A senior analyst explained that research expenses had been shifted between reporting periods in ways that depressed near-term earnings. At the same time, revenue from certain completed contracts had been conservatively estimated for the sale model despite more favorable figures being used in other presentations. The mismatch did not prove every person involved had acted with fraudulent intent, but it demanded an explanation Oliver had not provided. The auditors documented each discrepancy without converting suspicion into a conclusion before the relevant witnesses had been interviewed.
Zane's procurement records were harder to reconstruct because some original supporting materials had been kept outside the normal purchasing system. Archie Bennett helped the investigators match vendor codes with records from suppliers who could verify what goods had actually been delivered. A number of disputed payments led to companies with little evidence of meaningful services. Other transfers were legitimate but had been deliberately described in ways that concealed their connection to essential research projects.
When a supplier's owner was invited to provide documents, she brought a box containing years of correspondence with Mercer Meridian. Her company had made precision components for the hospital backup systems since the warehouse era, and she still carried a photograph of Henry Lawson testing one of the earliest designs. She explained that the delayed invoices had forced her to reduce hours for skilled workers who could not easily find other jobs in their small Colorado town. Dante listened without interrupting, then asked the finance team to review the legitimate obligations urgently so the company's dispute with its former executives would not become the supplier's burden.
Calista attended that meeting and recognized a familiar expression on the woman's face. It was the exhausted composure of someone who had spent months making polite requests because the person controlling the money could afford to ignore them. She asked why the supplier's letters had not reached her office. The reply was predictable: the correspondence had been summarized as a vendor-management concern and marked as resolved.
Afterward, Calista went to the archives and read several other communications she had once approved without seeing their original contents. There were notices from engineers about postponed tests, complaints from maintenance staff about unavailable parts, and letters from small community partners whose project dates had changed without explanation. She began keeping a list of every report she needed to revisit. The list grew faster than she could finish it, which frightened her more than any threat from Oliver's lawyers.
In a closed session of the emergency committee, Dante proposed a review of the company's delegated approval system. He wanted to know how an appendix containing critical sale terms had been circulated under Calista's credentials without her fully informed authorization. The information-security team found that the delegation process had been configured to permit certain approvals through an executive office account. That configuration had been approved during a period when Oliver's division was expanding its control over transactions.
The team preserved system logs and access records without drawing an immediate conclusion about who had intentionally misused them. Calista requested that her own account remain frozen from transaction approval until the inquiry was complete. She told the directors that she had benefited from the appearance of efficiency and could not now separate herself from the consequences of the shortcuts she had accepted. The chairman of the independent committee thanked her, then reminded everyone that cooperation would be evaluated against the evidence rather than against a person's willingness to make an impressive confession.