Part 4
The operations manager took a deep breath clearing the display table in-front of her. She fixed her new contractor with all her focus. She lead her back into her office, seating herself behind the large managerial desk her finger tips touched as she spoke.
“Now that you have had some induction to our current product range, lets begin with the investigation. If you would just sign these papers”. It was almost like some magic trick, dozens of documents were suddenly produced. She looked at the pile in front of her, it was standard employee benefits confidentiality clauses etc. Dolores looked at the papers looked worried back at the demonstration room. She had a little thought at the back of her head that she should just politely shake the woman's hand and leave. Some things you didn't want to get stuck with. Then she looked at the promised money on the table and with a feeling of trepidation in in her gut signed on the dotted line.
Rather quickly Dolores found that there was not exactly a lot to go on. With the ink still drying they produced what data they had accumulated thus far. They handed over the scant bit of information that Anderson adhesives had on what was going on there and they. Though the detective figured if there had been a lot of information then they would have used the police and she wouldn't have been needed. She found out that there had been three incidents. Where the first incident would count as breaking and entering. The second would count as trespass and the third would be an assault!
They had happened over the course of two weeks, the person perpetrating them was growing bolder. Actually reviewing the poor quality CCTV you couldn't be certain it was the same person. There could have been three different people sent over the course of that time, with each person growing a little bit bolder with each attempt. Though that would mean that there was another person coordinating it, there was a greater likely hood that it was just one person.
She was shown the CCTV footage of the first incident. It would have been hard to find a pattern from just the one incident. This looked like a simple burglary. Where someone climbed an old section of the fence, broke a window open with a hammer. They were only in a low security area where no sensitive information was kept. They could have been looking for a security pass or any devices which might hold digital access. The CCTV caught them coming in rummages around the facilities office and leaving the way they came after five minutes of searching. They didn't steal anything or break anything or even look up any information, they were in and out fairly quickly. It was only the next day on discovering the broken window and reviewing the footage that they were even noticed.
They wore nondescript clothing not leaving any impression behind, wearing a full mask they had rubber gloves which left no prints, with a hoodie over there face you had no details whatsoever to go on. There clothes were layered and baggy so you cant really see there shape from the CCTV, they were giving no leads whatsoever. It could have been a woman a slightly built man a teenager. The baggy clothing made sure the description would be quite vague.
She did pause the footage and review it. The operations manager watched her expecting some breakthrough. However on careful analysis Dolores decided that she couldn't really tell anything about who they were under all the baggy clothes. She had the files of staff members and comparing them it was impossible to tell if this was a member of staff. It didn't seem to be an inside job. They didn't seem to have any specialist knowledge of where anything was. So perhaps just based on this CCTV the investigator had to think that this was not an inside job. Or at the very least she thought to herself someone who was not familiar with that area of the business.
She looked around the clients other systems. The electronic security of the devices might be a little bit better. The physical security on site was quite a bit worse than the industry standard. You got that with insular places like this. The senior people had not had a need to upgrade there site or procedures until now. Especially around some of the older area's which had not felt the pressure to modernise in several decades. Dolores would need to get her client to fill in the gaps in there physical site security rather quickly. She was quickly compiling a list of people she knew could reliably do the job.
The second incident was a little bit more revealing, it was a second data point which would hopefully lead to an eventual pattern. By careful comparison it would allow the detective to identify the perpetrator. Again there was a break in where the aim didn't seem to be for the intruder to actually steal any physical item. Comparing one picture to the other assuming that there was a standardization on the height that signage and other items were mounted the intruders looked to be precisely the same height. Looking at the reports she had to hand it seemed that items like Petty cash laptops and phones were ignored by the intruder.
As she suspected money was not the motive. This thief had turned there nose up at what would appear to be easy money, like laptops and iPads. Only a thief who wasn't interested in the more mundane things, who was not motivated by profit from those small items would pass them up. The intruder quickly bypassed the open plan offices and pressed into the more sensitive areas of the building and triggered an alarm. They paused and then they wisely decided that they needed to be somewhere else very quickly.
Dolores looked at this carefully, whoever was behind it had some knowledge of the place. More than just someone who was relying on external records, this person made a beeline for the exit. They had limited knowledge but the still had knowledge. She had to consider possibilities so many at this point, perhaps it was an old employee. There were a few other people who might fit the criteria, perhaps someone who was not a very senior employee. Or someone who worked in the building occasionally was partnered up with the thief. It was clear that they were obviously after industrial secrets, the precise formula for something on the product range she had been shown maybe the technical specifications?
The detective decided that the operations manger would know her business well enough. She would know precisely what would be targeted, the fact that she didn't tell her, well her client was allowed to keep some secrets. She didn't need to know how much gold was in a vault to organise the security around it. Sometimes for confidentiality she had no idea what she was protecting at least this time she knew roughly what it was. Perhaps it was the entire industrial process or the schematic for some manufacturing machine didn't matter at this point.
Reviewing the CCTV there were site staff i.e. security staff already on alert after the first incident they did try to engage the intruder. But they were not quite as fast as they should have been, they were not really up to the task. She had to give them some credit that they had tired. Dolores looked a the CCTV footage of the second incident. There were various views of a security guard in a cheap ill fitting uniform chasing an intruder. The guard had obviously signed up to what they thought was an easy job. Just sitting in a building occasionally reporting the odd squeaky door or broken light on the handover report to the day shift. They were not in-fact expecting anyone to break into a glue factory there lack of preparation was obvious.
The second intruder was very similarly dressed to the first intruder, they were a bit more confident but then it could be the same person. They were obviously someone who got a good cardio work out as they managed to get away from the guard after about 30 yards. The security guard was just not a very fit girl. She ended up folded over wheezing then collapsing on the floor not far from where the chase started. While the intruder was already out of the building and getting out of the gate over the perimeter fence. An acrobatic feat that the guard would never have succeeded at in a hundred tries.
Dolores managed to avoid laughing at the security guard, she watched the CCTV footage of incident number 3. It was getting far more serious on the third try, only leading Anderson Adhesives to think that things were going to get worse until the intruder was caught, the detective would agree with them. Dolores took a sip of her coffee as she watched the intruder bump into cleaner, nearly knocking the poor woman off her feat. Breaking in when the place was being cleaned left a witness but it also meant the alarm was off, some creativity and further site knowledge was demonstrated there, this intruder might be a tricky opponent.
On the screen they seemed to stand there shocked for a second or two. Both of them not sure what to do. The silence and indecision was broken as the cleaner started screaming her head off. She kicked into full fight or flight and tired to take a swing at the burglar with a wet mop. The intruder stepped back avoiding the wild swing, then tackled her opponent to the ground. There was a bit of wrestling and with a grunt of effort the cleaner ended up on the bottom of the pile. Her arms were pinned with the burglar sitting on her back.
That didn't decrease the nose and the intruder couldn't spend the entire night sitting on the cleaner. The burglar decided to take care of the problem grasping the mop. She shut her up by shoving the mop head into her mouth, twisting the handle to get it in nice and tight. Dolores had to wince a little at the look on the cleaners face. The taste couldn't have been pleasant and the diameter of the mop head was quite large. She was obviously trying to expel it as the thief was unscrewing the handle. By the look on the cleaners face it was not comfortable or particularly nice, but it was bulky and muffling so her protests.
The thief didn't waste any time, bundling her victim up in what looked like a roll of Ape-Tape from a box. After securing the woman she shoved her into the cleaning cupboard and went on her way, a cleaning supervisor and a security guard came past and the thief was gone before they set off the alarm. Dolores wound the recoding back and watched it from a different angle. The cleaner had one small opportunity when the thief got up. But instead of trying to fight her, she tried to remove the gag. It was quite quick before the cleaner had lost completely. As soon as the thief had the cleaners elbows pulled behind her back and they were taped together she had no hope. Then to add insult to injury the gag was pulled out. Only to allow the thief to pick up some extra cleaning cloths and shove them into the cleaners mouth. Then the mop head was forced back in place. The poor woman's jaw was wrapped in tape securing the massive bundle of dirty fabric in place.
The assailant wrapped tape around her victims head forming a Muzzle. Then to really make her feel helpless she pulled the tape over her eyes and round and round her head to keep it in place. All the while the cleaner had been struggling to reach her face in a futile effort with her elbows fused together all she could do was flail ineffectively. To end the small risk her wandering fingers posed her hands were taped up into one useless mitten then taped firmly to her waist. In the commotion the poor cleaners skirt had been torn off showing her pink underwear and stockings. All the fight was gone out of her as her ankles were taped together. Then her knees were secured together with a further twist of tape so that she was unable to really move coherently at all. The thief did a little look around to make sure no one else was coming to the rescue. Then she forced her victim into ball tie, securing her body tightly with several additional turns of tape.
The thief pulled out a couple more rolls from the box and wrapped her up rather tightly, it was rather sadistic the way that the cleaner was bound. Surprisngly the thief reached for even more tape another roll was used to turn the cleaners head into a featureless oval with just her nose sticking out and the compacted bulge where her stuffed mouth was. The assailant used the entire roll to be certain. She shoved her victim in the cleaners cupboard into a locker in the cupboard. She locked the door with the cleaners key then in an act of sadism broke it off in the lock. The next cleaner found her missing about 18 hours later.
Checking the procedures that were in place the lazy security guards should have notified that she was missing when she was meant to clock out. When the maintenance guy fished the broken key out and finally got the door open the poor cleaner had been bundled up like that for nearly 20 hours. Dolores raised an eyebrow, the cleaner had been compensated with the company treating the 20 hours as overtime. The operations manger waited for her to Finished reviewing the third incident. She asked her,
“Do you had any conclusions?
“Not yet, we need to tighten the net before we weigh the catch”.
Dolores came back the next day, under cover as a new employee. She was dressed in trainers black trousers a blouse and a jacket. At the reception she met someone from HR. the first thing that the detectie noticed about the woman was the impractical red pumps. She looked her up and down a short brown skirt, a tight blue blouse, long hair tied-up tight. She was a south American woman who looked like she spent a lot of time cycling. If you took her out of the shoes she would be an couple of inches two tall to be the suspect.
Sofia took the new hire to a private office, Dolores noticed a photo from a team boding event where several employees were wrapped in tape from shoulder to ankle and had to hop to victory over a race course, it was worrisome. Sofia went through the basic on-boarding. Going through everything from the protocols for stationary requests to scheduling overtime. At the end of the basic orientation the HR officer Sofia paused. She looked at a note on the bottom of Dolores file. It mentioned that the director had indicated that she was working on a special project and to keep the distractions on her to a minimum. The woman from Human resources reluctantly filed away dozens of h&S registers.
There were various course notes that the regular employees would be subjected to. Things that they would have to go through rather than them doing anything useful in there first few days of there employment. Dolores apparently had work to be getting on with, so she was exempt from some of the more time consuming parts of the bureaucracy. Dolores completed a little exercise checking how secure the employee records were. How easy it would be to get into the HR department how easy it would be to get into the files without Sofia even noticing. It was a little bit below standard, so something's would need to be implemented soon. Dolores was not the first person that had the favour of a director so Sofia put a note on her file to remind Dolores about doing the various health and safety courses work station assessment etc. next week.
Sofia chatted with the new staff member a little, then took Dolores over to the next person that she was due to meet in R&D. Dolores was introduced to a nurse who looked after some of the medical trials, who had access to several bits of sensitive information or at least worked with prototypes and formulas. Emma was short at five foot 3 but curvy, The detective noticed not tall enough and two well endowed to be the spy. She had her own little office tucked away next to the testing lab. She wore an approximation of a nurses outfit that could be described as too short and too tight. With heels that were to say the least impractical for a medical professional.
Dolores looked over the security on the area for the medical testing. The procedures for securing files and samples. It was very secure, Dolores noticed that in Emma's office she had a lot of medical restraints, some historical some modern on the walls and in display cases. The nurse was eyeing the detective up in a bit of a disconcerting way. Especially she seemed to be looking at her ass, when she gave her security lockers a check and had to bend down suddenly she had the nurses hand on her ass. She politely declined the offer to see the nurse's restraint collection, or to participate in any out of hours trials for the company.
Outside the rather forward nurses office she meet her next point of contact a lab technician. A woman of colour who worked in quality control. The woman came with a set of curves, Rebecca kept her figure hidden under a sweater hidden under lab coat. With her bottom she was definitely not the thief seen on the CCTV. The detective had a check of her lab, there were lots of samples lots of tests going on. You could possibly get one good and promising result out of 1000 combinations and variants tried and failed. The security was not perfect but not terrible.
Dolores thought plus it wouldn't be the best place to try to steal secrets. Lots of these mixtures were not proven, they were just lots and lots of iterative sample batches. With a little bit of chatting she determined that this woman did have some knowledge of formulas. But only a very limited access to the different mixes. As they passed another lab technician had a sample that bubbled and expanded on bubble grew larger and larger swelling like a balloon she prodded it with her finger only for it to explode in a shower of glue sticking her to the wall. Rebecca shook her head sadly and crossed off another sample while the woman unsuccessfully tried to pull herself free.