"I wasn't supposed to be on call tonight," Caleb told Simone and Nia. "My manager asked me to cover because somebody said there might be a network issue. An hour later, the system flagged a bulk archival change. It wasn't part of any scheduled maintenance."
"What kind of change?" Nia asked.
"A set of dispatch events was queued for deletion from the searchable archive. The original logs hadn't all been overwritten. I interrupted the job and made protected copies of the event records and the audit trail."
Simone leaned forward. "Did you identify who initiated it?"
"A privileged account assigned to the command administration office. But I can't tell you who sat at the computer just from that account."
"That's an important distinction," Simone said.
Caleb looked relieved that she had not asked him to make a stronger accusation. "I can show the access window. The account signed in at 8:16. At 8:21 the deletion request was created. It failed at 8:24 when I locked the session. Then somebody tried again from a different workstation."
"Who can assign that account's permissions?" Nia asked.
"The sheriff can authorize them. The department administrator can activate them. I don't know who actually used the login."
The distinction was frustrating but valuable. Simone had built enough cases to know that the smallest unsupported assertion could give a skilled defense attorney a way to challenge an otherwise solid witness. She asked Caleb to describe the system as he knew it, without guessing motives. He explained the audit records and showed that most of the targeted entries corresponded to nights when Keller's cruiser had been logged near the warehouse. He had saved documentation before contacting anyone in the department.
"If I go back to work tomorrow, I'm finished," Caleb said at the end.
"We'll help you make a formal report and document any retaliation," Rios told him. "Your employer's response doesn't change the value of what you preserved."
"I just kept thinking about what those boxes were supposed to be for. My aunt works at the volunteer station in Birch Hollow. She spent her own money on batteries last winter. They told her there wasn't any budget."
When he left, Simone sat alone for a moment with his folder. That was how the case kept returning to the same point. Each technical irregularity had a human counterpart: a responder borrowing batteries, a warehouse employee afraid of losing a paycheck, a deputy wondering whether speaking honestly would cost his family their home. The men at the center of the scheme treated the inventory as numbers moving between accounts. The people paying for it had never been asked whether they could afford the loss.
She called her mother on the drive back to the hotel. Evelyn Carter answered on the second ring. Even retired, she kept the habit of sounding alert whenever her daughter called after dark.
"You're working too much," Evelyn said without a greeting.