the first business card she had printed when Hayes Transportation was little more than a bus and a borrowed parking space. He remembered the words beneath the company name: Every passenger matters. He had regarded the slogan as sentimental when he was twenty, and now he wondered whether his sophisticated business reporting was less useful than the principle behind it.
At nine the next morning, Derek Lawson sat in a conference room with a human resources adviser, a company representative, and an attorney of his choosing. He was wearing the same expensive watch he had worn during both encounters with Gloria, and he had prepared a statement describing the first visit as an attempted inventory protection incident. He insisted that he had made a reasonable effort to establish whether a visitor was qualified to purchase commercial vehicles. He described the catalog as an accidental drop and the barrier as an ordinary precaution.
The video made those explanations difficult to maintain. It showed Derek holding the catalog before deliberately releasing it toward the floor near Gloria, then watching her look down without offering to pick it up. It showed him reaching toward her near the van while she stood short of the door. It showed the barriers being installed immediately after the exchange, not as part of a scheduled product presentation. When the interviewer asked why he had threatened to tow a properly parked vehicle during a confirmed appointment, Derek had no answer that did not return to his assumptions about Gloria's appearance.
"I was trying to protect the business," he said finally. "People come in pretending to be buyers all the time. You have to use judgment." Fiona regarded him across the table.
"What objective information did you use?" she asked. "Did you review a purchase application, ask about the company, verify the appointment, or consult the fleet request?" Derek looked toward his attorney. He had done none of those things.
"I brought in numbers," he said after a pause. "My results speak for themselves." "Your results are part of your employment record," Fiona answered. "So is the way you treated customers and coworkers.
They aren't separate matters." Derek's shoulders tightened. He had been confident that a branch could not afford to lose a top producer. For the first time he began to suspect that management had stopped accepting the calculation on which that confidence rested.
Kelsey's interview was shorter but no easier. She described herself as someone who had been following instructions, and there was truth in the imbalance of authority between a receptionist and a senior salesperson. But the footage and her own written statement showed choices that were hers: laughing at Gloria, joining in the remarks about the bus, bringing the stanchions without questioning the reason, and encouraging Derek to call a tow truck while an appointment was visible in the system. The investigator asked whether she would have behaved the same way if she had known Gloria was Malcolm's mother.