Page 36 of So Twisted

“What was that employee’s name?”

Thurman sighed. “Alison Chen.”

“What a surprise,” Michael said drily.

Thurman sipped more of his coffee. He looked miserable. “A lot of this was in the news, but essentially what happened is we fired Dr. Vasquez and Alison Chen and issued the usual statements affirming our commitment to caring for our animals yadda yadda, we don’t approve of any of this, and so forth. It wasn’t enough. The Henry Doorly Zoo board of trustees voted to purchase the property from us and threatened to force the issue in court if we didn’t accept their offer of two-thirds of the market value. We weren’t in a position to say no, so we took the money. The damage to our reputation caused revenue to plummet by sixty percent. We had to sell a third of our properties and cut costs at the rest of them. We lost a quarter of the rest to bankruptcy. Basically, we were nearly ruined.”

He met Michael’s eyes and said sourly, “You see why I’m concerned about the company’s reputation? If we take another hit, I can’t pull us out of it.”

“I sympathize,” Michael replied, “but like I said earlier, we have a job to do.”

Thurman sighed. “Right.” He finished his coffee and said, “The last one, Marcus Reeves, he never actually worked for us. He leased staff from us for his zoo. Not animal care experts. I want that to be clear. No employee of Global Wildlife Experiences was responsible for the mistreatment those animals endured.”

“I believe you,” Faith replied, “but you were associated with him.”

“Yes.” He shook his head. “Worst advice I ever took, leasing employees to other zoos.”

“You mentioned that it was reported that Dr. Vasquez was drinking on the job,” Faith said. “Reported by whom?”

“Another former employee of ours. An animal trainer.”

“Does this trainer have a name?” Michael asked.

"James… I'll have to look up the last name. James, something or other. He called our HR department and said he'd talked to the zoo, and they weren't doing anything about it. His next phone call was going to be to the police, he said, so we took it seriously and sent people to investigate. And it turned out he was telling the truth."

“And what about Chen? Who reported her?”

“No one. A member of the HR team caught her stealing a red-tailed boa from an enclosure and when he confronted her about it, she started spouting some crazy shit about how she was meant to care for these animals, how their spirits were aligned or some crap.”

“And Marcus Reeves?”

Thurman’s eye twitched. He tapped his finger on the desk and sighed. “That was also James. Hawkins. I remember now, his name was Hawkins. Our CFO at the time called him Hawkins the Hawk for spotting every little damned thing that went wrong.”

“Not really a little thing,” Michael corrected.

“I know. That’s just what Katie called him.”

“Katie?”

“The CFO. We… well, look, hate us for this if you want, but we weren’t really big fans of James Hawkins after his whistleblowing left us gasping for air.”

“Would it have been better if he kept his mouth shut?” Faith asked.

“For the animals, no. For the eleven hundred people who lost their jobs and never got paid unemployment because we filed Chapter Eleven, yes. Again, hate me if you want, but the people matter more to me.”

“What a noble man you are,” Michael scoffed.

Faith laid a hand on her partner’s arm. “What happened to James Hawkins? Does he still work with you?”

“No. He was let go for unrelated issues.”

“What issues?”

“Performance issues. The animals he trained didn’t perform the way we wanted them to.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Not really. It was years ago.”

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