There was nothing, which I found more suspicious than if there was some bad-mouthing. So I accessed some web archive sites to see if there were any deleted tweets or posts of interest.”
“How did you do that?” Jessie asked.
“There are several sites that archive tweets, posts, and Instagram stories. A few take periodic screenshots. It gets a little complicated and I can give you a primer later. But here’s the point. I found one I think you’ll be interested in. It’s from a design associate at OTB named Annie Cole, dated ten twenty-one a.m. on January first.”
Ryan and Jessie came over to screen and looked at the tweet. It read:
Can’t believe what happened last nite. Boss cornered me at New Year’s Party at The Portico. Hit on me. When I said no, tried pull my skirt down. Scary stuff. #meto.
“She misspelled ‘me too,’” Ryan noted.
“Amazingly, that may be the only reason we don’t already know about this,” Jamil replied. “If she’d typed the hashtag correctly, it would have joined all the others in that trending topic and there’s no way it would have stayed hidden. Multiple people would have taken screenshots and done research. Considering that she mentions The Portico, where they held the party, it would have been traced back to Cunningham within hours. But because she deleted it less than fifteen minutes after posting it on New Year’s Day morning, it slipped under the radar. Unless you knew to specifically look for something like this, there’s no way you’d ever find it.”
“Okay,” Jessie said, her mind working faster than she could get the words out, “so she deleted the tweet. But I think we can safely assume that wasn’t the end of it. Clearly sometime between January first and January ninth she made the decision to file a complaint against Cunningham. And it would appear that she was convinced to withdraw the complaint by the end of business the next day, which suggests some furious legal wrangling during that time, leading to the settlement agreement on January fourteenth.”
“Right,” Ryan agreed, following her logic. “And once the settlement was agreed to, surely including requirements of confidentiality, the company was free to start the process of quietly jettisoning Cunningham.”
Jamil jumped in.
“Interestingly, on January fifteenth, the day after the settlement was finalized, Annie Cole posted an Instagram story saying she was leaving OTB and moving back to her hometown of Kansas City to start her own boutique. That timing can’t be coincidental.”
“Nope,” Jessie agreed. “And neither was the timing of OTB’s plan to flood their website with press releases and slip in the notification about Cunningham’s changed status. OTB is a publicly traded company. They’re required to disclose details like management changes. So they mention a revised role for him, and then six days later make a passing reference to him retiring early. No one even notices.”
“Someone noticed,” Ryan said, looking at his own computer screen.
“Who?” Jamil asked.
“Cunningham. After he ‘retired,’ he had a real run of bad luck. He transferred all his stock options to an unknown individual. I’m guessing that might have been part of the settlement with Annie Cole. Irina divorced him and got the house. He had to move into an apartment in Westchester, which he was subsequently evicted from. He even had his car impounded. He was also briefly institutionalized, involuntarily, for self-harm. It seems that a few months after he moved out Irina found him in their bathtub. He’d taken a bunch of pills. He spent time at the hospital physically recovering before being transferred to a longer-term care facility. He was only released a couple of weeks ago.”
“Where is he now?” Jessie asked.
“No idea,” Ryan said. “He dropped off the radar after leaving the hospital.”
“Maybe we should check in with Irina to see if she’s seen him or can give some insight into where he might hide out,” Jessie suggested, pulling up her contact information and calling her cell phone.
“Straight to voicemail,” she said, frustrated.
They all sat at their desks silently for a moment.
“Wait, I have an idea,” Jamil said suddenly, picking up his own phone.
“I kind of like this kid,” Ryan muttered to Jessie, who nodded in agreement.
“Hi, Nancy,” Jamil said, pausing briefly for a reply before continuing, “Yes, I’m sorry, I know it’s late. But you were so helpful with those folks from LAPD before that I was hoping to impose on you again.”
Another pause as the voice of Nancy from the MBSHOA could be heard on the other end of the