Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
Cody
People make mistakes when they panic. That’s one of the few reliable constants in both accounting and human behavior.
The problem is that intelligent people make smaller mistakes. Harder ones. Mistakes buried beneath confidence and cleanup and the assumption that nobody will look deeply enough to find them.
Unfortunately for Jake Dorsey, looking deeply enough is essentially my entire personality.
By the time Silas reaches the office, I’m already moving.
Tracking the shape of the damage in real time.
Annie stands near her desk with her backup drives clutched against her chest as survival equipment, tension written through every line of her body. Sherry hovers near the doorway looking as if she’d rather be swallowed whole by the floorboards than remain part of this conversation another second.
Silas walks in hard enough to change the atmosphere. “What happened?”
His eyes land on Annie first. They scan her automatically, searching for harm before they move to me.
“Jake revoked Annie’s access,” I say.
Silas goes still. “When?”
“This morning.”
“Why?”
“According to Sherry?” I glance briefly toward her. “Concern over compromised financial integrity.”
Silas’s jaw tightens so hard I hear the shift in his teeth.
“Jake’s cleaning house,” I say evenly. “Which means we’re out of time.”
Silas nods once. “We need to find him.”
I grab my laptop and external drive without another word, because at this point I’m no longer auditing, I’m hunting.
Jake’s office is locked.
That alone tells me everything I need to know.
Jake never locks his office during operational hours because operational efficiency depends on accessibility.
He’s argued that point repeatedly during staffing reviews. His entire management philosophy revolves around movement, visibility, availability.
Now, suddenly, the door’s locked.
Panic changes patterns.
I stare at the handle for exactly two seconds before pulling my keys from my pocket.
Silas appears beside me in the hallway. “You think he’s still here?”
“No.”
I unlock the office. The smell hits first. Coffee, printer toner, Jake’s cologne clinging faintly beneath both.
The room itself looks clean.
Too clean.
Desk cleared, paper trays empty, external drives missing, which means he purged in a hurry.
People always reveal themselves in the things they remove first.
I move toward the desktop terminal and wake the monitor.
Password protected.
Expected.
I bypass it in under forty seconds.
Silas watches over my shoulder silently while I start pulling local access history.
Recent files? Deleted. Vendor correspondence? Deleted. Payroll reroutes? Deleted.
Even the recycle directories are scrubbed thoroughly enough to irritate me professionally.
“Jeez,” Silas mutters.
“No.” I keep scrolling. “This was practiced.”
Because random panic wiping leaves fragmentation. This has structure. Jake anticipated scrutiny long before today.
I open server synchronization records next.
That’s where the first crack appears. Not in the files themselves. In the timing.
Something was removed too quickly. The deletion sequence bypassed full archival synchronization.
Meaning some version of the data likely still exists elsewhere inside the system.
Silas folds his arms beside me. “Can you recover it?”
“Probably.”
“How long?”
I don’t answer immediately because inaccurate estimates annoy me.
Instead I start tracing the synchronization paths manually. Primary storage. Secondary server routing. Emergency backups. Shadow redundancies.
Most people don’t understand how much information systems retain accidentally. Deletion isn’t destruction. It’s mostly administrative theater unless you know where the echoes remain.
And Jake understood enough to erase obvious paths.
But not enough to understand how obsessive I am.
I pull open backend server indexing. Check out mirrored pathways. Narrow operational permissions.
Then…
There. Hidden beneath an outdated maintenance directory. A backup folder. Unlabeled. Unscheduled. Never properly indexed into the main system architecture.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
I sit up straighter.
“What?” Silas asks.
I don’t answer yet, because suddenly my pulse is moving too fast. The folder shouldn’t exist. Not according to current operational structure. Which means one of two things happened:
Either Jake created it independently, or somebody older than Jake did.
Neither possibility comforts me.
I open the directory. Inside sits a compressed archive.
Shadow_Transit_Backup.
My stomach tightens. Because innocent people do not name folders like that.
Silas notices my expression. “Cody.”
I click open the archive.
Hundreds of files populate the screen at once. Email exports, vendor transfers, internal approvals, encrypted transaction records. And right at the top… a correspondence chain.
Between Jake Dorsey and someone labeled only: Investor Rep.
The blood drains slowly from my face.
Beside me, Silas goes completely still.
I open the first email. Then the second. Then the third. Each one colder than the last. Strategic destabilization. Asset weakening. Operational pressure points. Liquidity manipulation.
My eyes scan faster.
Faster.
Until finally one sentence stops everything in my body cold.
Once Ironwood’s valuation drops low enough, acquisition pressure becomes inevitable.
No.
Fuck. This isn’t theft.
The realization hits hard enough to physically hurt.
They weren’t stealing from Ironwood for money alone. They were bleeding the ranch deliberately.
Weakening operational confidence. Creating instability. Manufacturing vulnerability. Setting the ranch up for acquisition.
A takeover.
And sitting in the middle of all of it…
Jake.
Feeding them information. Approving false vendors. Manipulating internal systems. Creating operational strain from inside the ranch itself.
The inside man.
“Oh, fuck,” Silas says.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard him sound shocked before.
I keep reading.
More emails. More coordination. Property development speculation. Land leverage discussions. References to town council pressure. Even rodeo sponsorship manipulation.
This reaches further than we thought. Way further.
“They’ve been planning this for months,” I say.
“At least.”
My throat feels tight. Because Ironwood isn’t numbers to me. It’s structure, history, home, and somebody turned it into a business strategy.
I open another email chain.
This one includes projected outcomes if operational leadership fractures internally.
One line stands out immediately.
Temporary accounting staff may provide useful scapegoat positioning if exposure occurs.
Beside me, Silas’s expression changes from controlled fury, becoming much worse. Murderous clarity. “They were going to blame Annie.”
I lean back slowly in the chair, adjusting my watch hard enough to nearly snap the strap.
Because suddenly everything aligns. The revoked access, the isolation attempts, the credential manipulation, the timing.
Jake wasn’t protecting himself this morning.
He was positioning Annie directly between the fraud and the fallout.
I close my eyes briefly.
One deep breath.
Organize. Prioritize. Move.
“We need backups of everything immediately,” I say.
Silas is already pulling out his phone. “And Jake?”
I look back toward the screen. Toward the emails. Toward the months of calculated sabotage hidden beneath polished operational reports and fake professionalism.
Then I think about Annie standing in the office clutching hard drives while somebody quietly tried to build a case against her.
“Jake’s not the only one involved,” I say.
Silas looks over.
I point toward the investor correspondence. “People don’t attempt acquisitions like this without legal infrastructure. Financial planning. External coordination.”
“You think there’s more.”
“I know there’s more.”
And suddenly the circle around Ironwood feels much smaller. Much closer. Much more dangerous than we realized.
I export every file in the archive onto three separate drives before shutting the system down completely.
Then I stand.
Silas watches me carefully. “You alright?”
No.
Not remotely.
Because the worst part isn’t the fraud. It isn’t even the betrayal. It’s the realization that somebody looked at Ironwood, at my brothers, at Annie, and decided they were all acceptable collateral damage.
I grab the drive from the desk.
“We need all the proof we can get. Then we need to put an end to this. Once and for all.”