Mercer nodded stiffly. Lena searched her old correspondence and found another message, this one about unexplained retention changes. It had been forwarded to the project team and closed with a note that the contractor would resolve the matter after final acceptance. The same phrase appeared in several separate records: after project closeout. Each occurrence by itself could have been ordinary bureaucracy. Together, they suggested that staff had repeatedly been told to delay questions until the city had finished paying for the work.
"I wish I'd pushed harder," Lena said quietly.
"You did push," Maya answered. "You filed written concerns and kept a contemporaneous record when the normal system stopped providing reliable history. We'll evaluate what the department did with those concerns."
The hidden server's audit retention continued cycling as they worked. Owen warned that some older administrative events previously visible were becoming unavailable in the live queue. He could capture the state of records that remained, but stopping the entire system without understanding its links could interfere with legitimate operations. Maya wanted the team to preserve as much as possible before altering connections. She asked Owen to monitor the remaining external sessions while Elise mapped their permissions and the relationship to dispatch.
"Why don't you disconnect the contractor immediately?" Mercer asked.
"Because the existing connection may show us who is using it and what requests are being made. We won't leave it unrestricted. We'll protect operational systems and preserve activity under controlled observation. The moment it creates a direct safety risk, that priority changes."
"You're watching a door you believe somebody is using improperly," Rebecca said.
"I'm watching what can be documented. And we're preparing to close it safely."
The distinction mattered, but it was not reassuring to Rebecca. She had spent the morning seeing familiar institutional language turned against her. Every ordinary phrase she offered about policy, discretion, and department authority was answered with a request for an underlying record. She had always believed that strong leadership required people beneath her to trust her judgment. Now people were asking for documentation of decisions she had treated as too routine to explain. Her brother's name appeared repeatedly in a system she had defended, and she could no longer keep the investigation separate from her family.
Without announcing that she was leaving, Rebecca stepped into the hallway. She passed the records office, climbed the stairs, and entered a secondary administrative room near the chief's suite. The room contained terminals used by command staff for authorized system-management tasks. She had access there. At least, she had until Maya's preservation instructions changed the practical meaning of that access.
Rebecca sat before a workstation and opened the administrator console. Her stated intention, which she would later repeat, was to isolate what she believed might be compromised audit data. The console offered several administrative functions. She selected an archive queue, prepared a purge operation, and authenticated the request through her own identity. The action had not yet completed when Ben saw her go upstairs.