“You are Ramona Oakley, right?” Marcel asked, greeting the young woman who walked into his office.
Nervousness showed on her face. “Yes, but I don’t know what this is about. I’ve never gotten into any trouble, not even a parking ticket. Except for that one time I received a citation for swimming topless on the beach, but that was four years ago. Why would anyone from the FBI want to talk to me?”
Topless on the beach? Marcel cleared his throat. “Please have a seat, Ms. Oakley. I’m Marcel Eaton, Special Agent for the FBI, and my division is handling the trade-secret violations at Granger Aeronautics. I would like to ask you a few questions.”
“All right, but I don’t know what I can tell you. I was shocked like everyone else when Mr. Freeman, Mr. Carrington and Ms. Swanson were arrested. Who would have thought? And then for one of the company attorneys, that man named Vidal Duncan, to try to kill Jace Granger. He had to have been demented or something to think he could get away with it.”
She paused to take a deep breath and then asked, “So what would you like to ask me?”
Marcel leaned back in his chair. “Just the routine questions to get a feel of what you do at Granger. And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to record our conversation.”
She smiled. “I don’t mind being recorded. I think that’s cool. And telling you what I do at Granger Aeronautics is easy. I work on payroll, and I love my job, crunching all those numbers, and knowing at the end of the week everyone will get a paycheck because I’ve taken my job seriously and made sure they get paid, and on time. There are ten of us in my department.” Ramona paused to take a breath.
Marcel nodded, thinking the young woman was definitely chatty. Almost too chatty. He decided to get down to the reason she had been asked to come in. “Ms. Oakley, we recently checked several computers in your work area, and it seems that yours has software on it that was not installed by Granger.”
Ramona Oakley blinked, startled. “That’s impossible. I don’t put anything on my computer. It’s against company policy. Everyone knows that. The only thing I do every once in a while is listen to my music. That’s permissible and makes a long day go by faster.”
“You download your music onto the company computer?”
“No. That’s not permitted, either. Granger provides us with unrestricted music channels. I enjoy pop music, and that’s the site I listen to.”
Marcel nodded. “And how do you listen to your music?”
“With headphones, of course,” she said, looking at him as if he was dense.
“Granger provides you with special headphones?”
“No, we use our own. I have a special pair. At least they were special up until last week. The guy who gave them to me as a gift dumped me for no reason at all, so they aren’t special any longer.”
Marcel lifted a brow. “He dumped you?”
“Yes, can you believe that?”
It depends, Marcel thought to himself. “The two of you had a big fight or something?”
“No, and that’s what’s strange. I thought things were going well. I guess he decided to stop cheating on his wife.”
Marcel lifted another brow. “He was married?”
“So he said. And that’s why we couldn’t be seen in public and had to do things discreetly.”
“And you didn’t have a problem with that? The wife? Doing things discreetly?”
“No, of course not,” she said, shifting into a more comfortable position in her chair. “It’s not like I want a husband or anything. Heck, I’m only twenty-five. I like being single and having fun. Besides, he was nice to me. He liked buying me things.”
Marcel drew in a deep breath, thinking that there definitely wasn’t any shame in her game. “And one of the things he bought you was a pair of headphones?”
“Yes. Said he got them while vacationing with his wife in Dubai a few months ago.”
“Do you happen to have the headphones with you?”