“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 saidI 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.
