“Excellent deduction. I look forward to seeing the results. Please keep me posted.”
Coming up with a reasonably valid-sounding theory made me bold enough to say, “Sir? There is one other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What is it, Katie?”
“My parents are coming to town next week, for Thanksgiving. I know we already get Thursday and Friday off. I was wondering if I could maybe take a little more time off that week, just a few hours here and there. I know we’re busy, and I’ve got this investigation to work on, but if I’m spending time with them, then they can’t be asking to visit me at work.”
“I don’t see a problem with that. We can see how things are going later in the week and decide then when would be best for you to take off.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”
“In the meantime, continue your efforts. That was an excellent theory. Good work.”
There was one possibility with my theory that I hated to consider. If the object was more to stir things up than to actually spy, it took Owen off my “safe” list. What better way to stir things up than to report spying that hadn’t actually happened?
I wouldn’t be able to bear it if one of the few people I absolutely trusted was actually betraying me.
Now that I knew I was tracking a rumor, I knew exactly how to approach the situation. It was like that old game of telephone—the message changed as it moved farther from the source, and the tone of the message shift gave you a pretty good idea of who was part of the chain. The closer the rumor got to the actual truth (or the obviously manufactured lie), the closer you were to the original source. I hadn’t been a member of any particular clique in high school but had moved freely among all of them, and because of that I’d generally been tapped as the mediator in school rivalries. That made me an expert in figuring out who had said what to whom. I even had the “Miss Congeniality” picture in the yearbook to prove it.
This meant I’d have to leave the office. “I have to look into some things,” I told Trix as I headed out. “All the calls should go straight into voice mail.” Not listening to more gripes and whines was a price I’d have to pay for my diligence.
One thing I knew about gossip is that there’s always someone who sees all and knows all, even if she’s not involved in it. In this company, that was Isabel. If anyone in the company knew what the major feuds were, she’d be the one. She’d probably refereed most of them. The trick would be getting information out of her without giving her anything worth spreading. “Got a minute?” I asked when I got to her office.