I started with the numbers because numbers don’t blush. On my screen, cells glowed a quiet, accusing yellow where I’d set conditional formatting to catch lies. “Sold units” and “shipped units” should have braided clean; instead, they frayed. Returns didn’t explain the gap. Carrier delays didn’t either. The delta repeated across SKUs—aprons, jars, branded towels—as stubborn as a chorus line.
I took a breath and tasted the morning: salted caramel steam from the pier under the window, a ghost-click of a notification I’d turned off days ago. Fog funneled off the cliffs and pressed the glass cool to my temple. On the street below, a QR mural flipped to this week’s grid like a stagehand changing scenes: new palette, same pitch. Don’t make a scene—unless it’s profitable.
“Walk me through it,” I said out loud, because talking to spreadsheets makes me keep my verbs concrete. I highlighted the missing trail: sale events spike during Cass’s panic beats; payment processors freeze, crypto tips pick up; ghost units appear in inventory; no buyer receives them; line items route to a third-party fulfillment address that shares an officer with Rainer Narrative Studio’s shell.
I dialed Sloane and let the ring hum in my ear like a fluorescent light. “I have a delta that won’t die,” I said when she picked up. “Ghost inventory. The extras aren’t errors; they’re funding.”
“Numbers, not vibes?” she asked. I could hear a printer shuddering somewhere on her end, like paper nerves.
“Numbers,” I said. “Two thousand sixty-four units across three SKUs over six weeks. Fulfillment pings to ‘Harbor Apex Logistics.’ Registered agent links to a P.O. box we’ve already seen in the deck footer. This is a flow.”
“Send me the reconciled sheet and the corporate registry,” she said. “Then meet me downstairs. We’ll step.”
I forwarded the packet, printed a copy because chain-of-custody still prefers trees, and headed for the stairwell. The building smelled like coffee and cables. By the door, a ring light leaned against a plant stand like a weapon in choreo, unplugged but still perfuming the air with faint ozone. I touched the honeycomb stitch on my jacket’s cuff and wished sleeves could be talismans.
Sloane met me at the curb with a folder and her contained half-smile. “You keep bringing me boring,” she said.
“Boring wins,” I said.
“Boring keeps me employed,” she said, then tipped her head toward the unmarked car. “Let’s go look at your ghost.”
Scene Beat 1 — Spreadsheet delta exposes the scheme. I ran the numbers for her again on the drive as the freeway unspooled. Diesel lived in the air under the overpass like an uninvited uncle. “He separates inventory into three streams,” I said. “Direct-to-consumer real shipments, held inventory for drops, and an off-ledger stream labeled as damaged or ‘QA hold’ that never returns. Harbor Apex takes those pallets ‘for inspection’ and they don’t come back.”
“And the money?” she asked, eyes on the road. She keeps her cadence even; it makes me breathe slower.
“Insured write-offs claimed against a high-risk premium the sponsor negotiated, plus crypto tips converted to purchase orders for the ghost units. The orders clear through the shell; the ‘damaged’ goods become cash or props.”
“Laundering,” she said, not theatrical, just pronouncing the shape of the thing. “Documented in English.”
“And in pictures,” I said, tapping the folder. “I pulled public records on Harbor Apex’s lease. The warehouse is big enough for sets.”
She flicked her turn signal like punctuation. “We’ll tag it before we touch it.”
We took the exit where a billboard tried to sell a mattress with a honeycomb foam cutaway that looked like a civic flag for sleep. The warehouse row waited: concrete slabs, chain-link fences, the sound of forklifts clearing throat, or maybe just cars in the distance pretending. Fog dragged low, striping the lot lights into smeared halos.
Sloane’s team had beat us there because she’d texted from the stoplight. An officer I knew from the first hayloft sweep lifted a hand. “We’ve got the envelope,” he said, patting the warrant in a plastic sleeve like a newborn.
“We’re in tag-and-hold posture,” Sloane told me, catalog calm. “We’re not ripping in. We’re placing eyes and asking the building to betray itself.”
“Good,” I said, because the crowd likes raids and I wasn’t feeding them. I rubbed my thumbnail along the folder’s edge to keep my hands from rubbing nerves.
Scene Beat 2 — Sloane’s team tags the warehouse. They erected a slim pole camera that tucked into a shadow by the fence line. A tech slid a pancake tracker under the lip of a pallet jack near the open bay, a move practiced enough to look like choreography. Another officer stuck a blue evidence seal over a side door that had been too recently painted. The adhesive hissed like a soft threat. “We’ll know if they break it,” he said.
“What about the trucks?” I asked.
“Two active plates registered to the shell,” the tech said without looking up from his tablet. “We’ll have enough probable cause to ping if they move anything that looks ‘damaged.’”
“Don’t let him move the stage,” I said, too quick. I felt my voice catch and watched Sloane clock it without comment.
“We’re keeping the stage,” she said. “If he’s rehearsing a finale here, he doesn’t get to pick which act we see.”
The bay door squealed when a worker inside hauled it a foot up for air. Diesel ghosted out. I tasted rubber and dust. A sliver of interior resolved: racks, shrink-wrap, the pale edge of a painted flat like a cartoon wall waiting to be a house. I imagined Lyla standing in front of that hollow wall, tidy hair, steady voice, reading lines about survival some man wrote for her in bullet points.
“We hold position,” Sloane said to the team. “No cowboying. Mara, you and I are going to look with our imaginations until we can look with our feet.”
I pointed at the shipping stencils. “See the hex decal?” A minimalist honeycomb in the corner of several pallets, too subtle for a brand mark, too consistent for random. “That’s his tell. He can’t help but make the hive.”
“Compulsions close cases,” she said, not unkindly.
I pulled out my printouts, walked her through the recon again, and watched her annotate the margins in a pen that had no patience for curves. The freeway above boomed like an organ. A gull landed on the chain-link and stared like a security guard.
“I want eyes inside,” she said finally. “We’ll keep the footprint small and the clock shorter.”
“I can live with small,” I said. “Short makes me wheeze.”
“Then breathe,” she said, and nodded to the bay. “Let’s go say hello to whatever he’s hiding.”
We announced the warrant to the foreman, a man with a beard the shape of apologies. He tried a script: “We’re just third-party storage.” Sloane gave him a smile that let him keep his dignity while losing his room. We stepped in.
The warehouse air had the sweet, sick note of corrugated cardboard warmed by old lights. I heard the faint tick of a cooling ring light somewhere on a shelf—a mechanical insect refusing to die. The racks climbed like quiet ladders. Pallets labeled QA hold. Pallets labeled RETURNS. A line of boxes with a sticker that read KIT: RESCUE in clean font that pretended to be neutral.
I cut the first kit open with a pocket blade Sloane pretended not to see. “Don’t touch without a photo,” she said, already snapping. Inside: gauze rolls, non-latex gloves, stage blood capsules ironically labeled “edible,” a foil blanket, zip ties (my stomach flinched at those), and a laminated card with a color palette for a camera operator. At the bottom, a folded fabric banner: STAY CALM, COMMUNITY in soft letters, the kind you’d put on a wellness post.
“He built his own crisis cart,” I said. My voice went flat to stop it from doing anything else.
Sloane tilted the card into the light. “No serials,” she said. “But look.” She pointed at a QR printed on the corner, tiny, almost smug. She scanned it with a phone set to private relay. The link pushed to a dead domain that redirected to a wallet address I had already memorized. The back of my throat went bitter.
“Ghost inventory becomes ghost money,” I said. “The off-ledger stream buys the kits, which buy the show.”
“And the show sells ‘participatory rescue,’” she said, the words like stepping stones across a creek we’d both already fallen into once.
We moved deeper. Beyond a curtain of plastic flaps: flats painted the color of soothing kitchens, a tiled background with honeycomb hexes no building inspector would tolerate, a rollout floor in faux concrete, a neon script tucked in foam. The neon read YOU’RE SAFE HERE and made my hands cold.
“Alternate sets,” I said. “He hedges locations. If one site gets too hot, he moves the finale to another he’s already dressed.”
“Contingency finales,” Sloane said. “Like weather backup for a wedding, but make it coercion.”
“And if law enforcement shows?” I said, hearing my own plan for a lawful on-stream warrant service rattle inside the room. “He scripts us as antagonists to spike engagement.”
“That’s why we stay boring,” she said. “We read the paper out loud and don’t touch the confetti.”
On a worktable, someone had left a storyboard under a paperweight shaped like a lemon. I slid it free with two fingers and Sloane photographed each page as I turned them. Marker panels, clean lines: Panel 1—countdown site with chat exploding; Panel 2—sirens washed in blue light at a tasteful distance; Panel 3—“rescue fail”: a figure reaches, the camera shakes, captions plead; Panel 4—cut to black; Panel 5—“resurrection”: a soft-lit return, tears in moderation, a speech about community; Panel 6—merch restock overlay: WE MADE IT THROUGH TOGETHER.
“Rescue fail to resurrection,” I read. “He’s not just hedging. He’s gaming the outcome. Either way, he wins: fear or relief. Both bill.”
“We’re going to break the loop,” Sloane said, more promise than hope.
I photographed the lemon too because pettiness can be evidence: citrus oil on a thumbprint, maybe. I could smell zest under cardboard and dust; it made the room feel staged like a scent diffuser in an Airbnb.
“We’ll tag these flats,” an officer said, walking up with evidence tape. “Any movement triggers a call-out.”
“Tag the trucks,” Sloane said. “Tag my coffee if it looks like it wants to leave.”
I drifted to a stack of jars, not the drop jars but clear cousins etched with micro-scratches that made my neck heat. I tilted one to the light. Scratches formed letters in a code Lyla and I had used to mark chores as kids: one diagonal meant “skip,” two meant “double.” This jar said nothing I could read fast; the marks were noise or a taunt. I set it down carefully and wrote the feeling in my notes instead of trusting it with speech.
Micro-hook: The sets made everything obvious, which is dangerous; obvious turns people lazy. I didn’t want to get lazy.
Sloane’s radio popped twice. She pressed an earbud in. “Say again,” she murmured. She looked at me and let her face move a millimeter. “Two trucks on approach,” she said. “We have plates.”
“Moving the stage,” I said. My tongue tasted battery.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe just props.” She nodded to the team. “Hold your marks. We look like OSHA until we don’t.”
The foreman fussed near the office, doing the slow-walk shuffle of a man deciding which future he prefers. The air tightened. Outside, the freeway coughed and then settled into a high hum.
“We can let them load and follow,” Sloane said to me, voice quiet. “We might catch more fish.”
“Or we lose the set and the storyboard,” I said. “And he runs the finale in a room we haven’t mapped.”
“We’ve tagged enough to testify,” she said. “But netting the route gives us the buyer, the shell, the cash out. That’s the system.”
“My system has a face,” I said. I didn’t mean it as a rebuke. I felt the old split inside me: protect a person, dismantle a pattern. Both are jobs; one teaches you to triage feelings.
“I know,” she said. “We’re threading a needle while someone shakes the cloth.”
The beeping of a forklift rose like a heart monitor. A truck eased up to the bay, brake breath loud, bumper kissing the lip. The driver killed the engine. The lot light turned his windshield into a mirror; I saw the honeycomb shadow of the fence lay over the glass, a grid over a face I couldn’t see. An officer’s hand rested casually on the pallet jack where we’d tucked the tracker. Another officer adjusted the pole camera’s angle by a breath.
“Your call,” Sloane said. She didn’t mean it as theater. She meant: your knowledge, your stake, your sister. “Do we let him show us his route, or do we lock it now?”
I looked at the storyboard, at rescue fail → resurrection, at the jars wearing our childhood scratches, at the banner that promised community while charging admission. I tasted diesel and sugar and static. My phone vibrated in my pocket with a phantom nothing; even off, it wanted scenes.
“If he moves the sets, we lose his stage,” I said, steadying my voice against the metal table’s edge. “But if we grab too early, he scripts a raid and wins the scene. Which risk buys us more truth?”
Sloane waited. The forklift beeped. The truck’s back gate rattled. Outside, neon bled through fog and made the concrete glow like skin under stage lights.
I didn’t answer yet. I put my palm on the storyboard like I could weigh it, then lifted my head and asked the question I needed to hear in my own voice before I could decide: “Is this the night we teach him that boring can be stronger than spectacle—or do I cut the power to his resurrection and live with what we won’t follow?”