seat, Joy hopped into the back, and they quickly drove away.
“Will anybody see me in here?” she asked, leaning forward.
“Won’t matter. We’ll change the vehicle after lunch,” Galen said.
“You realize that, since you guys showed up, it feels like I’m being watched all the time?”
Johan, who was driving, caught her gaze in the rearview mirror. “Seriously?”
“Yes. At first, I kept turning around, and the women finally snapped at me because I was bugging them. But it just feels wrong.”
“And it’s from behind you in your office?”
She nodded. “And, yeah, I did look but didn’t see any cameras or anything terribly obvious.”
“Interesting,” they murmured.
“Other than that, it’s been really quiet,” she said. “Almost too quiet.”
“In what way?”
“Normally I would have meetings with my section boss once a day, or every couple days at least, just touching base to see what’s happening with my work, that type of thing. James has avoided me entirely this week.”
“Well, today’s Friday, so it will be interesting to see what he’s like next week.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Something just feels wrong.”
“Good point,” Johan said. “We’ll be doing some work in the office over the weekend.”
“They’re letting you in?”
“Well, we do have a pretty high security clearance,” he said, “but we’ll be doing a lot of it through remote access.”
“That makes more sense,” she said. “Did you guys have a reason for bringing me outside the office for lunch?”
“We would wait until the end of the day,” he said, “but we figured we’d start now.”
Not liking the mysterious way they’d explained it, she said, “Well, I hope I get lunch at the same time.”
They burst out laughing. “We’ll go to a restaurant up ahead,” Johan said, pulling into a restaurant parking lot.
They hopped out. It was one of those casual café places and kind of noisy. She was surprised; obviously they wouldn’t be talking about anything to do with work in this place.
They quickly ordered lunch, paid for it, and headed for a table at a far corner, where it was quieter, carrying a little wooden card with a number on it. They placed it on the table so the server could find them when their order was ready.
She glanced around and said, “I don’t know this place.”
“Not a surprise if you haven’t had much time to get out yet,” Johan said.
“Since I started working, there hasn’t been any time at all.”
“What do you do when you go home?” Johan asked casually.
“Laundry and cooking,” she said promptly. “Grocery shopping too because I never seem to get enough at once, and I’m still trying to find stores that carry some of my favorite foods. By the time I get home, I’m usually too tired for much else.”
They nodded, and a long silence ensued.
Finally she couldn’t stand it any longer. “Did you guys find anything?” she whispered.
“Yep,” they both said.
“But it goes deep,” came the response from Galen.
She sagged in her chair. “I was so hoping that you wouldn’t find anything, that it was all just a clerical error.”
“But you also knew it wasn’t,” Johan said, “and that’s why you contacted Kai.”
“Yeah. I should call her. I think I’m due for a girls’ night out.” She reached up to rub her temples. “Will I have to look for a new job?”
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Galen said. “Not too sure how the company will rebound after all this becomes public.”
“It’ll become public?” she asked in horror. “They hire an awful lot of people. I’d hate to think they could all lose their jobs over this.”
“Well, what we don’t know at the moment,” Johan said, “is how many people are involved.”
She turned up her nose at that. “Over 240 staff work there,” she said, “so I can’t imagine that very many have anything to do with the issue we’re dealing with.”
“No, but we’ll probably find one in every department,” he said. “How else do you hide office theft otherwise?”
She thought about it and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe someone just in accounting and somebody who had physical access to nick the drugs.”
“What about the purchaser who brings it in?” Johan threw it out there for her to think about. “What if the research lab is bringing in way more than they need and charging Westgroup for it, and then only so much is showing up on the shelves?”
“That’s possible, but then I wouldn’t have seen it noted as inventory, and, in that case, it wouldn’t have gone missing,” she said slowly. “So, that doesn’t make a whole lot