Chapter 3: A Pro Bono Case (3)
The next few days were a bit of a mixed bag for Joshua.
Buggsy and Paul had caught up with him as soon as Marjorie Young left the building and tried to stop him from doing anything foolish again. They caught him as he sat in his cubicle after he started to research Henry Gould.
"You're actually looking into him?" Buggsy asked incredulously. He nudged Paul's side as he turned to his friend, "this guy has a death wish on him, methinks."
Paul scrunched up a wrapper of the chocolate bar he had just inhaled, "why Joshua?"
Joshua sat back in his office chair and turned around to face his colleagues. He simply grinned apologetically at them as he answered, "I'm just looking into the dude, it's not like I'm actually making a case to go against him."
"If that's the case, then why was the old woman so happy when she left the office?" Buggsy leant in closer to try to intimidate him. Joshua had to turn away because his breath stank heavily of stale coffee.
"I think she was just so thankful that someone was willing to listen to her. Didn't you say that she went around to a bunch of other firms, and no one even listened to her story?"
Buggsy straightened and thought, "true. Must've been frustrating —" he snapped his attention back to Joshua, "but you shouldn't be looking into Henry Gould anyway. It's dangerous…"
Joshua raised his eyebrow at the claim, "how so?"
Buggsy went on his tiptoes and checked their surroundings. Nobody of importance was around or listening to their conversation, so he lowered back down close to Joshua and whispered, "I heard he's got ties with a bunch of the dangerous criminals.
"I heard stories of people going missing when they try to investigate his operations, and since there never is any direct connection between him and the people investigating that goes missing, he gets away with it all," Buggsy placed his finger on his lips as he finished.
"What have the police done to try and find the missing investigators?" Joshua asked as he wrote notes down on his notepad.
"I heard he's got a bunch of them on his payroll just to keep everything all hush-hush!" Buggsy hoarsely whispered, "wha—what are you doing right now? Are you writing this down to research it later?"
"I'm going to get a snack," Paul said suddenly to break the tension and walked off.
"All good big boy," Buggsy said automatically as he grabbed another office chair and rolled it up into Joshua's cubicle, "see that? Paul's stress-munching because of you. Do you really wanna disappear? 'Cause if you get on Henry Gould's radar, you will probably go missing right quick."
Even with all the warnings that Buggsy and Paul tried to inundate him with, Joshua still pursued research into the construction mogul, Henry Gould. Although, whenever the two colleagues were around, he made the effort to hide it so that they wouldn't continue harassing him.
True to what Buggsy told him, multiple people had tried to go against Henry Gould over the years since the creation of Gould Constructions. Although not all of them had gone missing, as Buggsy had forewarned, many investigative journalists backed away and halted their investigations. They often cited that there was nothing to the allegations, or they had outright refused any comments about the matter.
There were websites that chronicled the history of previously failed investigations into Henry Gould, and when he tried to contact any journalists that hadn't gone missing, they refused to comment.
The consensus on various online chat boards is that Henry Gould had too many powerful connections, both in the legal and governmental world as well as the criminal underworld.
He racked his brain to see how he could approach the problem. He had to find an in somehow and get some other people who could corroborate Marjorie Young's claims of wrongdoing, or at the very least, showed that there might have been some corners cut in the inner workings of Gould Constructions. If he was able to prove reasonable doubt that there might have been some corporate negligence in the worksites where the accidents occurred, then that would be a solid first step in helping Marjorie Young's case and all the other families that have been affected. According to the news, a couple of other workers in Adam's worksite also died in the accident that killed Mrs Young's son. So that was his first move: reach out to the other families.
The first person that he investigated, Eric Webber, was an 18-year-old labourer. He was the youngest of six, and his family had lived in Inglewood. After the accident, it seemed that they had moved out of town and when he tried to contact them, they never got back to him.
Oddly, the other person to have died when Adam died, Carl Medina, seemed to have disappeared into the void. Joshua couldn't find any information on the man, only his age: 32 years old. Some sources said that Medina lived in Harvard Heights, though others claimed otherwise. Medina didn't even have an online presence. It was almost as if he was a ghost.
Was Carl Medina an illegal immigrant? Possibly, there were rumours that Gould Constructions had a lax hiring process, so they surely wouldn't have minded hiring some illegal labour. Unsurprisingly, whenever immigration performed any raids on a worksite, Gould Constructions would always come out of it with a perfect rating.
Joshua tried to investigate the victims of the other accidents, and similar findings came again and again. The rate of seemingly illegal workers seemed higher in the other accidents though no official investigation into those workers ever happened.
As Joshua walked back to his old, busted Toyota Prius after visiting a random Gould Constructions site and failing to speak to the foreman, a mysterious, black Porsche Panamera rolled up next to him.
The backseat window on his side rolled down and he heard a smooth, velvety voice from inside. Even though the voice questioned him, there wasn't a hint of unsureness in the question. Almost as if the question was simply a kind courtesy for Joshua that came from somebody who intimately knew who he was.
"Joshua Gilbert, right?"
Joshua leant down and gazed in the car cautiously and stiffened when he recognised who was sitting on the other side. It was the man he had been investigating for the last few days, Henry Gould himself.
"Come in," Gould said casually, but with an obvious authority in his voice, "we need to talk."
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
KIDdyW25
KIDdyW25 Do you like the story? Please add it to your library, comment your thoughts and vote. It'll help me out for WSA2023! Thank you!
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone