Chapter III
SIENNA
The interview took place in a parking structure in Burbank, which was a location that would have seemed absurd in a film and was entirely unremarkable in documentary work.
Sienna leaned against the concrete wall between a support pillar and a minivan that smelled like it belonged to someone with small children.
The structure carried its own smell beneath that—cold concrete and old exhaust, a flat mineral coldness that coated the back of the throat.
She waited for the woman across from her to stop looking at the exits.
“Take your time,” Sienna said.
The source, mid-forties, industry veteran, someone whose name Sienna would not use without explicit permission, exhaled and laced her fingers together in her lap.
She was sitting on a folding stool Dani had set up beside the production van, and the fluorescent strip light overhead turned her face the color of old paper.
“I worked in Burty Howarth’s accounting department for seven years,” the woman said. “Not directly for him. For the production company. Howarth Media Group. But the books all flowed through the same system, and if you knew where to look, you’d see where the money was going.”
Sienna said nothing. She kept her hands still and her expression open, which was the interview technique that worked best with frightened people; hold the frame, keep the lens wide, let the subject fill the silence.
“There were payments, regular ones, monthly and sometimes weekly, to companies that didn’t produce anything. No employees, no product, no office address you could visit. Just a name and a bank account.”
“Shell companies,” Dani said from beside the camera. She was operating the sound equipment with the focus she brought to everything technical, her dark wavy hair pinned out of her face, her bright eyes fixed on the audio levels.
“That’s what they were. I didn’t know the word for it then, but that’s what they were.
And the amounts weren’t small. Five figures.
Sometimes six.” The source uncrossed her hands and pressed them flat against her knees.
“And there were other payments. To individuals. Specific people in the awards voting bodies. Specific journalists who wrote puff pieces. Specific producers who agreed not to compete for certain distribution windows.”
Sienna’s hands went still on the desk. This was it. Not the shape of the story. She’d had the shape for months. This was the skeleton. The financial skeleton of Burty Howarth’s empire, laid out by someone who had seen it from the inside.
“How long did this go on?” Sienna asked.
“The whole time I was there. Seven years. And from what I could tell from the older records, it was happening before I arrived. Decades, probably. It was just how the company worked. Nobody questioned it because Burty was making everyone money, and the people who might have asked questions were either on the payroll or too scared to speak.”
“Were you scared?”
The woman looked at Sienna directly for the first time. Her eyes were tired. Underneath… relief, maybe, or the first stirrings of regret for sitting in this parking structure and saying any of this out loud.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
Sienna held the woman’s gaze and gave her the smallest nod. Not gratitude. Sources didn’t want gratitude. They wanted to know that the risk they were taking would be worth the risk.
“One more question,” Sienna said. “The payments to the awards bodies. Were they documented?”
“Everything at Howarth Media was documented. Burty was paranoid about his own people stealing from him, so he kept meticulous records of every transaction, even the ones that should never have been written down.” A thin, humorless smile.
“The man built a paper trail to his own corruption because he was more afraid of his accountants than he was of investigators.”
Dani made a small sound beside the camera. When Sienna glanced over, Dani’s expression was the one she wore when a story locked into place: eyes wide, mouth set, the look of someone who had just understood the scope of what they were holding.
After the source left, walking quickly, head down, disappearing into the parking structure’s stairwell without looking back, Dani turned to Sienna with the camera still running.
“That’s our spine,” Dani said. “If the records exist and they’re as detailed as she says, we can trace every payment, match it to a recipient, and map the entire network. This isn’t an allegation. It’s accounting.”
They conducted three more interviews that week.
A former distribution executive who described how Burty’s team had pressured him into signing exclusivity agreements that locked competing documentaries out of key festival slots.
A publicist who had been paid a monthly retainer for years to ensure certain journalists received access to Burty’s productions and certain other journalists received nothing.
A retired awards administrator who described, in flat, methodical detail, the process by which votes had been influenced through a combination of hospitality, financial incentive, and the quiet understanding that cooperation would be remembered.
At one point the administrator paused, unprompted, and said, “The legal cover always came from the same firm. Lovett and Associates. Every time.” Sienna had kept her expression even and her pen moving, though her jaw tightened for one involuntary second—that cool gaze at the gala, sparkling water, abandon this. She brought herself back to the page.
Each interview followed the same pattern.
The source arrived nervous, spoke haltingly, gained momentum as the words found their own velocity, and left looking smaller than when they’d arrived, as though the act of telling the truth about Burty Howarth physically diminished them.
Sienna had seen this before, in every investigation she’d ever run; the tightened shoulders, voices that dropped to near-whispers even in empty rooms, the instinct to check over one’s shoulder that took weeks to fade.
She and Dani processed the footage each evening in their Silver Lake office, a converted garage that still smelled like motor oil when the afternoons got warm.
Parallax Films was technically a two-person operation with a roster of freelance editors and sound technicians they brought in as budgets allowed, but the core of every project was Sienna and Dani in this room, surrounded by equipment they’d bought secondhand and timelines they’d built by hand.
The walls were covered in timeline boards and source maps, colored string connecting names to dates to transactions in a web that grew more complex and more damning with every conversation.
“This is bigger than we thought,” Dani said on Thursday night, sitting cross-legged on the floor with her laptop balanced on a stack of research binders.
Thai food containers from the place down the street were scattered between them.
“Sienna, I’m serious. What they’re describing isn’t just one producer gaming the system.
This is institutional. The shell companies alone touch four different banking jurisdictions. ”
“I know.”
“And the awards manipulation goes back at least fifteen years. That’s not a scandal. That’s a business model.”
Sienna pulled a timeline printout from the stack on her desk and spread it across the floor between them.
Red circles marked confirmed payments. Blue circles marked suspected payments awaiting documentation.
There was more red than blue now, which should have been encouraging and instead made her stomach tighten.
“We need more sourcing on the awards side,” Sienna said. “What we have is strong, but it’s three people describing the same system from different angles. A lawyer would argue they’re all disgruntled ex-employees with an axe to grind.”
“A lawyer named Adriana Lovett?”
Sienna didn’t answer immediately. She picked up a container of pad thai that was mostly empty and set it aside.
“She’s going to be a factor,” Sienna said.
“She’s been Burty’s legal shield for nearly a decade.
Every settlement, every NDA, every time someone got close to the truth and was pushed back, that was her handiwork.
If we publish without addressing her role, we leave a hole big enough for the legal team to drive through. ”
Dani looked at her. The expression on her face was one Sienna recognized from years of friendship and partnership, the look that said I hear what you’re saying and I also hear what you’re not saying.
“You’re thinking about her.”
“I’m thinking about how to build a case that survives the legal counterattack she’s capable of mounting. Yes. That requires thinking about her.”
“Mm-hm.” Dani returned to her laptop with the studied neutrality of someone who had decided not to push further for the moment. “I’ll accept that. For now.”
The nervous call came on Friday afternoon.
Sienna was in the editing suite, a generous term for the partition in the back of their garage office where the sound equipment lived, reviewing raw footage from Monday’s interview, the one they’d shot the day before the gala, when her phone buzzed with a number she didn’t recognize.
“Ms. Ramirez.” The voice was male, mid-range, tight with anxiety. “I work for someone who works for Burty Howarth. I can’t tell you my name.”
Sienna reached for her recorder and switched it on. “I’m listening.”
“His lawyers know about your project. Not the details, but they know it exists and they know it’s about him. They’ve started making calls. To the distribution companies you might approach. To the festivals. To people in positions to slow you down or shut you out entirely.”
Sienna pressed her back against the wall of the editing partition, the metal cool through her shirt.
“How do you know this?”