Black Bird by Mark Pawlosky

Author:Mark Pawlosky [Pawlosky, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 30

Her full name was Greta Louisa Lopes, and she had been a bookkeeper at Xion Labs going on seven years. She worked largely in obscurity, recording revenues as they came in from sales of the company’s various products and processing outgoing payments. It wasn’t a sexy job, but it was important work, and steady, and she was good at it. At one time, she had contemplated going back to college to get an accounting degree and sit for the certified public accountant exam, but something always seemed to get in the way, and, besides, she had observed the company’s auditors up close and wasn’t particularly impressed with their work.

She had never been married, though she was engaged once, and lived alone in a four-story walk-up in Adams Morgan. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she played bridge with a group of women at a local Y, where she swam each morning. She had been a season ticket holder to the symphony for fifteen years but gave up her seats when the female companion whom she attended concerts with moved back to Arizona to take care of her elderly parents.

Other than that, Greta Lopes’s main activity was work. While she never cared much for Xion’s CEO, Glenn Bauer, she, nonetheless, had always considered herself a loyal employee, and she had wrestled with her decision to call the reporter who had left her his business card that day at the cemetery. But two events caused her to change her mind.

The first was the story by the TV reporter accusing Anne Paxton and her colleagues of trying to steal Xion’s proprietary vaccine research. Greta recalled when Anne had voluntarily returned a $150,000 overpayment the federal government had mistakenly made to her lab that had gone undetected by internal controls. She could have easily spent or pocketed the money without a trace. Anne Paxton was not a thief.

The other reason was more personal. When Greta told Nik that she didn’t have much time, she wasn’t referring to their meeting that day. She was referring to her life. She had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and given only months to live.

She related all of this to Nik without the least bit of self-pity after he pressed her on her obvious about-face to talk to him. Nik listened intently and sympathetically and made a point not to interrupt or to take notes. He waited patiently until she was done with her story before asking a question, and when he did, it wasn’t about her work but about her.

“Do you have any relatives nearby?” he asked.

“A few, but none that I would call close. I have a brother in Florida, and we stay in touch,” she said. “But enough about that. You can take your notebook out now. It’s time we talked about why I called you in the first place.”

_______________

Nik waved Zach over to his desk when he saw the intern saunter into the newsroom. With his Newshound internship drawing to a close, Zach had been temporarily reassigned to Mia’s podcast team, and he and Nik were on different schedules.

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