They gave me answers.
The answers were wrong.
Not obvious lies, they’d been prepared and rehearsed well enough that the performance was technically adequate.
Someone had coached them. Someone with access to enough of the operation to understand what a plausible cover story needed to address, and enough leverage over these three specific workers to make them go along with it without visible reluctance.
I went to my father after, framing it as a logistics concern, keeping my tone dry, almost clinical, the language of inventory and risk assessment doing the work for me while I left the implications deliberately unsaid.
He listened.
That was the first thing that caught me: He listened with his full attention, which my father gave to things he considered significant, and the fact that he considered this significant from the first two sentences meant he had already sensed something was wrong before I told him.
“Off-record deliveries,” he said. Quiet. Very still.
“The data points that way, yes.”
He looked at me across his desk with those deep hazel eyes that gave nothing away on the surface but were running something behind them—the five-moves-ahead calculation that was as natural to him as breathing. “I don’t know anything about off-record deliveries,mija.”
I studied his face.
He was not lying.
My father was not a man who got blindsided.
And he was blindsided.
That scared me more than anything the data had shown me.
I left his office and stood in the hallway for a moment with my back against the wall and the clipboard against my chest, and I thought: if someone is using our operation without my father’s knowledge, then someone has access that they shouldn’t have. Access deep enough, sustained enough, and careful enough that it had gone undetected for at least three weeks and possibly longer.
And if the trucks were carrying what the industrial destination near Maverick’s territory suggested they might be carrying—
I pushed off the wall and went back to my office.
***
It took me four days.
Four days of staying late, of cross-referencing shipping schedules against GPS blackout windows against the shift rotation patterns of the three workers, of building the picture piece by piece, the way you built a differential diagnosis—ruling out, narrowing down, following the evidence where it pointed, even when it pointed somewhere uncomfortable.
The dashboard was where I finally found it.
Not the main system—the logistics dashboard had a secondary layer—a debugging interface that I’d accessed months ago while troubleshooting a syncing issue and had never had occasion to return to. It retained cached receipt data that bypassed the primary record-keeping.
The receipts were there.
An industrial facility. East side of Chicago, in the territory that abutted Maverick Wiese’s known operational area. A location that appeared nowhere in Alvarez Holdings’s vendor database, had no relationship to any of our legitimate distribution networks, and had received deliveries from our fleet—three confirmed, possibly more—over the past month.
Our trucks.
Someone else’s deliveries.
Maverick’s territory.
I thought about the fundraiser. About Maverick’s calibrated smile and my father’s hand at my back and Nico standing beside his stepfather with those watchful dark eyes that gave nothing away and never stopped recording.
I thought about how neatly our names would appear in any investigation of those trucks. Then I shut down my computer, gathered my things, and went to find my sister.