tell from her tone and words that she was speaking to the pissed-off ex-husband of one of Aven Fisher’s clients, and hearing Charlene in action on the phone was fun.

  She was saying, “Well since you refused to accept service of the complaint by mail, we were forced to serve you with a private process server…No, sir, that is state law…Yes, in fact, we are permitted to bill you for it…because your ex-wife is not obligated to pay for your fits of pique…it means temper tantrum…I beg to differ; you were given the opportunity to accept service by mail and, for some reason, thought that rejecting that offer would cause problems for someone besides yourself…well, I think that’s an issue you need to take up with the process service company. That big fellow who served your papers to you would remember who you are…I guess you might have considered that before you impregnated your sister-in-law. Thank you for calling.”

  I mimed applause as she turned to face me. She groused, “Men. Men make me sick.”

  “Don’t they ever complain about the mean secretary who yells at them?”

  “Who cares if they do?”

  “I wish you’d been the secretary for my divorce attorney,” I sighed, pleased at the thought of Charlene ripping my stupid ex-husband a new asshole. Technically, I had been my divorce attorney’s secretary. The matter was handled by a junior associate at the firm where I used to work for the psychotic sadist.

  “I see these divorce proceedings and can’t even think what brought couples together in the first place.”

  “I wondered that myself when I was divorcing my stupid ex-husband.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember just fine. Temporary insanity.”

  Her eyebrows rose in surprise, and I couldn’t help laughing at her expression. I waved off her curious gaze, excusing myself with, “We’re just going to chalk my first marriage up as a learning experience and hope that if I get another chance, I’ll be smarter about it. Like next time, I might get a guy with an actual job.”

  “Like a detective, maybe.”

  “In my wettest dreams.” I realized what I’d said and felt my cheeks redden. To cover this female silliness, I asked her, “Was it Bryony Gilbert? Is that the name of the other woman?”

  Charlene studied me thoughtfully and tested the name. “Bryony. That one sounds right. I knew it was something Scottish sounding. Irish. Or whatever.”

  “Well, okay then. Mystery solved.”

  “Is it? Let me know what you find out.”

  *****

  This time, I wasn’t going to give the file request to Lloyd. Lloyd didn’t need to be a part of this transaction. I found a file clerk hiding behind a mountainous stack of copy machine paper and asked him to go get the file for me. The young man blinked as if I spoke a foreign language. Surely he must work here. He didn’t seem to have seen daylight in a while, though. He was small and ghostly pale.

  “I’m Carol.” I spoke slowly so as not to startle him. “I work for Bill Nestor. I’d like you to get a file for me.”

  He ducked his head and scooted toward a wobbly table that seemed to serve as his desk. He tried to give me a pink slip of paper.

  I took it and filled it out in big block letters, like writing something down for a small child.

  He didn’t understand. He looked fretfully up and down the room, reminding me of those pathetic lobsters waiting in a tank to be captured and thrown into boiling water. I did not eat lobster, and I did not like the way Lloyd scared his employees.

  “I’m Carol,” I repeated. “What’s your name?”

  “Eric,” he said. When he finally made eye contact with me I got a better fix on his age. Pre-law, so probably about twenty years old. It was so hard for kids to get jobs coming out of law school that they were willing to do things like this—work as a lowly file clerk in a big firm—just to have an extra little blurb on their resume and maybe to be able to say, “Please interview me. I slaved under Lloyd for two years so you know that no judge or jury can scare me.”

  Speaking gentl
y now, I said, “Eric, it would be a big favor to me if you’d go get this file right now.”

  Just when I thought I was going to have to get a candy bar to dangle before him (he didn’t appear to have eaten in a while), Eric broke and, checking behind him, took the request slip. “Do you think Lloyd will mind if I leave?” he asked.

  That’s when I decided that eliminating the middleman was necessary. I took the slip back and said, “You know what? I think I’ll just go get this one myself.”

  He shrunk back in terror.

  “It’s all right. You’re doing a good job. I think it might just be quicker this way.” I searched his stricken face and said, “You’re not in trouble.”

  But he didn’t believe me. I felt like I should call OSHA or something, so maybe they could assign a social worker to his case and get him a foster-boss.

  MBS&K storage is the scariest place in the building, scary in the way that library stacks can be scary, or catacombs, or a vast garden maze. A person could wander into one of these places and become lost to the world, break a leg, have a heart attack, or fall under a massive weight of old paper and just die and not be found for days. Is that a morbid way to think?

  How does one construct a place this scary in a modern office building? Take a good-sized basement room, say about as large as a union banquet hall, and fill it with flimsy soldier-rows of shelves. Then load ’em up, one box after another until they’re stuffed full of paper, plastic, cardboard, and vinyl. Do this for twenty or so years, run out of actual usable space somewhere after seven of those years, and then begin cramming what still must be made to fit wherever you can manage. The result is where I now stood, a labyrinthine crypt of flammable materials.

  God forbid anyone should ever light a cigarette in here; the radiant heat would start a catastrophic fire. Everyone in the eleven stories above would die of smoke inhalation within ten minutes because no one upstairs pays the slightest attention to alarms. I know I’m prone to sarcasm, but that’s not a joke. I’d been at work when the fire alarms went off, and people could barely be bothered to look up and say, “What the hell is that noise?” before going back to their conference calls.

  It is impossible to light a room like this correctly. The walls of paper block whatever feeble light the fluorescents produce. I don’t know how an old bastard like Lloyd can even see to find things down here, unless he traces files by their scent, which is entirely possible. I was a relative youngster with my eyesight not yet failing, and I was going to have to dive way back into the dark recesses of 2001. That’s five years of real time and five centuries of storage time. Already my skin was itching from the dust mites, an unpleasant thought.

  But I was curious now, and as I have mentioned, people will do just about anything to pass the time at work.

  *****

  When I returned to my cubicle, Bill was pacing in and out of his office door. He looked enormously relieved to see me.

  “Where have you been?” he cried. His tone was never that of a demanding boss so much as that of a worried parent. I suppose he thinks I am in the same danger as his files and documents when nobody is around to hold down the fort.

  “I was in storage,” I said. I had successfully found Bryony Gilbert’s file and now held it close to me with its file number and name not precisely in Bill’s sight. I wasn’t trying to hide information from him specifically but I was trying to hide the fact that I wasn’t working on an actual assignment. “Bill, I told you I was going to storage.”

  “But you were gone such a long time.”

  What a nut. I had been down there no more than twenty minutes. Dislike Lloyd though I may, the man did know how to keep things where they were supposed to be. My major obstacle had been that I was only five and a half feet tall and had trouble reaching the shelf where Bryony’s file was stored. Anyway when Bill got like this, when he started fussing over things that didn’t deserve fuss, the best solution was to thank him profusely for his concern.

  “I appreciate that you were keeping an eye out,” I said, slipping the file discreetly onto my desk and out of his line of sight. “That storage room is about the scariest place in the building. I’m always afraid I’ll get locked in or injured or something and then not be found for days.”

  “Is it possible to get locked in?” Things like that worried Bill very much.

  “Probably not really, but you can think all kinds of spooky thoughts when you’re actually down there.”

  “You should have a file clerk go down there. You don’t have to be messing around in storage.”

  “Oh, sometimes it’s just quicker to do it myself. Anyway I’m back now safe and sound, so what is it you needed me for?”

  “I have those letters signed and ready to go,” he said. But he was still distracted. “How could you get locked in?”

  Oh, damn it. I’d given him something to obsess over. Despite the fact that Bill would probably never have to go to storage, if I didn’t put a stop to this right now he’d worry for the next week about getting locked in down there, or me getting locked in, or someone being trapped in the storage room. I had no desire to send him into a compulsive cycle of checking, like that time he feared that there were used staples stuck in his carpet or leaves clogging the gutter outside his apartment. In this case, it would likely manifest in his going downstairs every couple hours to make sure there wasn’t anyone locked in storage.

  “You can’t get locked in,” I said. “Bill, I was being flip. I was joking around. It’s just a big room with a lot of paper. The door locks from the inside. See? I shouldn’t have said anything, but you know me, always trying to be funny.”

  He asked, “There’s no way someone could lock you inside?”

  “Absolutely not. The worst thing anyone could do,” and I had to be careful here, because I didn’t want him trying to think of worse things anyone could do, “is close the door. I’d just walk over and open it right back up again. Please calm down. Give me your letters, and I’ll get them in the mail.”

  Bill wandered thoughtfully away, a frown of concern still trying to wheedle its way onto his forehead. Had my explanation worked? I couldn’t tell for sure yet. If he started making unexplained trips downstairs, then I’d have to find a way to talk him out of the ritual. I spent enough time doing this kind of thing, and darn it, I was his secretary, not his psychiatrist.

  Of course you might not believe that, considering our history. Allow me a little time. I’ll try to explain.

  Chapter Seven

  My boss Bill wasn’t a popular man among the secretaries at the firm, and a lot of them didn’t know how he and I managed to get along so well. I was his first secretary ever to last more than seven months. We were nearing our third anniversary. He gave me glowing reviews; he was mannered, polite, and soft-spoken to me. Sometimes he was also funny.

  When a stressor jumped at him, though, he could go off the deep end into an attack of obsessive-compulsiveness. If his attack went unchecked, he could get so upset that it nearly made him sick. I lived through a couple of these attacks early on, and they scared me—for his sake, not for my own. Even at the height of his panic, his wrath was always turned inward. I was lucky to discover that in a manic state, he responded well to firm commands and gentle humor. If I could figure out the source of his anxiety, as unlikely as that source might be, I could often dispel his fears. And I did not mind. The other women found that hard to understand. Silly girls, who didn’t know the man I used to work for. Manic-but-polite neurotic beats psychotic sadist any day of the week.

  I loved working for Bill, as much as anyone can love being someone’s secretary. So why didn’t others like him? Mannered, polite, and soft-spoken though he might have been, he could drive the most patient secretary crazy with his fanatical beliefs in sameness. For Bill, disorder was not just annoying, but physically upsetting. He lost his previous secretary because she spent two days arranging for the copying and distribution of a huge legal brief with an impending deadline and, jus
t before she was about to package it all for mailing, Bill noticed that one attorney’s phone number was formatted (555) 555-5555 and another’s was formatted 1-555-555-5555 (no parentheses and the long-distance “1” glaring before it). He insisted that the entire project be redone. She worked until midnight, ended up driving it to the FedEx pickup site at the airport to make the deadline, and resigned the next day. It’s a legendary story around the office called “The Time Bill’s Secretary Quit Because of the Phone Number Thing.”

  The same situation went down differently between us. Another brief was ready to go, and the deadline loomed large. Bill meticulously prepared the document for two weeks. By then I had been over that thing with such care that I felt I knew the patterns of its word stops. It was never content that troubled Bill, but format, and this brief was so perfect in form that it had attained a spiritual beauty of its own. I wanted to keep a copy to stroke lovingly in my old age. “Oh, my lovely Appellee’s Reply Brief,” I would sigh, gazing at it, while the other inmates cherished their grandchildren’s pictures or their old love letters, “though your cover page has faded, the memory of our love never shall.”

  Bill came toward my desk, dark eyes shining with worry. As I’ve said, he responded badly to stress, and legal briefs caused him plenty of stress. They’re important documents; sometimes they can win or lose a case for you. Because Bill did estate work, he almost never had to mess with such things, except in the very few cases where disputes among heirs forced these matters to go before a court. This was one such matter. If his last secretary had only realized this and not allowed his worry to run roughshod over her, things might have worked out better between them. As he began to try this silliness with me, I could easily see that I would have to do some intervention right then and there.