What? Your phone, he said. The one you're using right now. Is it a company issued phone? A pause.
Yes. Turn it off, he said. Right now. Take out the SIM if you can. Do you have a personal phone?
Something you pay for yourself, not through the company account? Another pause, longer. I have an old one in my glove compartment. I keep it charged as a backup. Use that one, he said.
Call me back on that this number. He gave her the number again slowly. And Evelyn, do not turn the company phone back on. Not today. Not until we've talked to someone who can tell us it's safe.
She understood what he wasn't saying. A company phone meant company servers. Company servers meant Gerald Pruitt and whoever worked under him in operations had potential access to call logs, location data, message content. If Pruitt had been running this operation for 6 years with enough sophistication to fool board-level audits, he had the infrastructure to monitor communications. It would be exactly the kind of thing a man like that would have set up.
A quiet insurance policy. A way to know who was talking to whom before it became a problem. She called back 4 minutes later on the old phone. Her voice was slightly different on it, more compressed. Like the audio quality reminded her of how exposed she was.
I need to ask you something, she said immediately. Go ahead. The federal route, she said. You said go to the U. S.
Attorney's office. But Marcus, I walk into a federal building with a thumb drive and a story about my own company's COO and the first thing that happens is my lawyers get called and my lawyers work for the company. The company retainer covers my personal representation, too. If Pruitt finds out I've been to federal investigators before I have everything locked down and documented in a way that can't be touched. He buries it, Marcus said, same way he buried mine.
I need someone who can look at what I have and tell me if it's enough, she said, before I walk through any official door. Someone outside the legal system, but who understands it. Marcus thought for about 4 seconds. 4 seconds was a long time for Marcus Carter to think about something. He was a man who'd spent years making rapid assessments in situations where the cost of being wrong was too high to afford deliberation.
I know someone, he said. Her name was Patricia Odom, and she was 61 years old and had spent 22 years as a federal housing investigator before she retired and started consulting for civil rights organizations in Atlanta. She was the reason three housing discrimination cases in Georgia had resulted in actual convictions in the last decade rather than settlements with non-disclosure clauses. She was not warm in the way that made people comfortable. She was warm in the way that made people feel they were finally being taken seriously, which was a different thing entirely and considerably more valuable.