“Understood.” Bennie read over Mary’s shoulder. “We should divide the labor. I’ll take the first six months and you take the last six months.”
“Okay.” Mary highlighted the first six months of the emails as Bennie reached into her messenger bag, pulled out her laptop, and powered it on. Mary forwarded Bennie the emails in sections since it was so large, but in time, they both had their six-month segments and were reading away.
Mary read through email after email, taking notes in her Word file, but even an hour later, she wasn’t having any luck. Simon’s emails to Ray were only technical in nature, confirming details of POs, product specifications, or changes in a line’s production schedule, which affected delivery dates to Simon’s clients. Mary scrutinized this last category for signs of anger against Simon on Ray’s part, but there was nothing to support her theory and she was starting to worry that it was a dry hole. The only back-and-forth between Ray and Simon that was remotely fussy was over delays in deliveries.
Darkness fell outside the window, and Bennie turned on a chrome Luxor lamp on the worktable, which cast a conical pool of light on the two lawyers, their laptops, and the disarray of papers on the floor.
“You having any luck?” Bennie asked, before she resettled.
“Not yet.” Mary glanced at the time on her computer screen, which read 9:15. “I worry about time.”
“Me too. Keep going.”
“There’s no other choice, is there?” Mary opened the next email, heartened because its subject line was Quality Issues. She read:
Ray, I emailed Todd about this but he hasn’t gotten back to me and I need an answer for Susan at The Jarrat Organization, a call center for software support for their accounting program. She is unhappy with the lighting in her top-of-the-line units and she says it flickers. I’ve noticed this in another account and already brought it up with Todd because it’s provoking migraines in employees. This could be a liability issue for the company and Todd said he would do something about it, but this is the second customer of mine who’s complained. Susan is one of my biggest accounts and I would like not to lose another account over quality issues that don’t get the attention they deserve. Please advise ASAP. Thanks. Simon
“Hey, look at this,” Mary said, heartened, but not exactly sure why. “Here’s something about a quality issue, concerning the wiring.”
Bennie leaned over and skimmed the email. “What’s interesting about it?”
“I don’t remember seeing an email from Simon about quality issues at this account before. This suggests he’s written to Todd about The Jarrat Organization, but I don’t remember seeing any email about that.”
“Maybe you forgot.”
“Hold on, let me check.” Mary went into the file of her notes from the previously sent emails, and her document index was organizing them in several different ways, one of which was by Simon’s accounts. She scrolled the list of accounts, reading them aloud to Bennie. “Look, I don’t see any mention of The Jarrat Organization.”
“Maybe you didn’t get that far. You hadn’t read through all the emails yet, had you?”
“No, but this is referring to an email last month. I had gotten that far.”
“What did Ray write back?”
“Let me see.” Mary started scrolling through the emails, and the response appeared a week later, which was terse:
Simon, will do. Ray
“Keep going and see what else you can find.” Bennie returned to her laptop, and Mary did the same, feeling a tingle of excitement. She didn’t know if it meant anything but it did seem strange, and it gnawed at the back of her mind as she read through one email after the next, each one confirming technicalities of specifications, meetings, or purchase orders, most of which showed Ray as a copy but not a direct recipient. But only a month later she came upon another email about quality control, and her heart started to pound.
“Bennie, look at this.” Mary skimmed the email, which was decidedly testier in tone:
Ray, I wrote you about these wiring issues before and I haven’t heard anything from you or Todd. We tried to fix the flickering in the lighting on-site but it didn’t repair the problem. You should know that some of the employees at Jarrat have physical handicaps like visual impairments and migraines. This is going to result in liability for the company or me losing a client if it doesn’t get fixed by the end of this week. I assume the wiring is manufactured by PowerPlus and you should talk to Joe or somebody else over there in operations but this has to be dealt with. Susan is fit to be tied because one of her employees is talking about filing a complaint with the state human relations commission. This is a legal issue that needs to be attended to right away. Please get back to me by the end of the week.
“Interesting.” Bennie shifted over. “See what Ray replied.”
“Right.” Mary was already scrolling through the emails, past one week, the next, then the week after that, but there was no response from Ray. “Ray didn’t answer. Ray wouldn’t ignore that, would he?”
“Possible, since you heard what Simon said, they roll their eyes at him. He’s like the boy who cried wolf.”
“I know but Simon wouldn’t let them forget it.”
“Maybe they talked about it but there was no email.”
Mary didn’t think so. “Simon told us he rarely talks to Ray. And you would think he would’ve remembered that, because it’s what we were just asking him about, conversations with Ray over quality problems.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“I’m not understanding why I didn’t see any mention of Jarrat before.” Mary searched her document index again, but there was no mention. “It’s not there. This is a significant quality issue, clearly discussed with Todd and Ray, but it wasn’t included in any of the email that the company sent us. So there’s one obvious conclusion.”
Bennie lifted an eyebrow. “You think it was intentionally omitted?”
“Honestly, yes.” Mary felt her heartbeat quicken again. “Think about it. They kitchen-sinked us with emails. They expect us to get snowed under reading them, but they don’t realize that we have a way of checking if there’s any missing. They don’t know that Simon archives his email. It’s only because I read the email they produced and compared it with Simon’s email archive that we know that these were omitted from the production.”
Bennie nodded, perking up. “So the question isn’t what emails did they produce. The question is, what emails didn’t they produce?”
“Exactly!” Mary almost cheered. They were finally getting to the bottom of something, but of what, she didn’t know.
“So why did they leave them out?”
“To hide them. So the question is, what are they hiding?”
“And why?” Bennie asked, her blue eyes glittering.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Bennie kept reading the emails, but they were repetitive and technical, and a hunch was forming in the back of her mind. She turned to Mary. “I think there’s something going on with quality control, so why don’t we refine the search to only quality control.”