The Break-In
Chapter 09 - The Break-In
The alarm went off at two seventeen in the morning, and Kayla was dressed and in her truck before she'd fully processed the phone call.
By the time she arrived, two police cruisers sat in the lot, lights spinning silent against the wet asphalt, and Marcus was already standing outside the back office, arms crossed against the cold.
"Filing cabinet," he said, before she could ask. "Just the filing cabinet. Nothing else touched."
Her stomach dropped straight through the floor.
"The folder," she said.
"Gone," Marcus said. "Along with the backup drive Priya left here last week."
Kayla pushed past the officer at the door and into the office, cabinet drawer hanging open and empty, the rubber banded folder that had held two years of falsified sign-offs simply not there anymore.
"We have copies," she said, more to herself than anyone. "Priya scanned everything."
"They know that," Marcus said quietly. "This wasn't about erasing evidence. Digital copies exist and they know it. This was a message."
"What kind of message."
"The kind that says we can get into your building whenever we want," Marcus said, "and take whatever we decide to take."
The responding officer found no forced entry on the main doors. Whoever it was had a key, or knew exactly which door didn't lock properly, the same one that had been on the maintenance request list for eight months and never gotten fixed because it was low priority.
Kayla thought of the eighteen names with access to that particular door. Ground crew, senior mechanics, night security.
Dale's name was on that list.
She hated that the thought even crossed her mind, hated it more when she saw Dale arrive twenty minutes later, pale and out of breath, having driven straight from home the second Marcus called him.
"You think it's me," Dale said, reading her face before she said anything.
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to."
The office went quiet, just the officers murmuring near the cabinet, radios crackling low.
"I gave you everything I had," Dale said. "Every name, every date, my daughter's tuition on the line. If I wanted to protect Ray, I'd have never opened my mouth in the first place."
Kayla believed him. Mostly. The part of her that didn't quite believe anyone completely anymore, the part that had grown three sizes in the last two weeks, made her hold the thought a little longer than felt fair.
Priya arrived at dawn, laptop bag over her shoulder, already talking before she was fully out of the car.
"Backup drive is gone, but I emailed myself the full case file the night I made it," she said. "Old habit. We haven't lost anything permanent."
"Then why take it," Kayla said.
"Because whoever did this either didn't know about the email backup," Priya said, "or didn't care, because taking the physical folder was never really about destroying evidence. It was about proving they could walk into a secured building at will."
Marcus's jaw was tight in the gray morning light.
"There's something else," he said. "The break-in happened the same night as the injunction hearing prep meeting. Grant's lawyers know our filing schedule. If this was meant to rattle us before the hearing, it worked."
Kayla looked at the empty drawer, then at Dale, then out the window at Grant's jet, still cordoned off, still grounded, still somehow the calmest thing in the entire lot.
A memory surfaced unbidden. Three years ago. A near miss nobody outside a tight circle had ever heard about, one of Grant's older jets, a hydraulic warning light dismissed as sensor error during a landing in bad weather. It had made the rounds as hangar gossip once and then quietly disappeared from conversation the way inconvenient stories do.
She hadn't thought about it in years.
She thought about it now.
"Priya," she said slowly. "Pull anything you can find on an incident with tail number Kilo Alpha Seven One Two. Three years back. Landing incident, never formally reported."
Priya's fingers were already moving across the keyboard.
May you like
"Why," she said.
"Because I think tonight wasn't the first time somebody made a problem disappear to protect this fleet's reputation," Kayla said. "I think it's just the first time they got caught doing it."
