"What did you know when you entered the code?" Renee asked.
"That my lieutenant said the inventory needed another review. Nothing more."
"Then that's what your statement should say. We're not going to make you responsible for information you didn't have."
Elena looked almost startled. For years, she had worked in an office where a mistake was often traced to the lowest-ranking person who had touched a screen, even when the instruction came from someone above. Renee's response was not a promise that Elena's actions would never be examined. It was simply a commitment to distinguish what she had known from what someone later wanted her actions to mean.
The investigators then examined the approval history attached to the confidential informant payments. They compared the working ledger with archived versions, bank records obtained through appropriate authority, and vouchers maintained by the department. In several transactions, the recorded amount had been changed after an original approval. Some of the changes had legitimate explanations, including corrected dates and duplicate entries removed during routine reconciliation. Others involved payments shown as released when the supporting records did not establish that the money had reached the intended recipient.
One of those files belonged to a confidential source whose identity was protected in the review. The source's work had contributed to a narcotics investigation several months earlier, and the department had approved a reimbursement for expenses related to that work. The ledger showed the payment as completed. A signed acknowledgment was missing from the archived file, and the bank confirmation did not line up with the ledger's stated date. Those inconsistencies did not automatically identify a thief, but they were serious enough to require tracing the approval chain.
Another file involved property that had been logged during a search and later transferred between storage locations. The quantity recorded on the departure sheet differed from the quantity on arrival. A correction had been added afterward, but the corrected form did not identify who counted the items or why the original number had changed. Investigators had to consider ordinary explanations before drawing conclusions. What made the pattern troubling was that several of the disputed changes passed through the same supervisory account and the same small group of people who handled the advance notification.
Malcolm had seen many investigations unravel because a complicated financial record was described in the simplest possible moral terms. People liked stories in which every missing dollar had a clearly identifiable pocket waiting to receive it. Actual accounting misconduct was often harder to establish, and a false accusation could damage an innocent employee as thoroughly as a real cover-up damaged a victim. The strength of the case would depend on careful comparison and testimony, not on the amount of anger surrounding the torn warrant.