Understood.
At 7:04, another message came from Vale's personal number.
She is likely using 3B. Do not let the case reach chambers.
Vance replied with a thumbs-up emoji.
At 7:52, location data placed him inside the courthouse parking structure.
He had been waiting before I arrived.
The phone also contained a call from Vale at 8:03, lasting twenty-seven seconds.
That call ended less than a minute before Vance approached me.
Cho read the extraction report twice, then placed it flat on the conference table.
"This changes the hallway incident," she said.
Romero nodded.
"It also tells us Vale knew the audit delivery location."
"Who besides us knew?"
I answered from memory. "Judge Carter. Chief Judge Benton. Two people in the inspector general's office. Outside counsel. One court clerk who arranged the sealed delivery window."
"And Daniel Price?" Romero asked.
"No Daniel Price in this matter," I said automatically, then realized the name belonged to a different audit from years earlier. Fatigue was catching up with me. "Sorry. No. Our technical contractor knew a hand delivery was planned but not the courthouse or time."
Cho made a note.
"Then we investigate the leak separately from the underlying corruption."
Judge Carter joined us only after Cho had removed details related to the criminal search that the judge did not need to know in her administrative capacity. That boundary frustrated everyone and protected the case at the same time.
"Do we know why Vale wanted the briefcase?" Carter asked.
"We know he wanted it stopped," Cho said. "Motive comes later."
I opened Folder Two.
"The contents can suggest why."
Folder Two concerned property-room integrity.
For eighteen months, Westbridge's narcotics and special enforcement teams had seized cash during arrests, search warrants, and asset-forfeiture cases. The official evidence receipts looked clean. The property-room logs looked clean. Bank deposit confirmations looked clean.
But the numbers did not always match one another.
At first, the differences were small. Three hundred dollars. Five hundred. Nine hundred. Amounts that could be blamed on counting errors during chaotic arrests. Then I found a case with a $4,200 discrepancy and another with $7,000.
The pattern was not random.
Cash entered the chain at one amount, was reduced in an intermediate record, and then arrived at the property room at the lower amount. The original field receipt sometimes disappeared from the main system but remained in court discovery because defense attorneys had downloaded it before the change.
That was how I reconstructed the first twelve cases.
Vance was present for seven.
Vale approved supervisory corrections in five.
The same administrative service account appeared in all twelve.
"How much money?" Judge Carter asked.
"Documented discrepancy so far is $186,740. That does not mean theft of $186,740 is proven. It means the records cannot explain that amount."
"Important distinction."
"Very."
Folder Three concerned body-camera records.
Westbridge required officers to upload footage automatically at the end of each shift. The camera system generated immutable device timestamps, but the department's evidence portal allowed authorized administrators to mark clips as duplicate, corrupted, accidental activation, or non-evidentiary.
Those labels did not erase the raw file immediately.
They hid it from ordinary discovery exports.
Jonah Reed had discovered that dozens of clips marked non-evidentiary corresponded to complaint cases involving searches, use of force, or disputed consent. The raw files still existed on the vendor archive because a retention sync had failed to delete them when the department portal status changed.
That failure was the luckiest technical mistake in the entire audit.