"Can you tell the jury who physically typed these commands?" Bennett asked on cross-examination.
Keene adjusted his glasses. "I can tell the jury which account authenticated the transactions."
"That wasn't my question."
"I cannot identify the hands on the keyboard from a credential entry alone."
Elijah almost smiled. He had been waiting months to hear a qualified expert make the distinction aloud. Then Pierce stood and objected to Bennett's next question, which asked whether a remote user could impersonate an employee account. The judge sustained the objection because Bennett had not established a sufficient technical foundation for Keene's opinion about unauthorized network access; the witness had been engaged principally to follow payments, not determine cyber intrusion.
The small victory evaporated. Keene's statement about identifying credentials remained, but Pierce used redirect examination to emphasize that the same credentials appeared repeatedly and that the records carried the city's normal authentication markers. Elijah could feel the jury slipping back toward the familiar story. People found it easier to believe that a woman with an employee number had used it than to imagine a more complicated scheme.
That evening Bennett and Elijah sat with a contract investigator they could afford for only a few hours. The investigator, a former police analyst named Calvin Price, examined the vendor registration dates and found something suggestive. Northline Civic Strategies shared a registered agent with a nonprofit that had received public praise from Councilman Victor Ralston, one of the fund's strongest political supporters. Beacon Meridian Consulting had paid a small consulting fee to a company associated with Ralston's campaign treasurer.
"Suggestive isn't proof," Price warned. "People in city politics share accountants, agents, and lawyers all the time. Don't accuse a councilman until you know where the money actually went."
Elijah marked the connections on a sheet of paper and felt the diagram from the library becoming more crowded. He wanted the names to point cleanly toward the person who had stolen the money. Instead, they formed a web of possibilities, each requiring another record. His mother called as they packed up, asking whether he had eaten dinner, and he lied for the first time that day.
On the second day, Pierce called a municipal records supervisor to authenticate Sarah's electronic acknowledgement. The witness identified the scanned image of her signature on the program's intake forms and testified that the version used in the financial system matched it visually. He also admitted that the acknowledgement was an image file, not a wet signature on the disbursement paperwork. Elijah thought the distinction mattered enormously, but Pierce passed over it quickly enough that several jurors seemed to miss it.
Bennett asked the judge to permit Elijah to question the witness about a document's creation history. Harrison allowed a limited series of questions because Elijah had assisted in preparing a demonstrative chart, but he insisted that Bennett remain beside him and intervene whenever an evidentiary issue arose. Elijah approached the lectern with his legal pad and felt his mouth dry almost immediately. He had rehearsed every line in the library, but none of those rehearsals had included a courtroom full of strangers judging how his voice sounded.