Gage swore in a relieved, raw voice when the device came across the chain. It wasn’t all of the backups—some drives were still missing—but this one was a seeded copy that contained a trove. They brought the drive up under chain-of-custody and began to parse.
Tyler sat next to me with a pale, thrilled look. “It’s got a lot,” he said. “Server dumps, a list of buyers. And…Brie—look at this folder name.”
He pointed at the screen. There, in plain text among dozens of other folders, was a file labeled: Carter_Favors_—_Confidential.pdf.
My stomach dropped in a single, awful slide.
We decrypted. The file opened with clean, ugly inevitability: scanned pages, a ledger of transfers, receipts, and a series of meeting minutes. The dates unnerved me: old, but not ancient—within the last five years.
