For eight years, I had maintained an internal folder on our private servers labeled: `SPECIAL ACCOMMODATIONS // COLLINS REGIONAL DIVISION`.
Every three months, Vivian and Thomas Bennett had submitted internal audit reports documenting flagrant, catastrophic corporate abuse across our regional offices in Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Louisville.
And for eight years, to preserve the pathetic illusion of Claire’s domestic peace, I had quietly overridden the disciplinary notices, approved the unauthorized expense vouchers, and absorbed the losses from my personal shareholder dividend draws.
Tonight, the era of mercy was permanently dead.
I opened the personnel files one by one:
First: **Martin Collins**, Executive Regional Procurement Director.
Annual base salary: $240,000. Discretionary expense account: $65,000.
Documented violations: Forty-eight instances of commercial bid-rigging, awarding Whitaker subcontracting tenders to private shell companies registered to his brother-in-law in Kentucky, pocketing three hundred and twelve thousand dollars in mezzanine factoring kickbacks, and submitting false mileage vouchers for a corporate-leased Cadillac Escalade currently parked in his Indian Hill driveway.
Second: **Gregory Collins**, Associate Fleet Logistics Manager.
Annual base salary: $95,000.
Documented violations: Two hundred and fourteen days of unexcused absenteeism over an eighteen-month period, seventy-four thousand dollars in unauthorized fuel card charges logged at private marinas on Lake Cumberland, and three pending internal harassment complaints filed by warehouse administrative assistants that had been buried by human resources under Claire’s spousal intervention.
Third: **Bradley Collins**, Regional Site Compliance Inspector.
Annual base salary: $115,000.
Documented violations: Signing off on forty-two un-inspected commercial electrical conduits in downtown Columbus while vacationing in Cabo San Lucas, and selling five company-owned Bobcat excavators to an independent equipment broker in Dayton, pocketing one hundred and forty thousand dollars in un-reported cash.
I scrolled down the organizational chart.
Forty-seven names.
Every single one carrying the surname Collins, or married to a Collins, or cousin to a Collins.
Together, their fraudulent overtime, inflated salaries, un-audited expense accounts, and unauthorized factoring draws had drained **six point four million dollars** from Whitaker Construction’s operating capital over forty-eight months!
