Chapter 4 - The Digital Footprint
"Who did you send the password to?" I asked, my voice dead calm, though every muscle in my body was coiled tight.
Gladys didn't flinch. She simply crossed her arms, her jaw set. "I didn't send anything to anyone. I don't know the first thing about IP addresses or secure terminals."
"You don't have to," I said, pulling out my phone and tapping out a rapid reply to Vance. "You just had to let someone into the study while my father was at the Veterans Hall. Someone who knew the administrative structure of the Atlantic Fleet well enough to find the backup cache."
"You're giving yourself too much credit, Andrea," a voice said from the doorway.
I spun around. My father was standing in the hall, leaning heavily against the doorframe, looking older than time itself. But it was the man standing directly behind him that made the air freeze in my lungs.
It wasn't a local policeman or a debt collector. It was Lieutenant Commander Thomas Hayes—the second-in-command of the Navy's internal investigative unit in Norfolk, the man who had personally signed off on my deployment to the financial crimes division three years ago.
Hayes stepped past my father, casually removing his leather gloves. He looked at the bank statements spread across the desk, then gave a slow, dry nod.
"Well," Hayes said, offering a tight, humorless smile. "It seems family reunions are always more complicated than expected."
"Commander Hayes," I said, my hand instinctively dropping toward my pocket where my official badge rested. "What are you doing here? You're stationed three hundred miles north."
"I was reassigned, Lieutenant," Hayes said smoothly. "Or rather, I've been overseeing the broader scope of the Atlantic Logistics file. A scope that apparently involves your father's household."
"You're the one who accessed my terminal," I said, the pieces clicking together with terrifying clarity. "The audit wasn't just missing files because of a glitch. You've been leaking the fleet's supply data to Atlantic Logistics from the inside."
Hayes didn't deny it. He didn't even look surprised. He just walked over to the desk, picked up one of Gladys’s bank statements, and glanced at it before setting it back down.
"The Navy is a very large machine, Miller," Hayes said quietly. "Sometimes parts get stuck. Sometimes people look into corners they shouldn't, thinking they're being good little investigators, when all they're doing is disrupting arrangements that keep a lot of people very comfortable."
"Arrangements involving fraud against active-duty service members," I said, my voice rising.
"Arrangements involving survival," Gladys muttered from the corner.
Hayes turned his attention back to me, his eyes narrowing into cold, calculating slits. "Your father understood how this worked. He tried to do the right thing at the end, yes—which is why we had to make sure his reputation remained spotless while we managed the transition. But you? You kept digging. You brought Vance down here tonight just to make a point."
"I didn't call Vance," I said. "He came because of the missing audit."
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"And now," Hayes said, stepping closer to the desk, "Commander Vance is sitting in a motel room five miles away, waiting for a debrief file that is currently sitting in a locked drawer right here. Only the file isn't going to make it to his terminal, Miller."
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