Forget murders and embezzlement. Buffy and Spike tackle the greatest corporate mystery of all. (See icon.)
“Well?” Buffy watched Willow’s face impatiently. The witch was sorting through the piles of paper she and Spike had rescued from Melandra’s office floor before wiping surfaces clear of their fingerprints and sneaking out of the building.
But Willow just shook her head, passing each paper over to Anya as she finished with it. “It’s just not enough, Buffy. I mean, it looks like she’s got two sets of calculations, but I can’t tell if they’re just projections that were revised down later, or if her group really was making more money than she put in that final report. If I had the original files, and could see how it had been revised, maybe. But these are just printouts, and I can’t tell how old they are.”
Anya, who had shoved herself into a position next to Willow on the couch in the Summers’ living room, her eyes glowing in pleasure at the sight of pages with dollar signs on them, agreed. “If she is cooking the books, though, she deserves some kind of master chef award. She must be stealing hundreds of thousands, maybe more.”
Buffy leaned back in her chair. “Please don’t use the word ‘award’ around me.”
Willow took the pages back from Anya, shuffled them into a neat bundle, and set them down on the coffee table. “Even if she is an embezzler, I don’t see what it has to do with the murders. The only person from her department who was killed was this Eric guy, right?”
“Melandra’s section, not department.” Buffy raised her hands over her head, shifting restlessly. “They make a big deal about that. It would be a promotion for her to have her own department, and she’d get a better office, on an outside wall with a window, instead of inside that huge hamster cage, surrounded by the cubicles of the miserable masses.”
“That’s not a good reason to steal, unless she’s stealing on behalf of the company,” said Willow. “And even if she is a criminal, it doesn’t make any sense she’d kill all those people.”
Buffy flung her head back and groaned. “But I want her to be guilty! I hate her. And if I don’t find the murderer, I’m never going to escape Asshat Industries!”
Dawn, who had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching TV, joined the conversation. “Don’t worry, Buffy. If you really can’t find the bad guy, you can go back to the Doublemeat.”
Buffy sat up and stared at her sister. “I thought you wanted me to stay there and keep you in house and home and potato chips?”
“I did. But you’re not making any more money there than you did any place else. As long as Spike keeps his job, I don’t care.”
“Spike?” Willow leaned forward, puzzled. “Why do you want him to stay there?”
“Because he makes four dollars an hour more than Buffy, plus a shift differential.” Dawn grinned. “Haven’t you noticed? Since his last paycheck, there’s actual food in the house and the lights haven’t been turned off once.”
“He makes—” Buffy jumped up. “He’s a damned glorified handyman and I have to know computers and Powerpoint, and, and—stuff!”
Anya shrugged. “It’s a fact that male dominated professions tend to be better compensated than female ones, even when women are required to have a higher level of education to qualify for their jobs.”
“That—” Buffy’s outrage overwhelmed her. She grabbed her coat and stormed out of the house with a door slam that shook the whole house, muttering about stupid vampires who were going to get an unspecified “it.”
“Should take them a while to make this one up,” said Dawn calmly. “Anyone want to take bets on what time they crawl in the bedroom window tonight?”
Melandra stormed out of her office and down the row of cubicles, tossing a folder on Buffy’s desk. “Are you incapable of following directions? You may have fixed the charts, but the fonts are all wrong on this version, and you still haven’t got the bullet points indented properly.”
Papers spilled out of the folder onto the floor. As Buffy bent to pick them up, she saw Melandra stop at Rita’s desk. “Do you have the new copies of the figures from last month?”
“By noon.”
“I need them right away. I can’t find the printouts in the mess those vandals left of my office and —”
Even though she was interrupting, Rita’s voice was steady and firm, without a trace of anger. “By noon. Some of the reports are still running on the mainframe.”
Buffy wasn’t sure what a flounce was, but she suspected that Melandra’s rapid retreat to her office could be described as such. The door slammed behind her.
Buffy peered into Rita’s cubicle. “How come Melandra doesn’t treat you the way she does everyone else?”
Rita smiled as if she found the question genuinely amusing. “I’m one of the few people around here that actually gets any work done. It’s amazing how much slack even the bitch queens of the world will cut you when you do your job.”
Buffy nodded and looked down at the mess of papers on her desk and the PowerPoint on her monitor that resolutely refused to follow orders that it reformat itself. Rita’s strategy was novel and even a bit appealing, but somehow Buffy doubted it would work for her. She decided to get a cup of coffee.
The frizzy-haired lady was hovering over the coffee fund box again when Buffy entered. “I wasn’t stealing anything!” she announced. “This time I was just counting it. I count it three times a day to make sure no one’s cheating.”
“Why don’t you just lock it up?” Buffy asked, ostentatiously depositing a nickel and a dime before pouring herself a cup.
The woman stared at her as if this comment were so stupid as to be unworthy of response and skittered over to the refrigerator. She checked on her lunch box, which sat in its usual front-and-center position, surrounded by other boxes and brown bags. Buffy watched as she pulled a large black tape dispenser from her cardigan pocket, pulled off a strip, and carefully applied it to the underside of the wire refrigerator tray so that it stuck to both the tray and her lunchbox. She then squatted down and marked the point where the tape adhered to the box with a black felt-tipped pen.
“So I can tell if anyone’s moved it,” she hissed in Buffy’s direction. She shoved the tape dispenser and pen back in her pockets and scuttled off.
Well, at least that wasn’t a gun she was carrying.
Buffy eyed the coffee machine, trying to decide if it was in time-to-start-a-new-pot territory, or if she could leave that to the next person without risking tears and recriminations. She decided to live dangerously and let someone else take on the onerous chore of dumping the old coffee filter, replacing it with a new one, and hitting the “brew” button.
However, she was in no hurry to return to her desk and face PowerPoint, so she wandered around the room, reading some of the flyers that had been posted. There were the usual government warnings about issues like sexual harassment and minimum wage. Her coworkers were selling various items from cars to kittens, and there was a variety of announcements for exciting events like the company picnic and holiday party, all of which seemed to have occurred some time in the past. Except for one: the Talent Show was today.
No wonder Harry had been bouncing about more than usual all morning. He must be a bundle of nerves, wondering if his rubber chicken would beat two guitarists, one mime, an ad-lib drama team, and one accordionist.
“Going to enter the contest, Slayer?”
“Spike.” Buffy turned around. “I don’t know why I should be surprised to find you here. There’s no work in the vicinity, after all.” She gave a little gasp of surprise! “I know! We should enter you in the contest as the employee best at earning the most for doing the least.”
“Very funny, Slayer, but that’s not my biggest talent, and you know it.”
He leaned over, one hand reaching to press against the small of her back and pull her towards him.
Buffy stood on tiptoe to peek over his shoulder. They were in a corner and out of sight of anyone in the hallway outside, but just barely. “Spike, I am not making out with with you in front of the sandwich vending machine!”
Undeterred, he bent his lips to her ear, muttering, “The vending machine isn’t sensitive, love. And think about it, Slayer. Every time we’ve shagged during this mission, we’ve found a clue. Just trying to go with a proven method.”
“What kind of insane logic is that?” Trying to ignore the effect that his breath against her ear always had on her, Buffy slithered out from under his arms, and found herself backed up against a machine filled with soda cans.
Spike followed her. “It’s horny, mystical, vampire logic. And since I’m a horny vampire existing on a hellmouth, seems like there’s at least a chance of it working for me. At least, I’m not averse to testing the theory.”
“Not with this Slayer.” Buffy grasped Spike by the shoulders, whirled him around and slammed him into the soda machine. She used more force than she had intended, causing a can of soda to erupt from the vending slot between his legs and fly across the room, spraying Mountain Dew over the floor tiles.
“Want it rough, do you?” Spike pushed back, and he and Buffy spun around, slamming into the ice machine in unison. This time, ice cubes shot across the floor, mixing with the froth already there.
Buffy pulled away from Spike, shivering from the shock of being hit in the legs by a half dozen ice cubes. Her mouth opened in a soundless “Oh!” of outrage. Spike staggered backwards against the wall, shoving his hand in his mouth to try to keep from laughing.
A small man holding a clipboard and a coffee cup darted into the room, emptied the coffee remaining in the pot into his cup and turned to rush back out. He got about halfway to the exit before he noticed Buffy and Spike in the corner by the soda machine. His mouth opened in surprise.
But he had failed to notice the soda and ice at all, and when his foot hit the slippery mess, he skidded and went down, adding coffee and shards of coffee mug to the disaster.
Buffy rushed to help pick him up, retrieving his clipboard, and saying, “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry?” The man looked around. “Is this your mess? What’s the matter with you, throwing things around the floor? I could have been seriously hurt.” He leaned forward and peered at her chest.
Buffy jumped away.
But it seemed lechery wasn’t what he had in mind. “I’m going to call Human Resources about you, Buffy Summers!”
Buffy remembered the empty-eyed demons in HR and she felt her stomach clench at the thought of spending a couple of hours trying to explain this mishap to them.
But Spike strode up to the gibbering little man. “Yeah, mate? Well, you give her a hard time about anything and she exposes you as the coffee fund thief.” He thrust an accusatory index finger in the direction of the empty coffee pot. “You just poured a pot without dropping in any change.”
This silenced the soda victim. He went from angry to frightened as quickly as he’d gone from shaken to angry. Then he took refuge in bluster. “I didn’t, really. I put in extra yesterday because I couldn’t get change of a quarter and—”
Buffy interrupted ruthlessly. “You stole coffee. And you didn’t make a fresh pot, and you put the pot back empty without turning off the burner.” She tapped her foot. “I think I should go find that frizzy-haired lady with the sweater and see if she has something to say about that.”
“No! Not her! Anyone but her!” The man rushed off without a backwards look, leaving Buffy holding his clipboard.
Spike watched him flee. “You know, I lived with Drusilla for a century, and I’m still impressed by how daft the people in this place are.” He turned to Buffy, who was staring thoughtfully down at the clipboard in her hands. He tilted his head to one side. “I know that look, Slayer. You’ve figured it out, haven’t you?”
Buffy nodded. “I think I have. I’m going to go back to my desk and check on a few things to make sure.” She looked around and an evil smile dawned on her face. “You can stop by and I’ll bring you up to date after you’ve cleaned up this mess. Because you know what, Spike? This looks like a job for Facilities. Time to earn that bloated salary of yours.”
Chapter Eight: actual events.
Originally posted at http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/28338.html
