Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery by Maria Schneider Read Free Book Online Page B

because Sean was fielding all related phone calls for me as my lawyer, but I was certain the police had questions. Close enough for this war.
    My answer caught Cary off guard, but he was nothing if not persistent. “Why couldn’t you find the time to come in and pick up another phone?”
    I wasn’t ready for that question, but I rallied quickly. “I didn’t want to look like some crazed guilty person by returning to the scene of the crime.” I nodded, liking this lie. “You know they say the killer always does that, and what if the police thought me coming in on a weekend was suspicious? Everyone else was testing from home.” I shook my head. “No, I wouldn’t dare mess with a crime scene.”
    “The project is already late! Companies that don’t deliver on time get shut down. The police cannot be allowed to interfere with our schedule!”  He jabbed his finger in the air to punctuate his point.
    “Does this mean you won’t be able to pull the schedule in three weeks like you promised?” Monique demanded.  “You committed to that schedule! I’ve already told the marketing team you would do it.”
    “That’s impossible,” Kovid muttered.  “We just requested an extra month.”
    Monique probably wasn’t supposed to hear that comment.  She sputtered and slammed her coffee cup on the counter.
    I marched off down the hallway, my head held high.  Okay. The seamstress job was now looking like a match made in heaven.  A bloody, pin-pricked, crooked, unraveling seam type of match, but even Huntington wasn’t this big of an ass when it came to managing.  Had Cary deliberately tried to humiliate me in front of my co-workers, or had he planned on firing me right there in front of the others? Was there not a job on this earth I could keep???
    The first message in my inbox was definitely a Monday message.  I was “invited” to a mandatory code review at nine.  I hadn’t been at work ten minutes and the news was only slightly better than a dead body.
    A code review wasn’t entirely unusual except in this case it was the engineer calling his own code review.  Engineers hated code reviews more than having their computer break down right as they are about to score the big Wizard level in the latest computer game. Code reviews were the equivalent of a colonoscopy, only slightly worse because you had to stay awake.
    I sighed. Roscoe had scheduled his review for four straight hours. Was he crazy?
    Apparently he was. I blasted through my emails and, determined to be able to say I had done some testing should Cary attack me again, I downloaded the latest code on no less than three test phones.
    There wasn’t much time before the meeting, but testing three phones at once had to count for something.
    The phone assistant readily played various songs when I made my verbal request. The voice correctly reported stock prices and provided directions to a nearby store when I asked.  I moved to my favorite list of oddball test questions.
    “Borgot assistant, what is the meaning of life?”
    There was a longer pause than normal, but the robotic phone voice finally came up with an answer. “The reading material on the subject appears to have no plot, but many pages.”
    “You know I didn’t ask you for the meaning of my life, right?” I had a plot.  I even had a burgeoning romance. 
    “Verily.”
    That was a new answer.  “Verily?  Who programmed this thing with that word?” I looked up “verily” just to be certain the phone wasn’t equivocating or insulting me by using an obscure definition of the word.
    Monique, with her lovely spandex pants, hurried by my cube. “Time’s up,” I muttered.
    The phone answered me.  “You may delay, but time will not.”
    “What?”
    “Benjamin Franklin,” the phone replied.
    I shut the thing off.
    Several of my colleagues had already arrived by the time I slid into my seat. Oddly, Lawrence, the executive attorney, was in attendance.  Of course, he sat at the head