The tension in the briefing room of the Lakeport Police Sub-bureau had reached a fever pitch, the kind of heavy, suffocating atmosphere that precedes a lightning strike. Outside, the distant, rhythmic strobing of blue and red police lights reflected off the damp asphalt, but inside, the only light came from the harsh, flickering fluorescent tubes overhead.
Ambrose Ward stood amidst the storm, his posture relaxed, almost casual. He knew exactly why Director Gaines and Gareth Quinn felt so emboldened. In the labyrinthine world of digital forensics, tracing the origin of thousands of spam emails and harassing phone calls was a nightmare of bureaucratic stonewalling. Most of those calls were routed through out-of-province servers or masked by international proxies. For a standard investigator
