She opened the pad to a page dated three weeks earlier. The entries were neat, written in blue ink with small annotations in the margins. A contractor certificate had appeared after midnight. A storage alert had followed. Several media files had been marked for migration.
The next morning, the certificate was still visible, but an earlier access event was missing. Lena had copied the account label exactly, including a typographical error that later disappeared from the system entirely.
"Did you report these observations?" Maya asked.
"I filed a technical incident ticket. It was closed as resolved without a technician visiting my desk. I reopened it and asked for an explanation. The reply said the vendor had confirmed normal maintenance. I sent another request to command administration."
"And?"
"I was told to let the contractor finish."
Rebecca folded her arms. "You were told not to interfere with an approved project. There's a difference."
"I wasn't interfering. I was asking why an evidence administrator couldn't see a reliable audit history."
A knock sounded at the door. Two federal technical specialists had arrived, accompanied by an evidence agent carrying numbered containers. Maya introduced them as Owen Price and Elise Park. Owen was broad-shouldered and soft-spoken, with a concentration so complete that he appeared to forget his surroundings when examining a screen. Elise had the crisp efficiency of someone who had spent years listening to technical problems described in nontechnical terms and finding the question hidden inside the complaint. They carried authorized preservation equipment, but Maya made clear that no one was to connect anything before documenting the live configuration and the department's normal operating requirements.
"Dispatch remains live," she said. "Officers continue to answer calls. You preserve the existing state before collecting copies. Record every action you take. Nothing gets switched off because doing so seems convenient."
Mercer stood beside the door. "I need assurances that my emergency systems won't fail because federal technicians are examining a server."
"You have them," Elise replied. "We'll map the dependencies before any containment step. If an operation could affect dispatch, we'll stop and coordinate through the county."
Maya did not seem annoyed by Mercer's question. She seemed to welcome a genuine concern that could be answered by a specific plan. The distinction was not lost on Lena. Maya would not accept a vague claim that the system might be compromised as a reason to disregard evidence, but neither would she sacrifice emergency services to make an investigation easier.
Elise opened the storage-status report and compared the contract's promised capacity with the devices actually recognized by the system. She checked it twice and asked Lena for a second source. Both showed the same discrepancy. The department had certified three retention layers, including an off-site backup environment, but the available equipment and connection records did not adequately support the architecture described in the acceptance report.
"How big is the difference?" Maya asked.
"Enough that we should not call it a rounding problem," Elise answered. "The local environment exists. Part of the redundancy is visible. But I can't establish the full off-site retention capacity or the transfer history that would prove it is operating."