Page 92 of Dose

She’s right. That unsettles me more than if she were afraid.

We enter at 0947.

A bell gives a thin chime above the door. The woman behind reception looks up from a desk crowded with invoices, a cow-shaped mug and a framed photograph of a golden retriever.

“Morning,” Isla says. Her voice changes completely: courteous, brisk, mildly inconvenienced by the existence of paperwork. “Dr. Isla Chen, EPA Region Six. This is Adrian Reyes. We’re here for the compliance review.”

Deb glances at her calendar.

“I don’t have⁠—”

“The amended notice went to Mr. Corbin forty-eight hours ago.” Isla offers her the top sheet of the folder. “Hazardous-material inventory, waste records and supporting batch documentation. We should be out of your way before lunch if everything reconciles.”

Deb reads enough of the letter to find the reference number Ezra planted in Cascade’s email system. Then she scans Isla’s badge.

“I’ll get Mr. Corbin.”

“Thank you.” Isla looks at the dog photograph. “Golden retriever?”

Deb’s suspicion loosens by a fraction. “That’s Sadie.”

Dominic was right about the dog.

Six minutes later, Corbin ushers us into his office. He is in his fifties, broad through the middle, with damp palms and the permanent strain of a man who has spent his career hoping no government agency will take a close interest in him.

“We run clean here,” he says twice before we sit down.

“Then this should be painless,” Isla replies.

Her smile is pleasant. It promises nothing.

He walks us through the analytical wing himself. The two analysts barely look up from their benches. Dominic, wearing a white coat and safety glasses, gives us the professional nod of a contractor whose service call has been interrupted by an inspection.

The facility is aggressively ordinary. Fluorescent lights. Scuffed linoleum. Aging instruments maintained just well enough to pass. The cover works because most people would rather look away from a building this dull.

Corbin badges us into the storage room. Steel cabinets line three walls. A walk-in refrigerator hums at the far end.

“Everything’s logged,” he says. “We’ve never had a reportable violation.”

“Good.” Isla opens the inventory on her tablet. “I’d like to reconcile the physical stock against your annual declarations.”

She starts with the first cabinet. Her EPA performance does not disappear, but something sharper moves beneath it. Six years in V-series production taught her exactly where a facility hides the material that matters.

She points to a labeled drum without touching it. “Tetrachloroethylene,” she says for Corbin’s benefit. “Declared solvent stock.”

Then her gaze moves to a row of gray containers on the shelf below.

The hazard markings are genuine but generic. The product code means nothing to an ordinary inspector. To us it matches the lot family Ezra pulled from Seattle’s shipping records.

Isla photographs the label and the intact seal. She records the cabinet temperature, secondary containment and the code on the shelf tag. Her hands stay clear of the container.

“Mr. Corbin, I need the batch records supporting this product class, along with incoming raw-material certificates and outgoing waste totals for the last twelve months.”

His face tightens. “The process records are proprietary.”

“Your process is. The quantities supporting your environmental declarations are not.” Her tone remains friendly. “If the reported solvent use reconciles with production and waste, I note that and move on. If it doesn’t, the regional office requests a full records review.”

Corbin considers the difference between inconvenient and catastrophic.