Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  “Just your firstborn child,” he said. “Also a kidney, if I need it.”

  “Jason.”

  “Forget it,” he said firmly. “Let’s make that call.”

  I put on my best reporter voice for the media contact at Runnr, but she seemed unimpressed with my made-up credentials and none too happy to be confronted with yet another journalist covering sexism in Silicon Valley. “Sexual harassment claims are taken very seriously by Runnr,” she recited in the crisp, dry tones of rote memorization, “and handled promptly by HR in accordance with the highest standards of employee protection.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m wondering if you’d be willing to discuss one particular case in detail.”

  “We are not legally allowed to discuss—”

  “Her name is Amanda Dorn.”

  There was a pause.

  I tried backing off. “Perhaps you could start by confirming that she was an employee?”

  “I would have to check with our human resources department.”

  “Did Amanda Dorn file a sexual harassment claim at some point in her employment?”

  “That’s another matter for HR,” she said. “In the meantime, please consider filling out the media-request form you’ll find on our website.” The line went dead.

  Jason had been leaning forward, listening. “We should call HR before she does.”

  “Sure, good idea.” I turned to his laptop and started searching for the number on the Runnr site.

  “Let me try this time.” He looked excited, like a kid prank-calling the neighbors.

  I stared at him. It struck me that Jason had no idea of the stakes of the game we were playing. Amanda was out for blood this time, I could feel it, but to him this was just a chance to get back at an ex-girlfriend he’d never forgiven. With a slight pang I realized that he was just a little too interested in digging up dirt on Amanda. I’d known him too long to mistake the contemptuous expression on his face when he said her name for indifference. Maybe he’d been waiting for a chance to find out about her past since they’d first gotten together—in her motorcycle jacket, with her wild hair and hollowed-out eyes, she must have seemed as mysterious to him as she had to me.

  I pushed the thought firmly out of my mind. Jason had no way of knowing how much danger he was in. Unless I told him about Fash, the gun, the whole awful pact, he would never believe Amanda was capable of murder. To make him understand everything would be to confess my own shameful involvement with Amanda’s schemes, something I couldn’t do. And that conversation had the potential to bring up all kinds of things I didn’t know how to talk about with Jason—what his friend Neely had done, and even what his brother had done. I couldn’t have said exactly why I wanted to protect him from that knowledge, except that it didn’t seem fair to make Jason so angry about things in the past he’d had no control over. Far better that he saw what we were doing as nothing more than a petty game.

  I just hoped he wouldn’t find out for himself how games like that worked out.

  “Fine,” I said, handing the phone to him. “Knock yourself out.”

  Jason turned the volume all the way up so I could hear what was happening, and I leaned in close as he dialed the number.

  A high-pitched female voice answered. “Runnr human resources department, this is Callie.”

  “Hi, Callie, I’m Jason Murphy.” He sounded more confident using his real name than I had with a fake. “I’m with the website ProPublica. Have you heard of us?”

  “Of course,” Callie said. “Have you tried calling our media rep—”

  “I just talked to Renée. She sent me here to confirm some details,” he said with ostentatious seriousness. “I’m reporting a story about the costly epidemic of frivolous sexual harassment suits in Silicon Valley.” He winked at me. “We got a tip about an Amanda Dorn who used to work there. First, can you verify that she was a Runnr employee?”

  Callie’s voice grew warm and deferential. “Of course. Yes, Amanda Dorn worked here. Let me pull up her information.” After a brief pause, she read off the dates of Amanda’s two-year employment at Runnr. “Her termination was an extremely unfortunate circumstance for everyone involved. I can’t disclose the name of the employee she accused—baselessly, as an investigation into the incident revealed. But I can say that the grounds for her termination had nothing to do with that suit. In fact, a countersuit was filed against her for harassment, stalking, and illegal use of proprietary company software.”

  “I see,” Jason said, making eye contact with me and raising his brows dramatically. “Anything more you can tell me about the countersuit?”

  “Well,” she said in a lower tone, as if in confidence, “Ms. Dorn unfortunately was not a good fit from the very beginning. After a brief period of productivity here as an entry-level programmer, her supervisor, whose name I’d rather not disclose”—Branchik, I mouthed at Jason—“gave her a poor performance review, which kicked off the initial accusation. Her evidence included private photographs from the personal device of the accused. In investigating how she came by these photos, it was discovered that Ms. Dorn had been using Runnr’s proprietary code to develop her own app, an inappropriate use of company property in violation of intellectual property laws as well as the employee manual.”

  “So that’s why she was fired?” Jason prompted.

  “There was a settlement,” Callie said, pronouncing the last word as if it were something sour in her mouth. “She obviously had to leave once her theft had been revealed and her access revoked, but she refused to resign until she’d extracted a fair amount of money from Runnr in return for a nondisclosure agreement. An agreement she has obviously violated,” she said in a slightly chilly tone, “since I am speaking to a reporter now.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your taking my call. This topic is such an important one.” Jason always knew how to lay it on thick.

  “And we appreciate the chance to set the record straight,” Callie said. “Runnr is a fair company where women are treated as equals. I should know.” She went on, in a slightly warmer tone, to discuss the various benefits and accommodations she herself personally had received from Runnr during two pregnancies and a cancer scare. Next came a list of initiatives from the CEO to improve the hiring and performance of women in tech. Jason rolled his eyes and waited for her to finish.

  “Thank you so much,” he said when she took a breath. “You’ve been so helpful, and I’ll be sure to follow up if I have any further questions.”

  Sensing he was about to hang up, I mouthed a question for Callie at him. He squinted and shook his head, confused. I grabbed an envelope on the table nearby, flipped it over, wrote down three letters, and underlined them.

  “Ape?” he said out loud. “Oh, app. Sorry, my handwriting . . . what app was she working on?”

  The question must have knocked Callie off her talking points, because her response came out too rushed for me to catch more than a few words. Jason let her speak without interruption, his eyes widening. “I see, I see,” he said and gave me a thumbs-up sign.

  When she ran out of steam, he thanked her again, hung up, and grinned at me. “That last question really set her off. Apparently, in addition to ripping off the Runnr code and database for a side hustle, Amanda bugged four computers in the C-suite and collected a bunch of confidential e-mails that she threatened to release to the public.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “You have to admire her guts. Anyway, there must have been some good stuff in there, because they dropped the countersuit and settled.”

  “What do you mean, good stuff?” I frowned. “Like Doug Branchik’s dick pics?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Our friend Callie says there were rumors about his behavior around the office. Obviously, Amanda heard the rumors, saw a weak link, and filed the harassment suit against him preemptively.” I gave him a questioning look. “As a shield for the app. That way, when they found out about her theft of company code, she couldn’t be fired
without it looking like retaliation,” he explained. “Honestly, I doubt Branchik was ever even interested in her.”

  I thought of Amanda’s elaborate explanation for why we couldn’t use Branchik’s dick pics in our revenge plan. Maybe they didn’t exist. “So you think there were no pictures?”

  “Even if there were, we only have her word that they weren’t consensual. Guys like that are pretty easy to get compromising photos out of.”

  Guys like that. It rang a bell, and again I heard Amanda’s voice in my head. It was precisely how she had described Branchik the first time we met. Jason too. I drowned out that thought with another question. “Why do you think Callie got so mad when you asked about the app?”

  “It’s a touchy subject. It was highly offensive,” he said with a grimace. “Not to mention derivative. Sort of like a dating app but without the dates.” I looked at him quizzically. “Women record and rate every instance of so-called bad behavior from the men in their lives—bosses, classmates, friends of friends; the garbageman, I presume. The app uses GPS to share ratings of all the men in your area. Which is sick enough, right?” He leaned in. “But the creepiest thing is, instead of matching you to someone else who shares your love of sushi and Star Trek, it matches you to someone who qualifies for—get this—‘remote retaliation.’”

  “Remote retaliation.” The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I repeated the words.

  “Yeah. How messed up is that? Like taking out a hit on someone. The name of the app was something like You Scratch My Back . . . or, no, I’ll Get Yours . . . what was it again?”

  “Got Your Back?” I kept my face carefully averted.

  “That was it!” He snapped his fingers. “Stupid name for an app, if you ask me. It’s probably meant to be all one word, or maybe the vowels are replaced with dots or it’s capitalized funny or something.” I stayed silent and he went on. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. That’s pretty juicy, right? And definitely illegal. An app for hiring a hit man?”

  “Woman,” I corrected him mechanically. “And it wouldn’t be hiring. She’d want to make it some kind of trade or a point system. So you get out of it what you put in.”

  He gave me an odd look. “What, did she mention this revenge app to you?”

  “Not specifically,” I said, picking at a thread in my sleeve to avoid meeting his eyes. “But it’s the kind of thing she would like. The mutual responsibility, the sense of community. Like a neighborhood watch.” I was stumbling over my words.

  “You two spend a lot of time talking vigilantism?” Jason said. “She must have been pretty comfortable around you.”

  “Yeah, we were BFFs,” I snapped. “We made each other friendship bracelets and everything. Look, I’m not saying it’s not crazy.”

  “Batshit crazy,” he said emphatically. “And, more to the point, illegal. What do you want to bet she’s still working on some version of that thing? If we got hold of her computer and turned it over to the FBI—”

  “We don’t have her computer,” I pointed out. “It’s in Austin with her, last time I checked. And anyway, as long as the app’s not finished and she’s never taken it public, she could probably claim it was just a joke.”

  “A real laugh riot.” Jason turned his face away. “Ruining men’s lives.”

  “Presumably, the men who got their lives ruined would have ruined some women’s lives first,” I couldn’t help adding.

  “Based on hearsay.” He looked back at me in disbelief. “Don’t tell me you’re on her side in this.”

  “I’m on your side,” I said quickly. “All I’m saying is—think about it, Jason. Why was it so easy for Amanda to set up Branchik?”

  “Because of rumors.”

  “Yeah, rumors,” I said. “That’s what it’s called when women warn each other in private.”

  “But most of those rumors are completely made-up,” Jason said. “They’re just gossip.”

  “Maybe a few of them,” I said. “But for every woman who makes up rumors about guys like that, I bet there are ten who didn’t even tell their closest friends what happened to them. They were embarrassed and ashamed, so they just put their heads down and kept quiet.” Or flunked out, or moved away, or hid in the spotlight. Told their secrets to a microphone.

  He was staring at me, speechless, his expression unreadable.

  “I’m not saying I agree with her.” My voice had gotten higher, and I took a moment to think about what I did mean. “I’m just saying, I get why someone would—fantasize.”

  “Fantasize? About what?” He looked at me with horror bordering on revulsion. “About doing what, Dana?”

  I thought of Fash. Aaron Neely. Mattie. I thought of what was on Carl’s computer screen that night. About the power men fantasize about. Power over women like me, women like Amanda. For some, it was more than a fantasy. It was something they did in the dark, in basements and back seats, and even in sunny daylit offices, because they were confident that no one would care.

  No one important, anyway.

  “I’m on your side,” I repeated helplessly.

  “Forget it. I have to get to the restaurant. I’m late for work as it is.” Jason grabbed his keys off the counter and started for the door. Then he turned around. “Do me a favor? If this app thing isn’t really so bad, this plan of Amanda’s to orchestrate a massive network of revenge crimes, then find me something worse by the time I get back. Something we can use.” He left, slamming the door behind him.

  It was all I could do not to laugh. He had no idea how much worse it got. It was just a matter of finding something that wouldn’t drag me down too.

  19

  “Hey, Kim, it’s Dana,” I said quickly, knowing my new burner would come up looking weird on her caller ID. I’d been saving the call for when Jason left, hoping she could turn up some new details for me, something to link Fash’s suicide to Amanda. “Just checking in. I’m sorry about getting off the phone so fast last time. The Fash thing just hit me really hard.”

  “I get it,” Kim said shortly, and I winced. She had, after all, been the one to find his body. “The police came around again yesterday. They keep coming back at me with more questions. Something’s wrong.”

  “You think?” It came out sarcastic, but Kim wouldn’t mind. After having to hide what had happened with Fash from Jason, just talking to someone who knew about it was a relief.

  “I mean, more wrong than we thought,” Kim said. “Like, maybe it wasn’t suicide after all.”

  “Murder?” Somehow I wasn’t as shocked as I should have been. Amanda had been perversely offended when I suggested she’d pulled the trigger herself, as if it were too crude an intervention for her, but what I’d seen in the Neely video hadn’t been subtle. “Who would have wanted Fash dead?” Not me. I hadn’t wanted that, I argued silently with myself.

  “I have no idea,” Kim said, and I rubbed at my tense neck muscles, trying to ease the ache. “But there’s something strange happening in the Austin scene. There’ve been rumors going around about Aaron Neely too. Remember how he ghosted on the Funniest Person contest? One of the other judges staying at the same hotel saw him checking out, and they said he was limping, leaning on his assistant, wearing dark glasses to cover up bruises. He looked like he’d been hit by a truck.” I had a pretty good idea of what he’d looked like, having seen the video. “It’s all over the forums. One guy who’s worked with him before is ready to swear it was a drug deal gone wrong.”

  I almost laughed, thinking of Aaron and his smoothies, his performatively clean lifestyle. “Sounds like he was hiding something, all right,” I agreed in what I hoped were vague enough terms.

  “The point is, that’s two people directly connected with the contest put out of commission within weeks of each other.”

  I let my breath out with a whistle, as if the thought had never occurred to me. “So was Fash into drugs? Do they think the contest is a front for something?” I hated myself for trying to throw Kim off the sc
ent, but by design, every act of violence committed by Amanda could more easily be traced to me than to her. I had to find out what I could without letting Kim get too close to the truth.

  “It does look suspicious. I think that’s why the cops keep sniffing around us.”

  “Us?” My neck tensed again. “You mean you and me?”

  “They keep calling me, asking where you are.” I stifled the desire to cut her off and ask for specifics. “We were the two runners-up in the contest. Either they’re worried about our safety, or—”

  “Or they’re checking out possible motives,” I finished. I remembered something she had said in the last conversation: There was blood everywhere. “Do they really think we would ice our friend for a crack at first place in some local contest?”

  “‘Friend’ is stretching it,” she said wryly, the old Kim for a minute. But the laugh that followed sounded hollow. “Anyway, I did tell you I’d kill myself if I didn’t do well this year. I guess it’s not that big a leap to imagine I’d kill someone else.”

  There was a pause as I took this in. Men like Fash drove women out of the scene all the time. All I had done was try to find a way to drive a man out for once. If I happened to benefit from it—if I was now, technically, the funniest standup in Austin—did that constitute a motive? I shook my head. I couldn’t have a motive for a crime I didn’t commit.

  Then something occurred to me. “Kim, you found him in his apartment, right?” There was silence. “How did you get in?”

  “The door was unlocked,” she said. “Some of his friends were worried about his posts on the forums, and since I’d been the last to see him, I volunteered to go check on him. I knocked for a long time before I tried the door.” Her voice caught, and she took a deep breath. “Last time I ever walk into somebody’s house like that.”

  It was beginning to sound to me like a setup. Kim had been the last to see Fash and the first to find him. She had walked right into the scene of the crime. Amanda didn’t need to have been at Chacha’s on the final night of the contest; she could have overheard us talking about Fash in the bathroom over my bugged phone. What if she’d bugged Fash’s phone too? Maybe she knew he had been pounding on Kim’s door that night, had listened in as he cried and screamed at her to let him in. Maybe Amanda had taken it upon herself to punish both of them: Fash, for what he’d done to Kim, and Kim, for her silence.