Simone was thirty-eight. She had a runner's build, dark brown skin, and thick natural curls gathered into a high bun that stayed neat through long days in the field. She wore a pale blue button-up shirt, navy trousers, a dark tie, and comfortable black shoes. There was nothing theatrical about her appearance. She had never believed that looking intimidating made a person better at asking questions, and in nearly fourteen years of federal service she had learned to distrust investigators who enjoyed being feared.
People at the Bureau often described her as patient. What they meant was that she could listen through an hour of evasion without revealing which sentence had answered her question. She kept handwritten notebooks even when a case involved databases and drones, because a written line could sometimes reveal what a thousand entries concealed. She remembered people's exact words, including the words they wished they had chosen differently. Above all, she disliked shortcuts. A case built on a shortcut might fail precisely when the victims needed it to hold.
The Westbridge investigation had started six months before with a small discrepancy on a disaster reimbursement form. There should have been forty-two portable thermal imaging units available to the county's volunteer rescue teams at the end of the previous winter. A state audit found nineteen. The missing units were recorded as received, assigned, inspected, and ready for deployment, even though the volunteers who were supposed to use them had never seen them.
That anomaly led to another. Six rapid-deployment communication kits purchased through federally supported emergency-preparedness programs were marked as delivered to the county's southern fire district. The district chief had signed for two and returned a written request for the missing four. Someone had later uploaded a second receipt bearing what looked like his signature. When the chief challenged it, the county procurement office informed him that the matter had been resolved.
It had not been resolved. It had been hidden.
By the time Simone's task force became involved, the missing inventory covered portable generators, medical response packs, satellite communication terminals, rescue drones, thermal cameras, and mobile repeaters intended to let crews communicate when ordinary networks failed. Some items had been bought with grant funding, while others were county property purchased through federally reimbursed contracts. The invoices collectively ran into the millions. The actual physical inventory was a fraction of what the records promised.
The theft was not abstract to the people of Westbridge County. Eight months earlier, a violent rainstorm had driven water through the low roads around Birch Hollow, cutting off a row of houses near an old creek crossing. Firefighters needed a thermal drone to check a wooded bank where a missing older man might have sheltered. The county inventory listed three available. None could be located. A volunteer crew eventually searched the area on foot, in darkness, with one failing handheld light and a borrowed radio.