I described the envelope and the meeting without embellishment.
Daniel suggested that we stop discussing detailed evidence in front of Preston until counsel for every party had a chance to respond.
Rachel agreed.
Preston said he had done nothing wrong.
I asked why the blue tape on his briefcase matched the strip on the package delivered to my office that morning.
Preston answered too quickly.
He said blue tape was common.
Rachel finally told us what she suspected.
She had found blue archival tape on a storage carton from her mother’s office.
The carton held original vendor agreements and two encrypted backup drives.
When she went to retrieve it, the carton was empty.
Preston had claimed he sent the contents to shredding.
Rachel believed the briefcase had been used to transport the drives.
Nora said the tape could not prove that by itself.
Preston used that uncertainty like a shield.
He smiled at me and said I was desperate enough to imagine crimes in a strip of stationery.
I thought of the watch on the dresser upstairs.
I asked him whether he had taken anything else from my house.
He said he had not.
Allison closed her eyes.
She confessed that Preston had borrowed a small external drive from my study, believing it contained a presentation she had prepared on our home computer.
It actually held copies of project billing schedules.
I walked into the kitchen and put my hands against the counter.
The betrayal had layers I had not expected.
My wife had allowed a stranger into my room, my finances, and my business without once asking me whether I consented.
I did not raise my voice.
I called my office manager and told her to disable all remote credentials connected to our home devices.
I also asked her to preserve every system log.
For the first time that day I began acting for the people who would wake up the next morning expecting me to pay them.
Chapter 15: The Warehouse Visit
Grace and I visited a storage warehouse that had been handling archived materials for Bellwether clients.
The manager would not release private records without authorization, and we did not ask him to.
We wanted to understand the ordinary process for logging containers.
He showed us blank forms and explained how shipping labels were generated.
He remembered a carton with blue tape because it had arrived without a matching inventory slip.
He had refused to accept it until the sender provided a reference number.
