At Harbor Gate, the integration team was working through a different collection of documents. Nia had instructed the external accounting firm to review Lakeside Advisory without notifying the Belmont Row staff members whose approvals were under examination. The instructions were not designed to deprive anyone of a defense. They were designed to prevent the evidence from being altered before the investigators could compare versions of the same transaction.
The initial vendor file contained a consulting agreement spanning eighteen months. It promised weekly planning sessions, monthly strategic guidance, executive access, and quarterly analysis of potential acquisitions. Each invoice referred to the contract by number, and each contained enough polished language to suggest valuable professional work. What it did not contain was the ordinary trail of such work: correspondence with a named consultant, slide decks, accepted deliverables, travel expenses, revised plans, or meetings anyone outside Bradley's circle could remember.
"Could be remote work," one auditor said during a preliminary call. "Could be proprietary. We can't infer it never happened just because the deliverables aren't in this file."
"Agreed," Nia answered. "Find out what a normal engagement of this size would leave behind. Then compare that expectation with what we actually have."
The auditors requested a preserved copy of the contract-management database and all invoices using the Lakeside vendor code. They also identified unusual timing: payments often went through shortly before quarterly reporting deadlines, approved by Dennis Vale and requested from Bradley's department. The fact that no other department had ever received Lakeside's services did not prove theft, but it narrowed the legitimate explanations. If the consulting firm existed solely to advise Bradley, then Bradley should be able to describe who had advised him and what the advice had produced.
Nia searched the Georgia Secretary of State's public business records. Lakeside Advisory LLC had been formed shortly before its first invoice to Belmont Row and listed a registered agent named Sloane Avery. Nia recognized the name from the video posted after Loretta's lobby visit, a short clip in which Bradley's girlfriend had captioned a laughing image of the woman in the chair with a joke about the building's new cleaning lady. By Tuesday afternoon, the clip had been watched more than two hundred thousand times.
Loretta watched it only once. She heard Bradley's voice say that the woman in the lobby used to mop floors, followed by the laughter that made the whole exchange feel like entertainment. She did not ask Nia to have the video removed, although the public comments beneath it grew meaner by the hour. A few people asked why a confirmed visitor had been treated that way; others repeated Bradley's assumptions as though the fact he had spoken them made them true.
"Do you want me to get it taken down?" Nia asked.
"Leave it up," Loretta said. "It's his own voice. And it's a reminder that he thinks people are watching him for the same reasons he watches himself."
Nia opened the business filing beside the video. "The registered agent is Sloane Avery. His girlfriend."
Loretta leaned forward, interested now for a different reason. "What does it establish?"