"Marcus, that's proprietary company. It's my personnel file." he said flatly. "It's documentation I compiled. That I was fired for compiling.
If you're telling me it was sent to you anonymously, Young is Meachus, and you're sitting in a diner in a wool cap instead of handling it through your legal team, then we're already outside the boundary of proprietary company procedure. So show me." The silence stretched out between them. Evelyn reached into the inside pocket of the oversized green jacket, a pocket he noticed now was deeper than it looked, deliberately modified. The jacket, chosen because it could carry things, and pulled out a folded envelope.
She set it on the table between them. He looked at it. Didn't touch it yet. "Everything?" he said.
"Summaries." she said. "I wasn't going to carry originals into public space. But the summaries are complete. Every case referenced.
Every date, every name." He pulled the envelope toward him. He opened it carefully, the way he opened things. He expected to contain something that couldn't be unread. He unfolded the papers inside.
He started reading. The first page was an approval record cross-reference. Zip codes on one side, approval rates on the other. The numbers were not subtle. They were not the kind of numbers that could be explained by income variation or documentation quality or any of the neutral factors that got cited when systems like that This got challenged.
They were stark and they were consistent and they went back six years. The second page was the secondary review process memo. He read the flagging criteria. He'd seen them before, not this exact document, but their effects. He'd seen them in the pattern of the applications.
He tried to show Pruitt what they meant. Pruitt had nodded and said he'd look into it and then spent three weeks looking into Marcus Carter instead. He turned to the third page, his own personnel file summary. The memo he'd sent to Pruitt reproduced in full. The documentation he'd compiled listed by date and category.
The HR escalation chain and at the bottom, the note he'd never seen added after his termination. Prior conduct flag to be noted in any future program interaction. Do not process applications from this individual through standard channels. His hands were completely steady. He was proud of that.
He set the page down. The note at the bottom of my file, he said. I saw it, Evelyn said. That was written by someone in your HR department. Yes, after I was fired.