He slipped the key back into his pocket. Tomorrow he would listen before acting. It was the promise he had made to himself long before Victoria Hale ever learned his name.
Victoria returned to Chicago that Sunday with the uncomfortable feeling that her company had continued operating while she had only been looking at its reflection. Her messages were full of confident reassurances. Adrian wrote that the analyst issue was contained. Marcus said the company had adequate liquidity. The corporate communications director wanted to know whether she should respond to a journalist asking about a large investor's interest in a special shareholder meeting. Everyone wanted her to approve a sentence. Nobody wanted to sit down and examine what the sentences concealed.
She called Frances Wu, the independent director who chaired Hale Meridian's audit committee. Frances had spent twenty-five years investigating failures in banks and public companies, and she had a habit of refusing to be hurried. When Victoria explained the connection between Daniel Carter and Northstar, Frances did not gasp. She asked for the dates of the ownership disclosures, the dates of Daniel's employee concerns, and the names of the people who had evaluated his conduct.
"Have you seen his original report?" Frances asked.
"Yes."
"Did you read it before signing the termination?"
Victoria stared at the darkened window of her home office. "No."
"Then I suggest we begin there, not with the value of his shareholding. A company that can disregard an ordinary employee's evidence has a problem even when that employee turns out to own nothing at all."
It was precisely the kind of answer Victoria had not wanted to hear. She had hoped Frances would tell her that a complicated shareholder dispute could be solved through clever procedure. Instead, the older woman was asking whether she had done the most basic part of her job.
The next morning, Victoria invited Frances and two outside attorneys to a meeting in a conference room that had no Hale Meridian executives on the guest list. She turned over Daniel's report, his employment correspondence, the original vendor contracts, and the current proposal to sell Meridian's industrial service division. She also asked the board secretary to preserve all relevant records and suspend routine deletion schedules for the accounts under review. Frances insisted that the review report directly to the independent directors, not to Adrian Voss.
The first uncomfortable discovery came before lunch. The internal ethics hotline had received four complaints about the same vendor network during the previous year. Two were from procurement employees. One was from an accounts-payable clerk who questioned why a supplier's bank information changed immediately before a major transfer. One was from an engineer who said a supposedly completed installation had never occurred. All four complaints had been marked resolved after reviews conducted by Hale Meridian's legal department.
"Did the audit committee see these?" Victoria asked.
The board secretary searched the meeting archives. "Only abbreviated quarterly summaries. They were categorized as administrative issues."
Frances adjusted her glasses. "By whom?"