Maya noticed an older photograph showing Mercer at the ribbon cutting for the department's digital modernization project. Rebecca stood beside him; next to her, a tall man in a blue business suit shook hands with a city councilwoman. The caption identified the man as Calvin Sloan, president of Sloan Integrated Systems.
Inside the digital evidence office, three workstations faced one wall. There were locked equipment cabinets, an access-controlled door to the main server room, and a whiteboard covered with storage quotas and reminders about evidence transfers. The room smelled faintly of warm electronics and the coffee Lena kept forgetting to finish. Unlike the chief's polished office, this place had the quiet clutter of work being performed by somebody who cared more about accuracy than appearances.
Before stepping inside, Maya asked for an inventory of privileged accounts. Lena named her own evidence administration role, Mercer's executive privileges, Rebecca's security permissions, and contractor access belonging to Sloan Integrated Systems. Rebecca immediately explained that her brother owned the company and that the relationship had been disclosed through procurement. Mercer added that the contract had been approved by the city, reviewed by attorneys, and awarded under the usual competitive process.
"Then there will be records supporting all of that," Maya said. "We'll preserve them."
Rebecca looked disappointed, as though she had expected an accusation she could loudly deny. Instead Maya asked Lena to display the audit console. Recent entries appeared with full timestamps, user identities, session categories, and changes. Farther down the history, fields became incomplete. Names turned into generic account labels. Entire spans of activity disappeared between entries that should have been consecutive.
"Before the upgrade, I could reconstruct an administrator session all the way back to its originating request," Lena explained. "I could tell who had opened a case, who had exported a file, who had approved a metadata correction, and whether a correction was later reversed. That's the foundation of evidence integrity. A lawyer doesn't need to trust me personally if I can show a reliable history."
"And now?" Maya asked.
Lena opened another page. "Now I can tell you what the system says happened yesterday. I'm less certain about what it says happened three weeks ago. Every new event seems to take space from an older one. That's not the configured retention period we accepted."
Mercer leaned closer. "It could be a storage optimization error."
"It could," Maya agreed. "We need to establish what the original settings were, who changed them, and whether older records exist anywhere else."
Lena took out the yellow pad. She had begun writing down suspicious entries by hand after a routine Monday morning review revealed that weekend contractor access had vanished from the visible audit trail. At first she had been embarrassed by the habit. Recording computer events on paper felt old-fashioned, almost childish in a department that had spent millions advertising its digital capabilities. Then she remembered an instructor from her earliest evidence-management course telling her that a chain of custody was not a collection of impressive software features. It was a promise that every person who handled something could be named.