Excerpt from “My Boss is a Serial Killer: A Tale of Murder, Romance and Filing” by Christina Harlin

Things have been hard enough for secretary Carol Frank as she suspects her boss Bill may be killing off his clients. She never expected to get into trouble for not following office procedure . . .

Not only the evil Terry Bronk, Junior Gestapo Brent and Donna came into the room, but Mr. Miller from Quality Assurance, the comptroller Lily and two members of the executive board. Suddenly I wished I’d worn one of my suits because I felt as if I was entering the most intimidating job interview ever. I tried to assure myself that all was well. First and most importantly, I was wearing my go-to skirt, which was my favorite and had never let me down in a crisis. You can laugh at that, but most women will tell you that wearing a good skirt can make the difference between triumph and tragedy. Anyway, secondly, I was trying to help these people, after all. Lawyers can come across as combative and argumentative even when they don’t intend to, so I just had to remember that we’d all had a hard week and keep my cool.

To my dismay, Junior Gestapo Brent, who had taken a chummy seat at Terry Bronk’s right side, spearheaded the meeting by saying to me, “Carol, to decide how to best proceed in this situation, we have some questions for you to answer.”

“Sure. Fire away.”

“We’d like to know when, exactly, you started investigating the past client records of Bill Nestor.”

My explanation was almost memorized because I had given it so many times the day before. I gave it again.

“And so,” Junior Gestapo Brent summarized, “you made multiple trips to the storage room for files to research a subject that was not actually part of your assigned work duties.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, but not dramatically. This was really typical of the little jerk, to find an infraction in every action. I said, “Mostly I went on my break times and lunch hours.”

“Are secretaries supposed to be in storage at all?” Terry Bronk asked Donna.

Donna said, “There’s no specific rule against it. I don’t think they like to go down there, ordinarily, but if Lloyd was busy…”

“Was Lloyd too busy to go down there?” Bronk asked me.

I thought we were getting rather off-topic, but I answered, “I didn’t bother Lloyd. As Brent has made clear, this was not precisely firm business, and I didn’t want to bother anyone else with it.”

“So you will admit,” said Junior Gestapo Brent, “that you were conducting an investigation on company time without any specific instructions to do so.”

I stared at him. Suddenly I sensed the need to choose my words carefully. “I’ll admit that I wasn’t instructed to do so.”

“And when,” continued Junior Gestapo Brent, checking an item off a neat little list in front of him, “did you start communicating with the Kansas City Police Department about your findings?”

“I think your phrasing is a little off there.” I glanced at the numerous faces surrounding me. “I wasn’t communicating with the police. I was dating a detective. I went out with Gus Haglund three or four times, and during our conversations, I mentioned that I was curious about suicide and retired widows. But I never said—”

Terry Bronk interrupted. “Can we assume by that statement that you were trying to impress the detective that you were dating?”

“What?”

“Were you investigating Bill Nestor in an effort to impress your boyfriend?”

“Wait a second,” I said, taking another glance around the room. The atmosphere in here certainly didn’t feel supportive. I had thought it was just Junior Gestapo Brent’s lousy attitude, but I was getting that bad vibe from every corner. Was it possible that I was actually in trouble? “What kind of meeting is this?”

“This is a meeting I have called,” said Terry Bronk, “to establish what actions you took and what actions we should take in turn.”

“What actions I took?” I looked to Donna, the closest thing to a friendly face. “Is this a disciplinary hearing or something?”

“Does it need to be?” asked Junior Gestapo Brent sharply.

Mr. Miller, the quality-assurance man, stepped into the fray at this point. He was a milquetoast little creep who I’d barely ever spoken to, and in a whining voice he asked, “Ms. Frank, why did you elect to go to the police with your findings rather than your supervisor?”

“What?”

“When you suspected that Mr. Nestor might be having problems of a personal nature, why did you neglect to report this in the proper format and to your immediate supervisor?”

I noticed suddenly that I was shaking, a combination of nerves and anger making me shiver as if under a blast of cold winter air. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “What would the proper format have been?”

“Work-related problems are properly reported in written form to your immediate supervisor.”

“Oh, well, I didn’t know it was a work-related problem, per se. What I thought was that my boss had a strange client record. I went and asked him about it, and he gave me a research assignment pertaining to that.” Several pairs of eyebrows shot upward. I asked Mr. Miller, “Does that count as reporting it to my supervisor?”

Miller didn’t answer me. He asked, “When did you question Mr. Nestor about this?”

“I’ve talked to him several times about it. Which one do you mean?”

“I’m referring to the conversation in which you told Mr. Nestor that the police suspected him of murder. When was that?”

“Yesterday,” I began. “But—”

“Job abandonment,” muttered Junior Gestapo Brent.

“What?” I barked at him in disbelief.

“Wasn’t it yesterday, when you fabricated a story to me that Bill was sick and you had to go to his apartment. You said you’d be back by ten but you never came back at all. Doesn’t this qualify as job abandonment?”

My mouth fell open so far that my jaw nearly hit the table.

“We’ll save the job abandonment issue until later,” said Terry Bronk, giving me an evil look. “The matter at hand is why Miss Frank decided to completely subvert the methods of reporting a work-related problem and instead just told it to her boyfriend at the police department.”

There was no question out there, so I didn’t say anything.

He smacked the table, startling everyone except me, and I was already so high-strung I couldn’t have been more alarmed by gunfire. “Did you not,” he demanded, “have self-serving intentions?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you intend to blackmail Bill Nestor with your knowledge?”

“I did not!”

“Did you intend to besmirch the reputation of this law firm in retaliation for some imagined slight you suffered?”

“I did not, assuming I understood what the hell you just asked me.”

“I don’t think this is a good time for you to be a smartass,” Bronk told me coldly.

At this point I recalled that slavery is illegal in the United States, and I didn’t have to put up with this. The imminence of my unemployment seemed suddenly quite liberating. Without Bill Nestor, I wasn’t sure I wanted to work at this dump anyway.

I leaned back in my chair. I stopped shaking abruptly, like a little switch turned off inside me. What were they going to do, kill me? Ha, that I doubted. Contrary to what His Majesty Terry Bronk had just said, it did seem like a good time to be a smartass. I gestured at Mr. Miller, who had an Employee Handbook with him, of all things. “Show me in that book,” I said, “the list of instructions that explains what to do when you suspect you’re working with a serial murderer.”

Excerpt from “My Boss is a Dead Man: a Tale of Passion, Greed and Job Interviews” by Christina Harlin

Attorney Dirk Klempt, Carol Frank’s former boss whom she nicknamed the Psychotic Sadist, is missing and a disturbing amount of the evidence points in Carol’s direction.  Carol is interviewed by police detectives Marlee Cross and Dailey Brown, and as they question her, Carol tries to piece her way through the myriad of motives and suspects.“You really harbor a lot of resentment toward the law firm of Curtis & Klempt,” observed Detective Cross. 

“Yep,” I agreed.  “But it was mostly dormant resentment until I got invited to that stupid party.”

“Dormant resentment.”  She tested the phrase in her mouth.  “Is that the kind of resentment that would lead you to divulge confidential information to another attorney, in an effort to promote a class action lawsuit against Curtis & Klempt?”

“The lawsuit!”  In all this accusatory rigamarole, I had forgotten about that.  “Oh my god, that’s a whole other can of worms, isn’t it?  But you’re wrong, I haven’t talked to that lawyer, Kim Wayne is her name, and I didn’t even know about the suit until I saw Leonard Laransky yesterday at the crime scene.” 

Damn it, Marlee Cross was really good at looking unconvinced.  I said, “Talk to Kim.  Ask her if we’ve ever even met.”

“I’ve spoken with Ms. Wayne,” Marlee said, “and she has not divulged the source of her information.  She’s protecting someone, and will probably continue to do so until we can get a court order.  She’s cagey about her record-keeping.  Funny that you and Mr. Laransky should meet up at the crime scene.”

“Well I don’t think Leonard Laransky attacked Dirk, if that’s what you mean.  He’s more interested in seeking legal remedies, not in a vengeance killing over a personal injury tort.”

“Carol Frank doesn’t think Leonard Laransky is guilty,” Marlee told Dailey.  “Cross him right the hell off the suspect list.”

“I’m only saying—”  I began, and caught myself before my mouth got the better of me.  I bit my lip and then offered this.  “It doesn’t make sense, to go to the trouble of preparing a suit against Curtis & Klempt, a suit which to my knowledge hasn’t even been filed yet, only to then attack Dirk.”

Marlee shook her head.  “It could make sense, in the context of an individual who was determined to do everything she could to avenge herself on a man whom she thinks treated her badly.”

“And I’ll tell you again, the list of those suspects has got to be formidable.  Dirk never treated anyone anything but badly.”

“Tell me about the day you planned to kill Mr. Klempt,” Marlee said, her words coming at me like a left hook.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Let me help you.  Several employees of the Curtis & Klempt firm remember that on the day you were fired—or, ‘gave notice,’ as you say—you discussed aloud a plan for murdering Mr. Klempt.”

“What employees?” I demanded.

She did not answer me, only fixed me with a cold glare.

“Because we had a completely facetious conversation about how much easier our jobs would be without the lawyers.  Those men are not easy to work for.”

“Did you outline a plan for killing Mr. Klempt?”

“We were joking around,” I insisted.

“Did you, in fact, talk about having Mr. Klempt killed in a parking lot and framing Mr. Curtis for the crime?”

She said, “Let’s talk for a moment about the paperweight.”

Ah, yes.  The reason for this entire interview. 

“Fine, let’s talk about it.”

“I’d love to hear your explanation of how a paperweight covered in your fingerprints came to be at the scene.”

“I believe it was stolen from my office.”

“Stolen by whom?”

I recounted my interview with Justine the kleptomaniac and said in summation, “It’s entirely possible that she took it from the shelf in my office that day.”

“Though it’s a relatively large object.  And though you say that you asked her to empty her bag.”

“Well, yes.  But even so.  She could have gotten out with it.  I didn’t frisk her.”

“Does this Justine know Mr. Klempt?”

“I have no idea.”

“So she stole a paperweight from you and through some crazy turn of events, it ended up being used to attack Mr. Klempt.  Though no one’s fingerprints are on it except for yours.”

“Well, you said yourself that it was in a pillowcase.  No one else would have had to touch it.”

“This Justine person would have had to touch it, in order to steal it.  There are no other prints but yours.”

After I bought the paperweight at the garage sale, I polished it to a glittering shine with glass cleaner, so the prints of the previous owner were doubtless obliterated.  I wished I hadn’t done that; it would have been nice for there to be someone else’s smudges left behind.

I said, “Look, why don’t you just speak to Justine?  She works at Holton Burke and I have her contact information in my office.  Our receptionist Lucille can tell you about the stealing.  Maybe Justine can tell you what happened to the paperweight after she took it.  Maybe she . . . I don’t know, gave it to someone.  Maybe she had an interview at Curtis & Klempt.  She was looking for a new job.”

“Or maybe she decided to kill Dirk Klempt herself,” said Detective Cross helpfully.

“Well it’s no damned harder to imagine than my doing it,” I commented.  “I have hardly seen Dirk Klempt in three years and I could care less about him, alive or dead.”

I said, “Tell me something about where you found the weapon.”

“I am asking the questions.”

“Didn’t you say it was in a sewer drain two parking lots down?”  I mulled this over for a moment.  “Down in the water, or what?”

“Ms. Frank—”

“But if the pillow case still had blood and hair on it, it couldn’t have been in much water, right?”  I looked to Dailey Brown and asked, “I don’t even know what the inside of a sewer looks like.  Where was it?”

Dailey Brown and I had once shared a nice conversation over espressos and croissants while I waited to give a statement.  He was a big fan of the TV show The Sopranos and I really was not, and a lively debate ensued.  Why this man was being allowed to investigate me, I was not sure, but perhaps no one knew about our friendly relationship except the two of us.  Dailey said, “We got lucky on this one, Carol.  The pillow case had snagged on the broken grating and it was just hanging there in midair.  It barely got wet.”

Hanging there?  Geez, as if I would be so stupid.  “Oh that is lucky,” I said.  “A little too damned lucky, if you ask me.”

Marlee Cross said, “Well nobody really did ask you, Ms. Frank.”

“Let me tell you something,” I said.  There was an implication here that I, the student of a thousand detective stories, was a sloppy criminal.  I said, “If I used that paperweight to attack Dirk Klempt, that means I had to bring it clear across town to do so.  And if I brought it clear across town, with the forethought to put it in a pillow case, you can be damned sure I would have wiped my prints off of it first.  And if I used it to murder my ex-boss, you can be damned sure I wouldn’t have just dropped it down the sewer half a block away without even making sure that it had fallen into the water.  That thing would be at the bottom of the Missouri River, if it had been me.  If it had been me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.

Detective Cross stared at me evenly with a grim little smile on her lips.  “Or maybe that’s just what you’d like us to think.”

“Oh, for crying out loud.  You think I’ve got reasons to attack Dirk Klempt?  That party Saturday night was like a support group for people who hated him.  From what I’ve heard, the last person to talk to him was Tommy Curtis, who might be more than a little pissed that Dirk was about to get their business sued for malpractice.  And I wasn’t the only one Dirk argued with that night.  Given a good motivational speaker, that room could have turned into a lynch mob.”

Marlee Cross leaned closer to me, gesturing that she was already aware of the things I had just stated.  “None of them left fingerprints on a weapon in a bloody pillowcase.”

“If I were Dirk’s attacker, I wouldn’t have either.”