Chapter 5 - THE PEOPLE WHO WERE TOO AFRAID TO SPEAK
By the next morning, word had traveled through the warehouse faster than forklifts.
Everyone knew Derek had been suspended by the CEO herself.
That changed the temperature of the building.
People who had spent months looking at the floor when he passed now lifted their heads a little. Not fully. Not safely. But enough to notice.
Catherine was already on-site when I arrived. I was directed again to Conference Room B, where Mel Grant and the acting HR manager were taking statements from floor workers.
Mara Diaz from receiving caught me by the vending machines before my turn came.
Mara had been at Morrison longer than I had and knew every shipment lane, vendor quirk, and overtime scam within a hundred miles.
“You tell them about Bay 4?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She glanced down the hall and lowered her voice.
“You’re not the only one Derek was building paperwork on.”
That stopped me.
“What do you mean?”
“He asked for my missed-scan reports last month, Luis’s overtime forms two weeks ago, and your attendance history last week. Only difference is yours came with more questions.”
“Questions about what?”
“About money,” she said. “About whether you were behind on bills. About whether you needed extra hours. About whether you’d ever sell equipment if things got bad enough.”
I stared at her.
“He asked you that?”
She gave me a dry look. “Not directly. Derek likes to circle before he bites.”
Before I could say anything else, Luis Mendoza from packing joined us. He kept his voice low too.
“Last Thursday Derek told me to reload two damaged cartons onto an emergency truck and not update the manifest,” he said. “When I said that wasn’t right, he told me to decide whether I wanted to be ‘team-oriented’ or not.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
Luis let out a humorless laugh. “Tell who? Him?”
That was the real damage Derek had done. Not just falsifying things, if that was what he was doing. He had trained an entire warehouse to swallow what it saw because paychecks were fragile and management wasn’t.
When my statement was done, Catherine called me aside.
“Three other employees independently mentioned you noticing discrepancies,” she said. “They also all said Mr. Collins seemed unusually interested in your financial situation.”
I felt heat crawl up my neck. “I’m late sometimes. I have bills. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“No,” she said. “It means you were vulnerable. That matters.”
The way she said it made my stomach drop.
Because I suddenly realized what kind of man Derek was.
May you like
Not one who chose random targets.
One who chose the easiest ones.
