Danielle closed her eyes for a moment. She had known Leah's archives were likely safe. Hearing it confirmed was a relief greater than she had expected.
"Did she get home all right?"
"Yes. Her sister met her and Sophie. They're staying together for the weekend while we assess the risk. Her employer has agreed to coordinate with the investigators instead of demanding that she report to work immediately."
"That's good."
Torres continued. "We also have some evidence about the outage. A building maintenance contractor says the service cabinet was operating normally that morning, and there was no reported interruption on the utility line. One of the exterior cameras shows movement near the rear access shortly before the lights went down. We're examining it carefully before attributing the cause."
"Shaw and Voss were back there," Danielle said.
"We know. We're not going to assume which one caused the failure until we can support it. But someone accessed the area, and the timing matters."
Danielle glanced at her kitchen clock. "I want every credible explanation preserved, including accidental failure. I don't want their lawyers finding an easy opening because we treated suspicion as proof."
"Already on the list."
By midweek, the lab had determined that the unauthorized module could interfere with the relationship between measured fuel delivery and administrative billing data. The precise installation method remained in the expert report, not in the public case summary. Investigators also found traces of more than one configuration on the system, suggesting that changes had been made over time. A damaged inspection seal had been replaced shortly before Danielle's arrival, likely in anticipation of a maintenance visit or routine audit.
The records told a story of increasing confidence. Early suspect transactions were small, enough to resemble a clerical adjustment. Then the quantities grew. A few invoices appeared at ordinary business hours, perhaps to blend with legitimate purchases, but most were recorded after midnight when traffic was light and a tanker could sit at pump six without attracting attention. The system used vehicle identifiers belonging to actual Army accounts, and the false data traveled through the payment processor into the same reports Navarro had challenged.
When Danielle saw the reconstructed audit timeline, she remembered Navarro's first two receipts. A three-hundred-and-eighty-gallon charge. A six-hundred-and-twenty-gallon charge. At the time, the amounts had seemed like isolated errors. Now they were among the early steps of a calculated pattern.
The financial strand produced its own disappointments. Not every suspicious transfer was connected to Shaw or Voss. Some were legitimate payments between related companies for trucking and storage. Some entries had been duplicated by ordinary accounting errors. Two apparent fuel thefts turned out to be invoice reversals posted days after a failed transaction. Each discarded lead meant more work and less impressive totals, but Danielle welcomed every correction. The case would be stronger for knowing what it did not prove.