He jumped. He actually jumped in his chair. He followed me into my office, looking like a man walking to the gallows. I closed the door. I didn’t offer him a seat. “Sit down, Gavin,” I commanded. He sat. He was wringing his hands. “I know,” I said simply.
Gavin’s face crumbled. “Madison, I am so sorry. I didn’t want you to find out this way.”
“You didn’t want me to find out?” I asked, my voice rising. “You downloaded the budget at 2:00 in the morning, Gavin. You fed the numbers to my brother. And then you told him about Boise.”
Gavin looked at me, total confusion washing over his panic. “What? What are you talking about?”
“The lawsuit!” I snapped. “You are the mole.”
“Mole?” Gavin stood up, offended now. “I am not a mole. I am looking for a new job!”
I blinked. “What?”
“I am looking for a new job!” he yelled, then lowered his voice, looking at the door. “Look, I have a mortgage. I have twins on the way. The news says you are bankrupt. Jim Vance told me he might not get paid. I got scared. Madison, I was printing my resume. That is what I was doing at the printer. I was taking calls from recruiters in the stairwell.”
“But the login,” I said, pointing at the paper on my desk. “Your login was used to download the Rivergate budget at 2:00 a.m. last Tuesday.”
“I was asleep at 2:00 a.m. last Tuesday,” Gavin protested. “My wife tracks my sleep on her watch because I snore. I can prove it.”
“Then why does the log say it was you?”
“I don’t know!” he shouted. “I have my password on a sticky note under my keyboard. Half the office knows it because I’m terrible at remembering them.”
I froze. A sticky note under the keyboard. And Boise…
“Did you tell anyone about Boise?” I asked.
“No. Who would I tell? I don’t care where you put the files. I just want to know if my paycheck is going to clear on Friday.”
I looked at him. Really looked at him. He was sweating. Yes, he was guilty. But he was guilty of disloyalty, not espionage. He was a scared employee trying to abandon a sinking ship, not a saboteur trying to torpedo it. He wasn’t the mole. He was the distraction.
“Gavin,” I said slowly. “Show me the sticky note.”
We walked out to his desk. He lifted his keyboard. There, stuck to the bottom, was a bright yellow Post-it note with his password written in bold Sharpie: RooksRules88.
“Who sits near you?” I asked, looking around the open-plan office.
“Laya is right there,” he pointed to the cubicle across the aisle. “And Marcus is over there.”
I looked at the IT report again. The download happened at a workstation, not via VPN. That meant someone was physically in the office at 2:00 in the morning.
“Gavin,” I said, “go get the building access logs. Not the server logs—the keycard swipes for the front door.”
Gavin ran to the security desk. He came back two minutes later with a printout. I scanned the list for last Tuesday.
02:05 a.m. Entry: Cleaning Crew. 02:08 a.m. Entry: Laya Grant.
I stopped. Laya. My cost controller. The quiet one. The one who cried when her cat died. The one who I had comforted in the breakroom just last week because she said she was stressed about the audit. She wasn’t stressed about the audit. She was stressed because she was stealing my company piece by piece.
“Where is Laya?” I asked, looking at her empty chair.
“She went to lunch,” Gavin said. “She took her bag.”
I looked at the screen of my phone. I had the confirmation about Boise. I had the building swipe log. And I had the realization that the person I had suspected was exactly who they wanted me to suspect. They had used Gavin’s account because they knew he was sloppy. They knew I would find the sticky note eventually, or the IT logs would point to him and I would fire him. If I had fired Gavin, I would have stopped looking, and Laya would have stayed buried deep in my finance department, bleeding me dry until there was nothing left.
“Gavin,” I said, my voice cold. “You are not fired yet. But if you ever write a password on a sticky note again, I will personally throw your computer out the window.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he whispered.
“Get Dana on the phone,” I said, staring at Laya’s empty desk. “And tell the security guard to disable Laya Grant’s badge. She isn’t coming back from lunch.”
I had found the leak. Now I had to find out why. Laya didn’t seem like the type to be bought. She was timid. She was fearful. And that, I realized, was exactly why they picked her. You don’t buy a person like Laya with money. You buy her with fear.
We had the location of the leak, the physical access to the building at 2:00 in the morning, but in a court of law, circumstantial evidence is just a story you can’t prove. I needed a chain of custody. I needed to trace the poison from my office directly into the veins of Miles Croft’s legal filings. So, Dana and I set the final trap. It was a technique known as a Canary Trap.
[Diagram of the Canary Trap: Three seemingly identical documents sent to three different people, but each has a unique phrase embedded in the text.]
We created three versions of a document titled “Internal Solvency Liquidity Forecast.” The data in the spreadsheets was identical—fake, but identical. The difference was in the prose. In the executive summary of the version I sent to Gavin, I used the phrase capital preservation protocols. In the version sent to Marcus, I used asset shielding measures. And in the version sent to Laya Grant’s secure inbox, the phrase was strategic resource isolation.
We waited. The waiting was different this time. It wasn’t the frantic panic of the first few days. It was the cold, predatory stillness of a hunter sitting in a blind. I watched Laya through the glass walls of my office. She looked terrible. Her skin was the color of old parchment, and she jumped every time the phone rang. She wasn’t eating. She was drinking coffee by the gallon.
Eighteen hours after I distributed the documents, a new motion hit the docket. Petitioner’s Supplemental Motion for Emergency Relief.
I didn’t even read the whole thing. I hit Control-F and typed isolation. There it was on Page 4, Paragraph 9.
The debtor has admitted in internal communications to engaging in strategic resource isolation, a clear euphemism for hiding assets from creditors.
Strategic resource isolation. I felt a heavy, dull thud in my chest. It was the sound of the last bit of trust I had in my team dying. It was Laya. It was definitely, undeniably Laya.
“Bring her in,” Dana said over the speakerphone. “And Madison, lock the door.”
I buzzed Laya. “Can you come see me for a minute? Bring the solvency report.”
When she walked in, she looked like she was walking to an execution. She clutched her tablet to her chest like a shield. Her eyes were darting around the room, landing everywhere except on my face.
“Sit down, Laya,” I said.
She sat on the edge of the chair, her knees pressed together. “Is this about the audit?”
“No,” I said. I slid a printout of Derek’s motion across the desk. I had highlighted the phrase in neon yellow. “It is about strategic resource isolation.”
Laya froze. She stared at the yellow highlighter, her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
“This document was filed with the federal court forty-five minutes ago,” I said, my voice dangerously quiet. “That phrase appears in only one document in the world, Laya. The one I sent to you yesterday afternoon.”
She started to shake. It wasn’t a tremble; it was a vibration that rattled the tablet in her hands. “I don’t know… Don’t…”
“I cut her off. “Don’t lie to me. We have the building logs. We know you were here at 2:00 in the morning last Tuesday. We know you used Gavin’s password. And now we have this.” I leaned forward. “You are sending my private financial data to my brother. You are helping him destroy this company. You are helping him destroy me. Why?”
I expected her to lawyer up. I expected her to get angry. I expected her to tell me that Derek had offered her $50,000 and a job at Monroe Commercial. Instead, she burst into tears. It wasn’t a polite cry. It was a guttural, ugly sobbing that doubled her over. She dropped the tablet. She put her face in her hands.
“I didn’t want to,” she choked out. “I swear
