Dead End Job (6 page)

“Just have some coffee or something, because this stuff will make you sleepy,” I warned him, reaching for my purse. As I opened it, Martin let out a very gay gasp.

“Oh My God! I forgot to tell you!”

“What?”
Lord
,
I can’t put up with a
Dancing with the Stars
recap right now.
I took a deep breath and handed him the pill.

“There’s a position on the internal job board I’m posting next week that I think you would be perfect for. I’ll totes send you the details after I take this little baby. It’s a new coordinator position for the big merger with NorCom PR. You would be able to work out of our office part of the time, but most of the work would be down in Portland. You love travelling! It’s totes perfect for you. It’s hush-hush, though, so don’t say anything until it’s actually posted. I’ll send you the email.”

“Uh, K thanks, Hon.” I had serious doubts that I would be considered for the position. Admins were always looked over for promotions and raises. I’d discovered over the past eighteen months that being an admin was the kiss of death for someone who wanted a career in consulting. If you were hired on as an admin, it didn’t matter what your contribution was, you were not going to get a promotion.  Most likely, a twenty-three-year-old fresh out of university would be brought on for the job you applied for and paid 30% more than you with bonuses.

When Martin walked away, and I went back to my aimless internet wandering, this time looking at the five-day weather forecast for June sixteenth through the twenty-first. Rain and 63, partly-sunny 62, partly-sunny 64, rain 61, scattered showers and 65. This not-so-sunny outlook matched my mood. When Martin emailed me the job description a little while later, I just rolled my eyes, choosing to not open the email. I preferred instead to browse my favorite gossip site and ignore the phone calls that I kept getting from Elaine, our psychotic department head, who had flown out to Manhattan the night before. I didn’t know if I should be complimented or insulted, but Elaine’s narcissism made her assume that I always knew exactly what and who she was talking about, often without any key facts or explanations offered. I didn’t have the energy this morning to push back, so I went along with Elaine’s email, which, as always, lacked clarity and detail of any kind:
              “Find Sarah. Need call.”
              Sarah was an important Principal in our group—not only was she second-in-line behind Elaine for the office head position, but she also supervised most of the staff. Her status gave her the dubious prestige of working out of the office right next to Elaine’s at the west corner of the building, near the back entrance. Because I was in the very center of the building, I rarely saw her unless we had a team meeting or I ran into her at the ladies room. That was OK with me—she was one of those people who didn’t seem to possess the social skills needed to determine whether the person you were speaking to was actually interested in the conversation. Poor Sarah also had terrible timing. Being a very sweet and verbose woman, she had made several sad attempts to befriend me and the other twenty-somethings in the office, but despite her best efforts, we could not be sold on her endless rambling stories about her children’s softball games or her husband’s attempts at home remodeling. So about three months ago, she just stopped making the effort. I don’t think anyone besides me really noticed too much of a difference, because Sarah was the head attorney in our group, so her schedule was always crazy. Between the merger and her kids’ softball games, at any hour of the day it seemed that she was either working or bussing some snot-nosed brat around to a tournament or practice. I often saw emails coming in from her after midnight and before 6:00 AM.

I hadn’t noticed her around this morning, but I figured that this was just because I had spent most of my morning feeling bad for myself and generally zoning out. I was tired, so I just called her extension, even though I know how ridiculously lame that was when her office was only about fifty steps away. No answer. Damn it. I got up and headed over to her office to see if I could flag her down for Elaine’s “very important” client call.

There was absolutely no one on her side of the building. We were pretty empty anyway—after the major staffing cuts that happened a few years earlier we had six empty cubicles and two empty offices in the immediate vicinity. The IT group kept trying to move over to the empty area, but Elaine had convinced our office services group somehow that we “really needed the space,” and she even had Mark put things in the cubicles and offices that made them look like they were being used. When I reached the back of the office I noticed that Michelle, Laura, and Nathan, the three analysts who were usually there, along with the Associates Maya and Priti as well as Elaine’s admin Mark, who sat at this end of the office, were either not in yet, or out of town to meet clients somewhere in our huge Northwest territory.

I slid open the door to Sarah’s office, expecting her to be on a call, but there was no one sitting at the desk. The office was set up so she could view people as they walked in, with one chair behind the desk and two chairs in front – a pretty typical layout for someone who works with clients. She also had a huge window behind her desk that looked out on Elliot Bay, and there were pictures drawn by her elementary school-aged kids hung on the walls, along with snapshots of her family and dog. Her laptop was sitting open on the desk, and there were papers spread out all over the surface and some on the floor. Her purse was also there, but the contents had been dumped on the back of the desk in a little pile: wallet, lipstick, a bottle of allergy medicine, tissues. Plopped right on the floor near the office door, the rolling suitcase she used every day was tipped over, partially-blocking the entrance to the office. Then I noticed there was also something spilled all over the floor of the office, an almost-black liquid that pooled out from underneath the desk and spread out in a four-foot-wide circle that crept towards the office door. 

“Sarah?” I asked weakly. No answer. I stepped around the back of the desk.

The realization that the liquid was blood happened at the same instant that I stepped around the desk to see Sarah sprawled out on the floor, face down. 

She was a tall woman, so while her head and upper body were slumped almost all the way underneath her desk, her lower body poked out into the sitting area. Her feet were splayed against the file cabinet behind her desk.  She wore her usual dumpy brown JC Penney suit and the kind of black leather, square-toed boots that had gone out of style a decade ago. When I stepped around the to the back of her desk I could see that her mousy brown hair was matted with blood, which had dripped from a huge, gruesome injury on the back of her head down the side of her face and colored her pale skin dark red. The sheer amount of liquid that had spilled out of her head and spread all over the floor behind the desk made it apparent to me that there was no way that Sarah Lieber was alive.

I was frozen on the spot for what seemed like hours, a wave of massive and crippling anxiety settling on my body and weighing me down like chain mail.
Move, Louisa, Move!
My thoughts screamed at my useless body. I stood over Sarah, frozen for agonizing seconds. Then suddenly, cutting through the silence, I heard myself take a raggedy, long breath. I felt a second of relief-until I heard an ear-piercing scream fill the office. At the same moment that I thought to myself that the noise was horrible, I also realized that it was me who was making it. The office seemed to darken around me as I fainted right there on the floor.

Chapter 5: Sign Here, Stupid

“Ohhhmyyyygoddddd, Ohhhmyyyygoddddd, Ohhhmyyyygoddddd!!!!!!!!! Louisa wake up, wake up! What happened to Sarah? Ohhmyyyygodddd!!!!!!” 

Apparently the Ativan hadn’t been strong enough to prepare Martin for this particular situation. He was hunched over me on the floor outside of Sarah’s office, holding my head in his lap, and was fanning my face, but the physical effort had caused him to start sweating, so I woke up to his double chin and two soaking wet armpits above my head. He still smelled faintly like vodka and French onion chips, but now the overwhelming odor was sweat, and I could see droplets forming on his forehead that were making their way down his face onto his chin, threatening to dislodge and drop into my eyes and mouth.

Personally, I was confused. Part of me felt groggy and really wanted to get away from Martin, go home, and get to bed. Unfortunately, the other part of me was screaming about the issue of a dead body in the office—a dead body that
I
had found.

Even though the floor had been empty when I’d initially found Sarah, by now there were dozens of employees milling around our area, horrified, interested, and puzzled. Many of their faces I’d never even seen before. Some were staring into Sarah’s office, and they were all whispering and staring at me. It seemed like they were stuck, like children, waiting for instructions. When the entire law enforcement entourage suddenly poured into the office from the front entrance, headed by a ghost white but still relatively composed receptionist, the group of people wandering around our corner of the building grew even larger. In the crowd I spotted Mr. Curtis, Martin’s boss, among the other group leaders, with a gaggle from HR and even more of Merit’s employees. It seemed like everyone came in at the same time, and there were at least six uniformed officers, the officials from CSI, the coroner and his assistant, three plain-clothes detectives, and the police sergeant who was the ranking uniformed officer on the scene.

I studied the police officers. The head detective was a very petite Asian woman with long, sleek, black hair, worn down and cut in a sharp line below her shoulder blades. She had ivory skin, with a perfect dusting of rose blush, immaculate and subtle eye makeup and a well-tailored, grey wool skirt-suit with a deep purple blouse. Her tiny fingernails were cut into perfect ovals, and she was wearing sky-high black patent heels with no scuffs. She was anywhere from twenty-five to forty-five years old, but because of her Asian genes and perfect skin, it was impossible to tell her age exactly. 

In direct contrast were the other two detectives. One was an extremely obese man in his fifties wearing an un-tucked Hawaiian shirt, whose overtaxed buttons were straining to hold in his protruding and visibly hairy belly. He probably weighed close to three-hundred fifty pounds, and his heavy breathing was so strained it made me worry that he would drop dead at any minute, and then there would be two bodies to deal with.

The third detective was a Hispanic woman in her early thirties. She was wearing athletic clothing, probably just coming from the gym, where she obviously spent lots of time. She was at least 5’10” and had her hair pulled up in a tight braid. You could see that under her fleece jacket and black lululemon pants that she was bulging with huge muscles and scant body fat. She was completely flat in the chest, and had a classic-looking but faded tattoo of a rose with thorns poking out above her sports bra strap on her left breast. Her lips were full and naturally rosy and her eyes were deep brown, almost black, with the kind of long black lashes that don’t need mascara. Despite her attractive features there was something in her demeanor that was extremely intimidating—the type of woman you wouldn’t mess with.
              Because I knew it was inevitable that I would be talking to one of these three people very soon, I was trying to decide which one of them I would least dislike dealing with and realized that I would really rather not speak to any of them. Of course, I would really rather not have seen a dead body either, but my feelings on the matter at this point were irrelevant.

I sighed deeply and watched unmoving as the Asian detective took charge of the scene and started barking orders at the other two detectives, who in turn gave orders to the uniformed officers. They spread out amongst the group of employees and started asking each one the same set of questions: name, position at Merit, relationship to the deceased, how they found out about the incident, and so on. I could see a couple of them point to me during these conversations, including Martin. The CSI people went directly into the office and started snapping photographs of Sarah’s body and putting little yellow numbers next to each piece of paper strewn around the scene, and all of the items from Sarah’s purse and desk, taking pictures of everything, trying to collect evidence. 

I waited around for a minute for some kind of instructions, but when no one spoke to me, I numbly got up and forced myself to walk back over to my cube. I sat down, shaken and still confused by what had transpired. Although my adrenaline was running in full gear, all I wanted was to get the hell out of the office and head home to a nice, warm bed, about six Ativans and a twenty hour nap.

The petite Asian detective spoke in hushed tones with a group that included the building manager, the business leader of our office, an HR representative, the receptionist and the police sergeant. After a few minutes, the sergeant approached my desk and kneeled down like a person talking to small child.

“Louisa, my name is Rocky,” he said in a purposefully gentle, soothing voice. “I understand you were the person to find Sarah Lieber’s body this morning. I realize that what you have gone through has been pretty traumatic, so we are going to make this as painless as possible. If it’s all right with you, I would like to take you down to the station to answer a couple of questions, and then we will get you home. OK?”

I nodded, but my body would not respond when I tried to get up and go. I just sat there, virtually catatonic. I think I was still nodding when Rocky realized that this was going to take more than simple coaching.

“Is this your bag?’ He picked up the cheap, tan, vinyl handbag that I’d dropped on the floor of my cube. Instead of waiting for me to respond, he took my left hand, put his other hand on my back and gently pulled me up. I followed him, still silent. He swung my purse over his shoulder and we walked out together, still holding hands.