That could have been careless supervision. It could have been something worse. Danielle added the summaries to a folder labeled QUESTIONS, not CONCLUSIONS.
The station manager, Leah Grant, was the first living person behind the numbers to make Danielle uneasy.
Leah was forty-one, with close-cropped brown hair, tired gray eyes, and a habit of glancing toward the parking lot when someone mentioned the police. She managed the station for a regional retail operator, which meant she had authority over its daily systems but not the power to change its contracts. She had worked there long enough to recognize the difference between normal night deliveries and trucks that arrived without a bill of lading.
Danielle first spoke to her by telephone, identifying herself as a federal investigator and explaining the narrow questions she wanted to ask. Leah's replies were polite and almost perfectly useless.
"We sell fuel," she said. "Trucks come in. People pay. I process the end-of-day reports."
"Do you ever see purchases on military accounts that don't correspond to vehicles at the pumps?"
"I don't know. The system handles the cards."
"Have police officers been involved in accessing the dispenser cabinets?"
A pause, so brief that another interviewer might have missed it.
"You'll have to ask the maintenance company."
"Ms. Grant, is there a reason you're uncomfortable discussing this on the phone?"
Another pause. Then the sound of a door closing somewhere near the receiver.
"I have a shift to finish," Leah said. "I can't help you."
The line went dead.
Danielle did not interpret the call as evidence that Leah was complicit. Fear and guilt could sound similar through a telephone, but they left different tracks if an investigator took the time to look. She requested background records, checked Leah's employment history, and found the manager had repeatedly asked the corporate office to review unexplained discrepancies. Those complaints had been returned to the local station with instructions to reconcile them internally. The person who would be notified that Leah had complained was Leah herself.
A second fact bothered Danielle more. Within twenty-four hours of that telephone call, a county patrol cruiser parked across from Leah's apartment building for nearly an hour. Its automated vehicle-location record placed it there, and the officer assigned to it was Voss.
Danielle met General Marcus Thorne two days later at a secure conference room overlooking an Army vehicle staging yard. The four-star general had spent decades in logistics commands and was now overseeing a broader review of vulnerabilities in military supply contracts. He was not running a criminal investigation by personal decree. Danielle's case remained under the authority of Army CID and the federal prosecutors advising it. But Thorne had asked to be kept informed because the scheme raised a question beyond the missing fuel: if private vendors could submit false charges without triggering alarms, how many other gaps had gone unnoticed?