Chapter 152: Don’t Leave Me Out

Chapter 152: Chapter 152: Don’t Leave Me Out

"You found something, didn’t you?"

Audrey went completely silent. The dusty air in the archive room suddenly felt suffocating. She stared at the glowing screen of her phone, her heart hammering against her ribs.

She tried to dismiss it. She forced her voice to sound entirely casual.

"Why would you think that?" Audrey asked.

Mason did not buy it for a single second.

"Because you only say ’at work’ like that when you’re trying not to tell me something," Mason stated flatly.

Across the table, Daisy and Ben exchanged a highly expressive look. Daisy winced in sympathy. Ben just raised a dark eyebrow and took a sip of his lukewarm coffee.

Audrey squeezed her eyes shut. She suddenly realized Mason could hear the dead silence echoing around her. He knew she wasn’t sitting in the loud, chaotic bullpen upstairs.

"Are Ben and Daisy there?" Mason asked.

Audrey hesitated. She looked at her two friends.

"Yes," Audrey admitted softly.

Mason’s voice became more serious.

"Is this about Calloway Football Group?"

Audrey didn’t answer immediately.

That silence was more than enough.

Mason asked the dangerous question.

"Did you find my name in something?"

Audrey looked down at the physical papers spread across the table. Her eyes locked onto the falsified access record. The printed letters of his name stared right back at her.

This wasn’t just a corporate puzzle anymore.

She knew his name had been deliberately inserted by someone else, but she still didn’t know why they had chosen him.

She took a slow, steadying breath.

"Your name came up," Audrey finally said.

Mason immediately asked, "In what?"

Audrey refused to tell him about Miles. Not yet. She could not drop a bomb about his own family over a phone call while standing in a basement.

"We’re still verifying everything," Audrey said smoothly, dodging the specific details.

Mason clearly didn’t like the answer.

"Audrey, if this concerns me, I need to know," Mason warned.

Audrey looked at the mountain of documents. She thought about the corrupted files, the missing money, and the hidden black folder.

"That’s exactly why I don’t want to tell you before we know what we’re looking at," Audrey countered firmly.

Mason went quiet.

The line was totally silent for several heavy seconds. He was clearly weighing her words, trusting her journalistic instincts even while his own frustration simmered beneath the surface.

"Fair," Mason finally said.

But he added a strict condition.

"Just don’t investigate something involving me and pretend I’m not part of it," Mason told her.

Audrey felt a sharp pang of respect for him.

That boundary gave him agency without making him aggressively take over her investigation.

She decided to give him one piece. Just enough to let him know he wasn’t the target.

"Someone altered an old record and put your name somewhere it shouldn’t have been," Audrey confessed quietly.

Silence.

When Mason spoke again, the frustration was gone.

"What record?" Mason asked.

"An access record," Audrey replied.

He immediately remembered 2019.

"What access record?" Mason pressed.

Audrey didn’t answer.

Mason asked the exact right question.

"Did I actually have access to that area?"

Audrey looked down at the original, unaltered document.

"No," Audrey said.

The single word landed heavily over the line.

"Then somebody wanted it to look like I did," Mason concluded.

Audrey said nothing.

"Send me whatever you can," Mason instructed.

Audrey stood her ground.

"Not until we’ve verified them."

Mason accepted it. He knew she was a professional. But he did not let her off the hook entirely.

"Then call me the second you do," Mason said.

They hung up.

The moment the call ended, Audrey set her phone face down on the table.

Daisy let out a long breath and looked at Audrey.

"Well. That went badly," Daisy noted softly.

Ben adjusted his glasses and corrected her.

"It went better than I expected," Ben said.

Audrey gave them both a completely flat, exhausted look. She did not have the energy to unpack the emotional weight of that phone call.

She turned her attention back to the printed ledger sitting on the table.

Kessler Sports Consulting.

They needed to establish exactly what that company was actually doing.

Ben dragged his laptop closer and started typing rapidly. He bypassed the standard search engines and dug directly into the state’s archived corporate records.

At first glance, everything looked completely legitimate.

"Kessler Sports Consulting," Ben read aloud from the screen. "They provided athlete management services, sports development consulting, event coordination, and financial advisory services."

It sounded like a perfectly normal vendor for a massive football organization.

But something simply did not fit.

Daisy pulled her own laptop closer. She started comparing the dates of Kessler’s invoiced payments with the timeline they had built on the whiteboard.

"Look at this," Daisy said, her fingers flying across the trackpad. "The suspicious payments aren’t random at all. They occur in clusters."

She highlighted a series of transactions.

"Several payments were made shortly before and after the November 2019 meeting," Daisy explained.

Ben pulled up the specific ledger on his monitor.

"Look at the dates," Ben instructed.

Audrey leaned over and studied the tiny black numbers on the screen.

One massive payment was made just days before Daniel Mercer filed his initial financial complaint.

Another massive transfer came shortly after the east-wing access records were officially changed.

Another chunk of money was moved right after Mercer’s original complaint disappeared from the standard archive.

Now they had a disturbing timeline.

Money moved. Mercer noticed. Mercer complained. Records were altered to create a cover story. The complaint disappeared.

But they still did not know who ultimately controlled Kessler Sports Consulting.

Daisy opened a new browser tab. She searched Kessler’s old corporate registration information.

"The original company director is listed under a name we don’t recognize," Daisy frowned, reading the screen. "A guy named Thomas Vance. I’m running him now, but he looks like a nobody."

She kept scrolling through the registration history.

"But the registered office has changed several times," Daisy noticed.

Ben immediately jumped on that detail. He searched the archived addresses for the company.

"The first address was a normal business office in the financial district," Ben said, reading the history log. "The second address was an accounting firm."

Ben clicked the third address.

The database loaded a new page.

"The third address," Ben said, his voice dropping into a serious register. "It is connected to another company that had previously done business with Calloway Football Group."

Audrey’s attention sharpened instantly.

"That’s not a coincidence," Audrey stated.

Ben immediately held up a warning finger.

"Careful," Ben responded.

Audrey looked right at him.

"I know," Audrey replied smoothly. "Connection isn’t proof."

It was a direct echo of her own rule from earlier. She was learning to distinguish raw evidence from blind suspicion.

Daisy was already searching old newspaper coverage of Kessler Sports Consulting.

"Most of these articles are completely harmless," Daisy muttered. "Just PR fluff about charity tournaments."

She scrolled to the very bottom of the search results.

"Wait. I found something," Daisy announced.

She turned her screen so they could all read the text.

The article mentioned that Kessler Sports Consulting had been brought in to advise several professional sports organizations on budget optimization.

But there was one specific sentence buried in the third paragraph.

One of its senior consultants had previously worked in Calloway Football Group’s financial administration.

It was not Miles.

It was not a name immediately recognizable to the public.

It was just a former finance executive.

But it connected Kessler directly to the people inside the Calloway building without revealing the entire conspiracy.

Ben immediately grabbed his mouse.

"We need his personnel file," Ben said.

They searched the internal Calloway employee database. They ran the names of former finance executives who left before 2018.

Then they searched Daniel Mercer’s employment history.

The record loaded on the screen.

It did not say Mercer worked for Kessler.

Instead, it revealed something infinitely more interesting.

Mercer had previously reviewed internal financial transactions involving Kessler Sports Consulting during a routine audit two years prior.

Audrey completely froze.

Mercer didn’t randomly stumble across Kessler in 2019.

He already knew exactly where to look.

Ben aggressively pulled up the original financial complaint again. He placed it right next to the Kessler payment ledger.

They compared the specific bank accounts Mercer had flagged with the accounts receiving the Kessler payments.

One long string of digits matched perfectly.

One account number appeared in both documents.

Daisy let out a soft, shocked breath.

"That’s the same account," Daisy whispered.

Nobody moved.

Then Ben noticed something else at the very bottom of the ledger.

"The account wasn’t closed after Mercer disappeared," Ben noted, tracing his pen under the line. "It was transferred."

The destination account belonged to an entirely different corporate entity.

Ben highlighted the new company name and searched the state registry.

The screen loaded with a blank grey box.

Nothing.

"The company was dissolved years ago," Ben announced flatly.

Audrey exhaled a long, frustrated breath. She slumped back slightly in her chair.

"Dead end?" Audrey asked.

Ben shook his head stubbornly.

"Not necessarily," Ben said.

He opened the historical corporate registry archives. He bypassed the current status and dug into the founding documents.

"There is an old director listed before the company dissolved," Ben explained, pointing at a blurred line of text.

They could not see the full information yet because the archived digital record was incomplete. The scan was corrupted right over the signature line.

"We need the original registration documents," Ben concluded.

Audrey looked up at the wall clock.

It was incredibly late. Her eyes were burning from staring at bright screens, and her brain felt like pure static.

Daisy gently closed her laptop folder.

"Tomorrow?" Daisy asked softly.

Audrey looked down at the name Kessler Sports Consulting printed on the ledger.

"Tomorrow," Audrey agreed.

Just as she reached for her coat, her cell phone vibrated violently on the table.

She picked it up.

The screen glowed with a new message from Mason.

Mason: I meant what I said.

Before she could process it, another message arrived.

Mason: Don’t leave me out of this.

Audrey stared at the screen. Her thumb hovered over the keyboard.

Then a third, final message appeared.

Mason: Because if someone used my name in 2019, I want to know why.

Audrey slowly locked her phone. She slipped it into her pocket.

She didn’t reply.

She looked up at the large rolling whiteboard in the corner of the room.

At the very top, written in bold black marker, was the first question.

WHO CHANGED MASON’S RECORDS?

Beneath it was the second question.

WHO MOVED MERCER’S MONEY?

And now, written in massive letters right in the center of the board, was the newest piece of the puzzle.

KESSLER SPORTS CONSULTING.

Audrey stared at the board.

The cold realization finally settled deep into her bones.

The two questions might have the same answer.