After midnight, Loretta sat in the quiet of her kitchen with the notebook from the lobby, the screenshot from Friday night, and a cup of tea that had gone cold. She did not feel triumphant. She was thinking about Teresa calculating how long her savings would cover rent, about Ben cleaning up pastries from a room nobody used, and about the employees who had applauded Bradley because their paychecks came through his office. She wanted the company to keep its good people and its legitimate work, and she knew that Monday could be painful for both.
She turned to a fresh page and wrote three words across the top: PEOPLE, PAPER, MONEY. Beneath PEOPLE she wrote Teresa, Hayley, Ben, Dennis, Bradley, Sloane, and Patricia. Beneath PAPER she listed room calendars, visitor logs, invoices, the agency filing, the appointment record, and the original approvals. Beneath MONEY she wrote the two sums that mattered, separated by a long line: $1,620,000 already paid; $180,000 requested and awaiting approval.
She left the notebook open when she went to bed. The following morning, the auditors would begin preparing their final access requests, and the district attorney's investigators would continue examining the referral. Loretta had spent thirty years building a company that knew the difference between a clean floor and a building run with integrity. On Monday she intended to find out whether Belmont Row could learn that difference too.
Nia received Teresa's statement before breakfast on Saturday. By then, outside counsel had reviewed the preliminary documents and sent the package to the county district attorney's economic crimes unit. The referral included payment ledgers, the vendor contract, the registered-agent filing, the unexplained conference reservations, and Teresa's signed account. It also contained a warning that the available information was incomplete and required independent verification, a sentence Loretta insisted on keeping despite its lack of drama.
A prosecutor requested additional records and began seeking the legal authority needed to inspect Lakeside's bank transactions. No one in the prosecutor's office promised an immediate arrest or a particular charge. The value of the referral was that it gave investigators a documented reason to examine transactions that a private owner could not lawfully demand to see. Loretta preferred that uncertainty to a dramatic accusation that might collapse under scrutiny.
By Saturday evening, the audit team had located an additional problem. Belmont Row's contract-management software contained a series of reports described as Lakeside strategy summaries, but the earliest version of several documents appeared to have been uploaded after the invoices they supposedly supported had already been paid. One report cited a market analysis that had not been published until months after the meeting date printed on its cover. Another referred to a conference venue whose name had changed only recently, long after the period in which the document claimed to have been prepared.
"Could be administrative backfilling," the lead auditor, Elaine Porter, told Nia during a call. "It's not unheard of for teams to upload a deliverable late. But the timing is inconsistent enough that we should preserve version history and interview whoever accepted the work."