Chapter 16 - The Copy They Couldn't Burn
Nobody was seriously hurt, but Mae needed oxygen at the hospital and Gus spent the night under observation. The family center would stay locked while fire investigators examined the storage room. Its grand reopening, once advertised in gold lettering, had become a row of yellow caution tape.
The police found the truck's driver through a traffic camera near the loading road. He said Colin had told him to remove obsolete records before the renovation's final audit. When he smelled smoke, he'd run out. His statement didn't explain how the fire started, but it placed Colin inside the closed building.
The shredded papers were harder. Some showed parts of my name. Others were purchase orders for equipment the center had never received. I gave investigators my actual signature samples and the files Asha had preserved before anyone knew the center was unsafe.
"She thought the only copy was on the hard drive," Asha said. "The accounting platform keeps its own audit history. Deleting a local file doesn't erase that."
We sat in silence while her screen loaded entries from the previous month. There was Brielle's administrator login changing vendor account numbers. There was Colin's name on a replacement payment request. There were notes from Eli's rejected test, removed twelve minutes before the forged approval appeared.
Then Asha found a message Brielle had sent Colin on the night before the wedding.
MAKE THE ELI PROBLEM GO AWAY. DANIEL CAN'T FIND OUT UNTIL AFTER WE LEAVE.
I thought about Owen waiting in a dark greenhouse, hearing adults plan how to silence a nineteen-year-old worker. He had been afraid for good reason.
Renee read the message and asked Asha to preserve the full export. "That's significant," she said. "Not the whole case by itself. But significant."
May you like
Then another entry appeared, one Brielle had never expected us to see.
A transfer request listed a new destination account in her own name.
