Jasper walked past Dad, sniffed at him, then came over to Kathy and laid his head in her lap.

She stroked the top of his head and whispered, “I hope he’s really getting better.”

###

Juan took a seat in a small private conference room down the hall from Winslow’s office. Already present were Winslow and a man Juan recognized as Paul Hutchison, the head of AgriMed’s domestic security. Paul was a balding man in his sixties who had spent a career in the military, focused on information security.

“Juan,” said Winslow, “we’ve asked you to be in on this meeting because you’re from the Rochester site. We hope you might have some insight on some of the folks we’re going to talk about.” He turned to Paul and asked, “Paul, what are the results of the audit?”

Paul opened a file folder—one of many he had stacked before him. “At the time of the security audit, the Rochester site had 433 full-time employees and 37 temp workers. All 470 were asked, as a condition of employment, to submit themselves to polygraphs. Thirteen chose to terminate their relationship with the company. Seven of those were contractors; we informed the service through which we’d received them that they’re never to be submitted for AgriMed temp assignments again.”

He held up a stack of six folders. “That leaves six full-time employees who departed when faced with a polygraph. I’ve pulled their HR records so that we can go over them together. All of these were low-performing employees, according to the periodic reviews. However, two of them were at one time high performers, before allowing their performance to lapse.”

“Let’s start with the former high performers,” Winslow said.

Paul pulled the top two folders from the stack and opened the first. “The first one is a Melody Kolifrath. A biochemist who was developing an anti-inflammatory medicine for treating Crohn’s disease.” The man flipped through a few of the pages in her file and nodded. “According to her last review, and I’ll quote, ‘Melody hasn’t made any progress on her research in eighteen months, and frankly, I’m not sure if her heart’s in it anymore. She seems distracted. I warned her that if she’s ever going to get to trials, she needs much more lab work to justify it.’”

Winslow looked at Juan. “Do you know this Kolifrath?”