“How about the beginning?” Kyle said cheerfully.

She was wearing a sweater with a high neck that came right up to her chin. She pulled it down to expose her neck, which was seriously bruised. A bluish mark went around her throat from one side to the other.

“Jesus,” Kyle said. “What happened? Did you have an accident or something?”

“Emeril Francisco is what happened,” she said, pulling the sweater back up to cover the bruising.

“I don’t understand.”

“This,” she said, her voice starting to break, “is what he’s into. He’s sick. He’s a sick, sick man, and I can’t work alongside someone like that anymore.”

Kyle’s star employee, it turned out, was a sexual sadist. Rhonda knew of at least one other woman in the office who’d had a similar experience with the man. Rhonda’s run-in with Emeril had been four days earlier, which explained why she had not been into the office for the last three days.

“He’s a psychopath,” Rhonda said. “If he’s done it to me, and—well, I promised not to say who the other person is—then he’s probably done it to more than just us. One of these days, he’s going to go too far. He’s going to choke someone to death.”

Kyle said he completely sympathized. It was a terrible thing that she’d been through. How could she be expected to work alongside such a man?

So Brandon Kyle took action.

Years ago, a person in his position might have been able to get away with transferring Rhonda to another department, maybe to another city. But the days of making the victim pay for the offender’s misdeeds were long since over.

He brought Emeril into his office and spoke plainly: “Regardless of how valuable you may be to this company, there are some behaviors that simply cannot be tolerated. The people in this workplace have every right to feel safe, and I’m afraid your presence makes that exceedingly difficult.”

Kyle even recorded the firing and played it for Rhonda. Her eyes brimmed with tears when she heard what Kyle had to say.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

Kyle had smiled and said, “I’m the one who should thank you, for bringing this to my attention.”

Except Kyle never fired Emeril at all. Did Rhonda really believe he was going to let one of his top people go? Run the risk that he’d go to the competition and take all of Gandalf’s corporate secrets with him? Not on your life.

“We’re going to have to do a little improv,” he’d told Emeril, and the firing was staged and recorded. The first two times, Kyle hadn’t been satisfied with Emeril’s performance. “You need to deny it, say Rhonda was lying, get a little more outraged.” The third take went perfectly.