Dallas clears the workstation, and the desk gives up its secret at last. A concealed panel clicks open beneath the wood, exactly where the earlier tampering suggested.

He plugs into the terminal, and the screen wakes with a hard blue glow. The connection runs straight to Rowan Mercer Holdings headquarters, encrypted and live.

Then the manifest starts to scroll. Line after line. Ghost shipments, false codes, concealed routes, Captain Miller’s hidden trail laid bare in black and white.

Outside the frame, the office feels smaller, meaner. The active security monitor keeps staring, and the open side door lets in a slice of dockside fog.

Murderbone stays tight to Dallas’s leg as the numbers keep coming. Whoever tried to bury the shipments just left their fingerprints on the record.

Dallas snaps a drive into the terminal and starts the copy. The manifest keeps crawling, line by line, into storage before the connection can fail.

The transfer bar fills. Mercer Holdings, ghost routes, cleanup codes, all of it pouring into a second, safer place.

A hidden line in the data catches and duplicates itself, a backup index tucked behind the manifest, like someone expected a theft.

Murderbone shifts closer, muzzle low, eyes fixed on the open door as fog curls across the threshold.

The terminal gives a soft chime, then goes still. On the security monitor, a shape lingers in the hallway outside the office.

The copied drive sits in Dallas's hand, but the office is no longer empty.

Dallas leans in and scrolls past the manifest header, then freezes the feed on the hidden index. The terminal is not just storing shipments, it is cross referencing names, routes, and times in a second ledger layer.

A column of entries resolves under a Mercer Holdings code block, and several lines are marked for manual review. One notation repeats beside the copied freight trail, a private office tag at the waterfront annex.

Fog pushes farther into the room, whitening the floor around Murderbone's paws. On the monitor, the hallway shape shifts but does not leave.

Dallas catches one more detail in the index, a timestamp trail tied to a cleanup signoff and a second access path. The file is not only a manifest, it is a routing map for who touches the evidence next.

The monitor flickers as the hallway figure inches closer to the office door.

Dallas shifts the drive to one hand and drags the second ledger trace onto the terminal with the other. The names branch into a back route, then a clean office tag, then a time stamp that matches the hallway figure on the monitor.

At the door, Murderbone slides sideways into the narrowest angle, shoulders squared to the fog. He plants himself for a strike, all stillness and teeth.

Dallas follows the second ledger line down to a service access note and a handwritten initials block. It is a real clerk's shorthand, not some phantom code, and it points to whoever is watching the hall.

The monitor flares, and the hallway shape stops outside the office door. A hand lifts into frame, then hesitates.

Dallas finishes tracing the path and lands on a hidden review slot stamped beneath the second ledger layer. The file is already telling him who gets the next look at the evidence, and the office door is about to move.