The review was dropped, but the flag is there. Elena was quiet for a moment. Keep pulling. Always do, Olivia said. That evening, Elena was at her desk when Mattie walked in holding his tablet with the expression he wore when the news was bad.
Brad's lawyers filed, he said. Temporary asset freeze injunction. They're claiming the fraud allegation warrants a preliminary financial investigation. Elena took the tablet, read the filing. It was thin, meritless, tactical, designed purely to make noise and drain resources.
The legal equivalent of throwing sand in someone's eyes. She set the tablet down. He wants me buried in paperwork, she said. Mattie waited. Make sure our litigation team buries him instead.
The message came in at 11:14 p.m. Olivia was still at her desk. She kept hours that would have broken most people half her age when the secure contact form on her private investigator portal received a submission. No name, no phone number. The message was four sentences long.
I work in HMG's legal department. I have something you need to hear. It's a recorded phone call. I've been carrying this long enough. Olivia forwarded it to Elena within 60 seconds.
Elena was awake. She read it standing at the window of her hotel suite, the Chicago skyline, doing what it always did, glittering, indifferent, enormous. She typed back two words to Olivia, verify first. It took Olivia 18 hours. She ran the contact through every channel available to her, cross-referencing the submissions metadata, confirming the source's employment through public HMG records, and establishing through a trusted intermediary that the person was exactly who they implied, a paralegal inside HMG's legal team, four years with the company, clean record, no prior contact with journalists or investigators.
Someone who had simply decided they were done. The exchange happened through Olivia's intermediary, careful, documented, and structured to protect the source under Illinois whistleblower statutes. What arrived on the other end was an audio file, 11 minutes and 43 seconds long, legally recorded by the source during a conference call they had been included on as a notetaker. Elena, Mattie, Olivia, joining by video, and Kimberly Dempsey, who had been in quiet contact with Elena since the boardroom clip went viral 3 days ago, all listened to it together in Elena's hotel suite. Nobody spoke for the first 3 minutes.
Brad's voice was immediately recognizable, relaxed, almost bored, the way he sounded when he was among people he considered his equals. His CFO was on the call. So was a man who was addressed only as commissioner, his voice older, measured, careful with his words in the specific way of someone who has learned to be careful with his words. They discussed Meridian Rising's timeline. They discussed the commission vote schedule.
They discussed what Brad called the community management piece, his term for handling the inevitable push back from Southside residents once demolition notices went out. What's the realistic window on appeals? Brad asked. 60 days standard, the commissioner said. But if we run the notices concurrent with the holiday calendar, realistically nobody has legal counsel organized before the window closes.
Beautiful, Brad said. Just that, one word. Then the CFO asked about the residents who had already been contacted through the survey process. What happened if they organized before the notices went out? Brad laughed.