A gentle knock interrupted my thoughts.
My lead analyst, Marcus, stood outside the glass door.
He was holding an encrypted tablet.
His expression was unusually serious.
“Emma,” Marcus began, his voice unusually tight. “The independent audit committee for Halden Group just sent over the final, unredacted batch of server logs for the regional development investigation.”
I immediately straightened.
Halden Group was a multibillion-dollar property investment corporation.
It was also the company where Vanessa had recently been promoted to regional vice president.
Three months earlier, Halden’s board of directors had hired Clearwater Forensics to investigate substantial financial losses within its regional development operations.
The assignment was confidential.
To protect the investigation from bias, we had initially worked with anonymized departmental information.
Until that morning, the executives connected to the suspicious transactions had been identified only through coded credentials.
“Did they unmask the executive identifiers?” I asked, my voice suddenly dropping to a whisper.
