Leak Inside the AG Office

Nico's device audit takes four hours and gives us exactly what institutions always hate most: a leak with a respectable business card. Case metadata, witness relocations, and warrant drafts were all mirrored to an external review inbox from inside the attorney general's office. The account belongs to Deputy Chief Mason Greer, Nico's mentor and the man who once taught him chain of custody like it was religion.

"No," Nico says when the trace finishes. Not denial. damage.

I have watched men lose fathers, campaigns, and marriages with less visible grief. Mentors are how ambitious systems pass themselves forward. If Greer is dirty, then the rot did not start around this case. It simply recognized itself in it.

Nico calls Greer immediately and gets voicemail. Then a text arrives from Greer's secure number: Stand down on the archive. You are inside a larger containment event than you understand.

Tessa reads it over his shoulder. "Containment event," she says. "That's Vivian language with a law degree."

Nico pockets the phone so hard I think it might crack. "I'm done asking permission."

"Good," I say, because permission is how this story kept burying women.

He should probably suspend himself. He knows that. Instead he requisitions an after-hours archive access card on an old courthouse maintenance pretext and looks at me the way people do right before something inadvisable becomes necessary. "You know the county basement better than anyone," he says. "If Mia was pointing there, I want the person who still remembers which dead corridors lie to visitors."

"I remember all of them."

On the way out, Callum's intern messages from his backup route. She managed to lift one partial ping from Bell's network before it went dark again. Location cluster: downtown courthouse.

Mia's message was not a clue. It was a countdown.