This was, technically, a procedural violation. Lena was aware of this and made a note of it in the file itself, along with her reasoning: *Anonymous tip with credible detail suggests potential inside knowledge of department access. Precautionary information security practice during initial investigation. Formal logging to follow upon threat assessment completion.*
She felt better having written it down. It wouldn't hold up if anyone ever looked closely, but she had a long habit of documenting her reasoning in real time, and old habits were the ones you fell back on when you were operating on no sleep with a wire of anxiety running through your chest.
She built the Krauss file on her personal laptop, in a folder with a name that would mean nothing to anyone who didn't already know what they were looking for.
Thomas Krauss: financial analyst, Mercer-Bell, seventeen years. The flag he'd raised was about a set of transfers — amounts in the mid-seven figures, routed through what he'd described as "an unusual sequence of intermediate accounts." His exact words, which she had noted rather than recorded. He had made a copy and had it stored somewhere not on any company or cloud server, which he would not specify, which was wise.
The senior person who had removed his flag was called Vivienne Strand. Director of Compliance, Mercer-Bell Financial Group. Forty-eight. No criminal history, no open investigations. Prior career in regulatory oversight before moving to the private sector.
Marco knew her from the Bellhaven money laundering case, three years ago. They had worked together for fourteen months as the department's liaison to the financial regulators. The case had ended with a conviction, a commendation for both of them, and — Lena had heard at the time, from Marco, who had mentioned it once and never again — a complicated professional relationship. She hadn't asked about the complications. It hadn't been her case.
She searched the Bellhaven records. They were extensive, publicly available, well-documented. She read them for two hours and then read them again looking for Vivienne Strand.
Strand had been cooperative, responsive, professionally helpful. There was nothing in the record that would give anyone pause.
Lena read it a third time anyway.
---
She rode the 7:10 Green Line the next morning.
The platform was the usual commuter density — three hundred people, roughly, compressed into the specific anxious patience of people who are running approximately on time and can't afford not to be. She got there at 7:04 and stood near the back of the platform, looking.
Krauss was there at 7:07, moving with the unconscious familiarity of someone executing a deeply habitual route. He was, she noted, the kind of person who looked at his phone rather than at other people, which meant he would not notice surveillance. She filed this with the faint protectiveness she'd developed toward him since the previous morning — the specific weight of knowing about a threat that its target didn't fully understand.
She spent the six-minute wait watching the platform.
Not for anything specific. For the quality of attention around Krauss — for the kind of non-attention that is actually very careful attention, the particular stillness of someone who is watching without wanting to be seen watching.
She didn't see anything.
The train arrived and Krauss got on and the platform cleared.
She stayed for the next train.
---
The informant called again on day three.
Not the tip line. Her personal mobile, which was not listed and which she had not given to anyone she hadn't trusted absolutely for at least two years.
She was in her car when the call came in, parked outside a coffee shop where she'd spent the past hour reviewing financial sector regulatory frameworks, because she had apparently decided to become an expert in compliance violations in her spare time. She looked at the unknown number for three rings and picked up.
Silence, and then the same filtered voice. *"You're looking at it from the Bellhaven angle. That's right, but it's not the whole picture."*
"Who are you?" she said.
*"Someone who needs you to find this correctly. If you go at it too directly you'll alert the wrong people and Krauss dies early."*
"What does that mean, early?"
*"The 7:10 is a plan B. Plan A is cleaner. More deniable. If you establish official surveillance on Krauss before we've built enough of the picture, whoever's behind this gets nervous and moves to plan A."*
"Tell me who's behind it."
A pause. *"Not yet. You need the financial thread first. Not the Bellhaven convictions — the acquittals. Look at who walked away from Bellhaven and where they went."*
The call ended.
Lena sat in her car for three minutes, looking at the dead screen.
The informant was using her phone. Not a burner — or if it was a burner, it had been routed through something that gave it a genuine number signature. They had called her personally. They knew her mobile number.
She thought about the short list of people who knew her personal mobile number.
Then she put the phone in the cup holder and drove back to the precinct.
---
The Bellhaven acquittals were eleven people. She pulled the files one by one, constructed a timeline of their activities in the three years since the case, found six who had gone into financial sector roles.
Two of the six had gone to work for companies with regulatory oversight relationships with Mercer-Bell.
One of those two had, eighteen months ago, transitioned out of their role into an advisory position.
The advisory position was at a firm whose primary client, over the past six months, was a subsidiary of a fund management company whose ownership structure was opaque, whose address was a registered office in the Cayman Islands, and which had conducted a significant volume of transactions through Mercer-Bell in the month before Krauss had raised his flag.
Lena wrote the chain on paper, not on the laptop. Then she read it back to herself.
Then she sat for a long time and thought about who in her department had worked the Bellhaven case from the inside, who would know those eleven defendants personally, and who she would have trusted with the information she had just found.
She thought about Marco.
She thought about the four years they'd worked together, the three times she'd trusted him with her life, the way he'd read her face over his desk monitor at 7:45 AM and asked if she hadn't slept.
She thought about how a detective who had worked Bellhaven for fourteen months would know exactly which acquittals were still connected, and which financial threads were live, and where to pull them.
She also thought about how a detective who wanted to warn her, who knew she would be careful, who understood precisely how she thought — that detective might use an anonymous tip precisely because they knew she'd take it seriously and investigate without bringing it officially into the system.
She didn't know which version was true.
She added both to the paper notes, folded them, and put them in her jacket pocket.
