Chapter 7
SIENNA
The financial documents arrived on a Tuesday morning in a manila envelope with no return address, left on the doorstep of the Silver Lake office sometime before Sienna got there at seven-fifteen.
She stood in the doorway of the converted garage with the envelope in her hands and the smell of motor oil and jasmine in the morning air and knew, before she opened it, that this was the break.
The envelope contained forty-three pages of internal accounting records from Howarth Media Group.
Disbursement schedules. Wire transfer confirmations.
Account statements for six of the shell companies that Sienna and Dani had identified through their source interviews.
The documents were photocopies, not originals, and the source had redacted their own identifying information with a black marker so thorough that not even the paper stock could be traced.
But the numbers were there. The dates. The recipient accounts. The amounts that matched, almost to the dollar, the testimony their sources had provided.
Sienna spread the pages across the workbench that served as their primary editing surface and called Dani.
“Get here.”
“It’s seven-twenty in the morning and I’m in my pajamas.”
“Get here now.”
Dani arrived forty minutes later with wet hair, a coffee from the place on Hyperion, and the expression she wore when she knew that the next thing Sienna showed her was going to change the shape of the project. She looked at the documents spread across the workbench and went very still.
“Oh,” Dani said.
“Yeah.”
Dani set her coffee down gently, as though sudden movements might disturb the evidence, and leaned over the pages. Her dark eyes moved across the numbers with the quick, systematic attention of someone who had spent years learning to read financial data the way other people read novels.
“These are disbursement records. Internal ones. From inside Howarth Media.” Dani’s voice had dropped to the register she used when she was processing a discovery and didn’t want her excitement to outpace her analysis.
She picked up one of the pages and held it at an angle, reading the fine print at the bottom.
“Authorization signatures on every transfer. Account numbers for the recipient entities. And look: the disbursement codes match a pattern. Every payment to the awards committee contacts was coded as production consulting, and every payment to the journalists was coded as market research.” She shook her head.
“Someone in that accounting department had a dark sense of humor.”
“Or they were documenting it deliberately. Our first source said Burty kept meticulous records because he was more afraid of his own people stealing from him than he was of investigators.”
“Which means the paper trail exists by design.” Dani set the page down. “This links Burty to every transaction. Not through inference, not through testimony. Through his own company’s records. His own system.”
Dani looked up. Her face was serious, and beneath the seriousness was an expression Sienna recognized from every major break they’d ever had together; the blend of exhilaration and fear that came from holding evidence powerful enough to change things and knowing that the power cut in both directions.
“Sienna, we need to be very careful with this.” Dani straightened and crossed her arms, the coffee forgotten on the workbench.
“If Burty finds out we have internal documents, he’ll move to suppress them before we can publish.
He’ll claim they’re stolen property, privileged, obtained through breach of fiduciary duty.
His lawyers will file injunctions in every jurisdiction they can reach. ”
“His lawyers. Meaning Adriana Lovett.”
“Meaning Adriana Lovett. Who has not, as far as I can tell, ever lost an injunction filing.” Dani held her gaze.
“We need to move carefully, document our chain of custody, and make sure that by the time they know we have this, we’ve already verified everything independently.
If we rush, they bury it. If we’re careful, they can’t. ”
Sienna nodded. She ran her hand across one of the disbursement schedules, feeling the smooth surface of the photocopy under her fingertips, and let the reality of what she was holding settle.
Someone had wanted them to have this. Someone with access to Burty’s internal accounting systems who had a reason to want the truth out, and enough at stake to ensure their own name appeared nowhere on any of it.
The redaction was too careful, too thorough, for someone acting on impulse.
Whoever had sent this had been sitting with the decision for a long time.
The weight hit that afternoon.
She was sitting at her desk in the back of the garage with the financial documents locked in the fire safe and the source maps on the wall staring back at her, and the magnitude of what they were about to do arrived with a sudden, terrible clarity.
Her hands went cold. The air in the garage felt closer than it had that morning, the ceiling lower, the walls a few inches tighter than they needed to be.
If they published, Burty Howarth’s career would end.
That part was simple, and it was the part that made the investigation worth doing.
Decades of corruption exposed, financial crimes documented, an industry shaken into accountability.
That was the story she had spent nine months building, and it was the right story to tell.
But the blast radius would extend far beyond Burty.
The sources who had spoken to her would face scrutiny, potential legal action, professional consequences.
Two of them had families. One had a daughter in college.
The retired awards administrator had a pension that depended on the goodwill of an industry he had just accused of systemic fraud.
Dani’s company was at risk. Parallax Films was two people, a garage office, and a body of work that represented everything they had built together since film school.
If Burty’s legal team retaliated with the full resources of Lovett & Associates, the lawsuits alone could bankrupt them before the documentary ever reached an audience.
Sienna herself was not exempt. Her name would be attached to an investigation that accused one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers of criminal corruption and accused his legal team, accused Adriana Lovett, of enabling it.
Every professional relationship she had built would be tested.
Every future project would be evaluated through the lens of whether Sienna Ramirez was a filmmaker or a crusader, and in Hollywood those categories were not equally welcome.
She stared at the wall of evidence and felt every decision she had made pressing down on her to reach this point.
The gala. The confrontation. The parking structure interviews and the anonymous sources and the late nights in this garage with Dani and the takeout and the timeline boards and the colored string connecting names to crimes.
Nine months. Nine months of her life pointed at this moment, and now the moment was here, and it was heavier than she’d imagined.
The weight did not change her mind. Nothing could change her mind, not at this point, not after everything she’d seen and heard and verified.
But it pressed down with a heaviness that made her breathing shallow and her hands less steady than she liked.
She gripped the edge of the desk and counted three breaths as she always did when the pressure peaked.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
Feel the desk under your hands. Feel the floor under your feet.
You are here. This is real. This matters.
She sat with it because sitting with uncomfortable truths was the entire foundation of what she did for a living.
Dani found her at five o’clock, still at the desk, still staring at the wall. The late afternoon light came through the garage’s small windows at an angle that turned the dust in the air gold, and the coffee Dani had brought that morning sat on the workbench cold and untouched.
“You’re doing the thing,” Dani said from the doorway.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you carry everyone else’s consequences on your own shoulders instead of sharing it with the person who signed up to carry it with you.” Dani pulled a chair over and sat beside her. “Talk to me.”
Sienna told her. The sources. The legal exposure. Parallax. The scope of what they were about to do and the impossibility of controlling what happened after.
Dani listened without interrupting. When Sienna finished, Dani was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “I know all of that. I’ve known it since month three. I’m still here.”
“I know you are.”
“Then stop carrying it alone. It’s annoying and it’s not what business partners are for.”
A laugh broke out of Sienna, sudden, genuine, the first thing in hours that had cracked the weight sitting on her chest. Dani grinned at her, and the grin was warm and fierce and exactly what Sienna needed, which was Dani’s gift and always had been.
Sienna’s phone rang at eight-forty that evening.
She was in her apartment, a one-bedroom in Echo Park with high ceilings, too many books, and a fire escape that she used as a balcony when the evenings were warm enough.
She was sitting on the couch with her laptop open and her notes spread across the cushions, reviewing the verification plan she and Dani had assembled for the financial documents, when the screen lit up with a number she didn’t recognize.
She almost didn’t answer. Unknown numbers at eight-forty on a Tuesday were either robocalls or sources who had changed their minds about talking, and the ratio leaned heavily toward the former.
She answered.
“Ms. Ramirez.” The voice was low and immediately recognizable.