"Then why didn't you report it?"
"I did."
"To whom?"
Lena looked toward Mercer. He responded immediately: "You reported storage irregularities, not missing infrastructure."
"I reported that the backup architecture didn't match the contract."
Mercer's expression remained controlled. "And IT told us the vendor was completing remote configuration."
Lena opened another page. "Remote configuration doesn't create physical storage that isn't here."
No one spoke for a moment. Maya asked the federal technician to record the screen, capture the contract capacity, active capacity, backup status, and current certificates. The technician began imaging the configuration.
Rebecca looked at Maya. "You came here because of the storage system?"
"Partly."
"What else?"
Maya did not answer.
Lena pulled a yellow legal pad from beside her keyboard. Several pages were filled with handwritten dates, account names, and brief notes.
Maya looked at it. "What's that?"
"My own record."
"You kept separate notes?"
"After the system started losing history."
Mercer looked irritated. "Lena, you maintained unofficial audit records?"
"I wrote down what I saw on the department's own system."
"That isn't the same thing as an official record."
"No," Lena said, "but it still exists."
Maya took the point without commenting on the dispute. "Show me the first event that made you start writing things down."
Lena turned back several pages. "There were small inconsistencies before this—storage errors, contractor sessions at strange hours, files appearing in indexes after they had supposedly been removed. But this was the first one I couldn't explain."
She entered a case number into the evidence database. A file opened. The name at the top read Nathan Cole.
Maya studied the screen. "Age 25. What happened?"
"He was detained after officers said they found a restricted municipal access card in his belongings."
Rebecca said, "I remember the case. He had temporary access to a city facility."
Lena nodded. "He also said the card wasn't his."