And when Grant's own convoy signaled for it to pull over those cruisers swung sideways to block the road entirely instead of yielding an inch. What followed was a tense standoff on an empty stretch of two-lane highway that could easily have ended in disaster, both sides stepping out of their vehicles, hands hovering near holsters, headlights washing across the asphalt in the pre-dawn dark. Grant broadcast a verification code over the radio confirming that the operation had been personally authorized by the state attorney general's office, and several of the local officers lowered their weapons almost immediately once they understood with visible discomfort that their own superiors had been quietly using them as pawns in a scheme far larger than any of them had ever been told about. Inside the truck itself, agents found the missing evidence. Boxes stacked neatly against the walls, several hundred thousand dollars in loose cash bundled with rubber bands and a payment ledger carrying Sheriff Darius Boone's own genuine signature proof no one in that county would ever again be able to pretend did not exist.
Just as Grant prepared to give the final order to bring Boone in personally, an alert flashed across his screen showing that the sheriff had already vanished entirely from his office downtown, his phone quietly pinging steadily westward toward Marjorie's private estate on the hill. Boone burst through the front door of Marjorie's house without knocking, demanding immediately that she hand over every piece of evidence that could possibly implicate him personally before it was too late for either of them. Marjorie, still entirely unaware that all three trucks had already been intercepted hours earlier, calmly believed Nolan was somewhere over the state line by now with the last of the sensitive material safely out of reach. Boone told her flatly that the safe stolen from Grant's home had almost certainly been a trap from the very beginning, admitting for the first time that he suspected the quiet, unassuming homeowner might not be an ordinary resident at all. Marjorie only laughed at his sudden fear and reminded him coldly that she had personally kept detailed records of every single dollar he had ever accepted from her over the years, opening a second wall safe of her own that held a backup drive and a small stack of damning recordings meant to serve as her own final insurance policy against exactly this kind of betrayal.
Grant and Celeste were listening to all of it in real time through a device Wade had originally installed at Marjorie's own direct order months earlier, a device Wade had quietly surrendered full control of to the anti-corruption unit the moment he agreed to cooperate in exchange for leniency. Boone threatened to arrest Marjorie on the spot and let her carry the full weight of the blame entirely alone. And Marjorie answered by calmly playing back a recording of him personally instructing a deputy on exactly how to bury a resident's formal complaint, telling him with icy precision that he did not protect her, he belonged to her. As the two of them physically fought over the backup drive right there in her living room, knocking over a lamp and shattering a framed photograph against the floor, Loretta slipped quietly in through the unlocked back door, seized the drive for herself in the confusion, and disappeared into the night without a single word to either of them. She had, it turned out, been quietly preparing her own personal escape for weeks already, having long since understood that Marjorie would sacrifice every single board member without hesitation the moment it became necessary to save herself.