Marcus found it on a Wednesday.
He had been looking for six days.
Not continuously — he had other work, the kind that didn't pause because someone was running a verification order against a contracted consultant — but consistently.
Every morning before the briefings.
Every evening after.
The specific, patient archaeology of a man who had been doing this kind of work for eight years and understood that evidence didn't hide so much as it waited.
For someone who knew where to look.
-----
The committee member's name was Garrett.
Fifty-seven years old.
Seventeen years on the Oversight Committee.
Long enough to have built, quietly and through the specific accumulation of favors that characterized careers like his, a set of relationships that were useful in both directions.
Marcus had pulled his financial records first.
Clean.
Or clean enough that a surface examination found nothing.
He pulled them again.
Looked at the second layer.
The consulting payments.
