Caldwell looks at her like he's beginning to understand why Skylar trusted this room. "Can you pull that?"
Dana's hands keep moving. "Give me thirty minutes and one person who's willing to sign something later, saying they didn't know I was delightful."
Sloane sighs. "That'll be me."
"It usually is."
For a moment, the room moves around her, everyone preparing for information she can pull. Skylar steps closer to me, his arm brushing mine ever so slightly. I throw him a smile, just as Dana twists her screen to face us.
“Okay, I foundsomething.Something that might explain a lot of shit. Between what Skylar and Caldwell have and what we know, the payments always happened before something happened.” She wiggles her fingers and Sloane shoves her a file that Caldwell had brought over. “You see, all of the murders and everything, right? All the dates line up. Money was moved, someone died. And if the claim that Cardinal Network meansmore than just guiding your serial killer... then the payments that don’t match up are moving something else.”
Caldwell looks at the screen for a long time, jaw tight. "It makes a whole lot of fucking sense for how long Hex was able to avoid getting caught."
Skylar's voice softens, but not by much. "I know."
"No one wanted to say Hex wasn't working alone unless we could prove who was holding the leash. Every time we got close, the money split, a witness recanted, or some route went cold before we could get there." Caldwell taps one line on the table. "This is what we were missing."
I study the transfer chain, the way it moves too cleanly to be instinct and too repeatedly to be luck. "Someone's either funding Hex or controlling him. Maybe both. They've been moving money, access, and information through enough layers to keep him useful and deniable."
"And when he became too contained," Skylar says, "they got him out."
Caldwell nods once. "Or someone did it for them. The way the guy talks, he sounds like he’s running the show. However, most suspects like that are usually the pawns of the operation." Caldwell exhales through his nose. "A federal apprehension team's coming to Ansdale. They're not trusting local resources to bring Hex in. They can't explain how he got out, and until they can, everyone who touched the containment chain is being treated like a possible breach."
"Inside help," I say.
"Clean enough to mean it," Caldwell answers. "Access protocols bypassed in sequence. No panic, no improvising. Whoever helped him knew where the blind spots were or had someone telling them."
Skylar's scent sharpens beside me, amber edged with something cold. "Morrison."
Caldwell doesn't answer immediately.
That's answer enough to make my hand curl against the table.
"We don't have proof," Caldwell says.
"No," Skylar says. "We have a chief who kept trying to make Kade the threat, pushed the file away from the footage, and looked scared when I asked whom she was protecting."
The room stills again. I know the Morrison thread. I know enough of it to hear what Skylar isn't saying. He doesn't want it to be her. That matters less than the fact that he's no longer willing to look away.
Caldwell's expression goes grim. "Then we keep her away from anything that can bury this."
"My station won't make that easy."
"You're not working out of your station anymore," I say.
Skylar turns his head toward me. The words land harder than I intend, but not because they're wrong. He's spent too long trying to fight a compromised system from inside a room that wants him out. This room doesn't want him out. Neither do I.
Sloane picks up the thread without looking away from his tablet. "Rourke can host the work. Baxter can handle protected transfers. Caldwell can route task-force material through federal channels. Dana can keep doing whatever terrifying thing she's doing."
"I'm creating accountability," Dana says.
"You're smiling."
She throws up a middle finger at him but returns her attention to the screens. Caldwell looks around the table, the last of his earlier apprehension gone now, replaced by something that looks like reluctant relief. He's spent years chasing a ghost with official resources and closed doors and now he’s standing in a private security firm with better tools, an Alpha whose territory has become a war room, and Skylar planted in the middleof it like a man who's finally stopped pretending he's passing through.
"We keep digging," Caldwell says. "The money doesn't lie. If we prove the network's still moving assets in and out of the city, we can force their hand before the federal team locks everything down."
Dana's fingers start moving again. "Then nobody distract me with feelings for the next hour."
