Loretta asked Patricia to arrange an all-staff question session before the end of the day, with independent human resources present and questions permitted without managers screening them first. Nia prepared an explanation of the payment controls, the limits of the audit, and the fact that the company continued operating normally. They made clear that people who had properly performed their jobs were not under suspicion simply because the executive above them had signed questionable documents. Those distinctions mattered more to workers facing rent and mortgage payments than the dramatic collapse of a promotion.
By lunchtime, the investigators had sealed the specified offices and begun collecting electronic records under the warrant. They worked with the company's legal and technical teams to preserve the relevant systems while keeping unrelated business information protected. The finance department continued processing ordinary vendor obligations through temporary controls, and the guests scheduled for that afternoon's meeting rooms still had places to sit. An acquisition could survive the removal of a chief operating officer; a building whose employees stopped knowing who was responsible for everyday work could not.
Bradley sat in his office with his attorney by late afternoon, watching investigators label devices that had previously seemed like ordinary tools of his authority. He had spent years treating the finance system as an extension of his own judgment, a place where an instruction from him became a payment after enough people clicked approve. Now he saw a stranger photograph the label on his computer and another note the serial number on a company phone. The same precision he had dismissed as pointless was being applied to him, one item at a time.
His attorney told him not to make another statement without reviewing the actual allegations. Bradley wanted to insist that he had been betrayed by Patricia, by Dennis, by Sloane, and finally by the quiet woman who had watched him from a lobby chair. But the attorney kept returning to the same questions: Who performed the consulting? What proof of services existed? Who controlled the Lakeside account? The questions were so ordinary that Bradley found them difficult to answer without explaining everything he had spent months refusing to explain.
Sloane sat with a separate lawyer that evening and opened the folder of messages she had saved. She described the day Bradley had asked her to sign the company registration papers, the account card he had arranged, and the assurances that the business would handle future sponsorship income. Her lawyer explained that she could not assume the mere act of signing someone else's documents excused her from responsibility, but that the records might help distinguish what she had known from what she had been told. Sloane finally understood that her public life had made her careless about private paperwork, and that being photographed beside power was no substitute for knowing what one had signed.