Chapter 2: Discovery

The Whitmore Logistics file did not get less weird overnight. It got worse. Priya spread the documents across her dining table at eleven p.m., a glass of wine going warm beside her laptop, and traced the numbers for the third time. Her client, a mid-level accounts manager named Felix Ruiz, stood accused of embezzling $340,000 over two years. The prosecution's evidence was clean. Too clean. Real embezzlement cases were messy — sloppy transfers, panicked cover-ups, a paper trail that looked like a man running out of good ideas. This looked like a paper trail built by someone with plenty of time and no fear of scrutiny. She called Denise at eleven-thirty, knowing she'd still be up. "The metadata's wrong," Priya said without preamble. "Exhibits twelve and thirteen. Generated three weeks after Ruiz was already charged." "So somebody backdated evidence." Denise's voice had the flat calm of someone who had seen a lot of things and was rarely surprised by new ones. "Or somebody's IT system just has bad clocks." "Maybe. I want you to pull everything on who had access to Whitmore's financial servers between March and June." "You know who's prosecuting this, right?" Priya did know. She'd seen the assignment sheet. "Locke." "You gonna tell him?" "Tell him what? That I think somebody handed him fabricated evidence and he's about to build a case on it?" Priya rubbed her eyes. "He'll say I'm trying to rattle him before trial." "Would you be wrong?" "No. But I'd also be right about the metadata." She didn't sleep much. In the morning she was back at the courthouse early, coffee in hand, when she found Sawyer already in the hallway outside Judge Alvarez's courtroom, reading something on his phone with the particular stillness of a man who had just found something he didn't like. "You look terrible," she said, because it was true and because saying something kind felt unnatural before nine a.m. "Thank you." He didn't look up. "Long night." "Whitmore Logistics?" That got his attention. He lowered the phone. "How do you know about Whitmore Logistics?" "I'm defending Felix Ruiz. Small world, isn't it." Something passed over his face — not the usual competitive spark, something more careful. "Small," he agreed. "Priya, can I ask you something, off the record, no games?" She crossed her arms. "You've never asked me anything off the record in three years." "I'm asking now." He glanced down the hallway, then back at her, and lowered his voice. "Have your exhibits — has anything in the discovery struck you as off? Timing, formatting, anything?" Her pulse ticked up. This was either a trap or it wasn't, and she had exactly no way to know which, except that Sawyer Locke had never once, in three years of trying to beat her, looked this unsettled before a trial had even started. "Funny you ask," she said carefully. "Two exhibits have metadata timestamps from after Ruiz was charged. Like they were generated after the fact and dressed up as originals." Sawyer went very still. "I flagged the same two exhibits to my supervisor yesterday. He told me I was misreading the metadata tool." "Were you?" "No." He said it simply, without his usual armor of certainty, which somehow made it more convincing. "I've prosecuted embezzlement cases for six years. I know what real ones look like. This isn't one." "So why are you still prosecuting it?" "Because I got told to, and because if I drop it without proof, it gets reassigned to someone who won't ask questions, and Ruiz still goes to prison for something that smells like a setup." He exhaled. "I don't like your client, Kapoor. I don't even know your client. But I don't think he did this." Priya studied him. Three years of watching this man argue like his life depended on winning, and this was the first time she'd seen him look like winning wasn't the point at all. "If we're doing this," she said slowly, "if you're actually saying what I think you're saying — we can't just talk in a hallway. Denise found something. I want you to see it." "I have court in twenty minutes." "Then after. Denise's office, six o'clock. Bring whatever you flagged for your supervisor." He studied her a moment, the same measuring look she imagined she gave witnesses right before she decided whether to trust them. "You realize what you're asking. If this goes where I think it goes, we're talking about people with a lot more power than either of us." "I've never once run from a hard case, Locke." "No," he said, and for the first time in three years, it didn't sound like an insult. "You haven't." The courtroom doors opened behind them. Judge Alvarez's clerk called the room to order, and they went their separate ways down the hall — rivals again, for the cameras, for the record — but something had shifted, quiet and unmistakable, and neither of them said a word about it for the rest of the morning. At six o'clock, Priya was standing in Denise's cramped office with a folder of financial records spread across the desk when she heard footsteps in the hall, and looked up to see Sawyer Locke standing in the doorway, holding a file of his own — and behind him, unnoticed by either of them, someone had paused at the end of the corridor just long enough to see exactly who was meeting, and where.

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