That morning, she’d given him access to the computer program that tracked who had been in and out of which areas at which times. She’d also handed over all their internal and external security video footage. The internal footage was automatically erased every week unless it was tagged for saving, but they held on to their external video for months. Letting Davis access all of it had been her attempt at getting their mutual goal back on track.
He frowned at her, the expression on his face telling her he was going to ask if she was okay.
“Well?” She was finished getting personal with him. From this point forward, she needed to remember that they were unwilling partners in an investigation to uncover the truth about what had happened to those soldiers. That was it.
Even if they were working together, even if she respected his intelligence and investigative experience, ultimately, they were going to end up on opposite sides. Yes, right now, they wanted the same thing. But once they found the perpetrator, he was unlikely to care whether Petrov Armor went down with the culprits. She couldn’t let that happen. Not only because of her dad, but also because of all the employees who counted on the company for their paychecks.
“I found something.”
Her heart seemed to plummet to her stomach. Leila clamped her hands on her desk for stability as she got to her feet. “What did you find?” Or rather, who? Who had been betraying her father, the company and their country? Who at Petrov Armor didn’t care if soldiers died thinking they were protected by body armor?
“Nothing on the external video. Not really, anyway.”
Davis stepped around to the back of her desk. She could smell his morning-fresh scent and feel the brush of his arm as he shifted her laptop toward him.
He leaned past her, typing away as he said, “I don’t know exactly when to look, so it’s a little tough to sort through all that raw footage. But you do have some gaps. I don’t know if it’s a system error or someone erased footage. What I didn’t find was anything obviously suspicious, like a truck being loaded with crates at night.”
“Well, I still think someone could have swapped out that armor after it left our facility,” Leila said, peering around him to see what he was doing on the laptop.
His fingers stalled and his whole body went unnaturally still. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before he was straightening and shrugging, but Leila’s mouth went dry. There was something he wasn’t telling her.
Before she could figure out what, he spun the laptop toward her. “This is a bit more interesting.”
Leila peered closer, recognizing their security card access logs. Every time someone used their security card to key into the building or any of the secure areas, the system logged it.
“Theresa Quinn was here late at night during the time you said that shipment of armor was being made.”
Leila sighed. “That’s not really a smoking gun, Davis. Theresa lives for the work. She’s here on weekends sometimes.”
“But these super-late-night visits don’t seem to happen except during this time period.”
Leaning in again, Leila scrolled through the dates in question, realizing he was right. “It still might not mean anything.”
She and Theresa had never gotten along. Maybe it was because the head of Research and Development had been part of Petrov Armor since Leila was a kid. Although her father had never told her about it, Leila had overheard Theresa arguing with him about recommending the board put Leila in charge. Theresa hadn’t seemed to want the CEO spot for herself, just thought Leila hadn’t earned it and wasn’t capable of running the company.
But Theresa was a professional. Once Leila had been given the job anyway, Leila had never heard a word about it from her head of R and D. They might not like each other personally, but it had never gotten in the way of work. Leila couldn’t imagine Theresa betraying the company she’d spent the last twenty years helping to build. Not even if that company was handed over to someone she’d called “the person who’s going to destroy Petrov Armor.”
“You and Theresa don’t get along,” Davis said.
“You noticed,” Leila said dryly. “Look, I’ve known Theresa since I was ten years old. My uncle brought her in while my dad wasn’t functioning after losing my mom. But when he got back to work, Dad said finding Theresa was one of the best things his brother had done. She can be prickly, but she wouldn’t betray this company. She helped make it what it is today.”
“So, how did she feel about you shutting down the firearm side of the business?”
Thrown by the topic change, Leila sank into her chair, wheeling it away from her desk to put a little space between them. “She wasn’t happy about it. Honestly, no one at the top was. But I’d been thinking about it for a long time. I didn’t do it right away, but last year, the timing seemed right. The ultralight body armor the military had been testing was a big success, and they finally started ordering in massive quantities. It was time to stop splitting our focus, and armor seemed like the way to go.”
“That’s why you did it?” Davis pressed.
“Mostly, yeah. But on the weapon side, we just made pistols. Honestly, I’ve just always been more comfortable selling to the military. Protecting soldiers by providing them with solid armor seemed like the best way to spend our company’s resources. Plus our armor was profitable. It seemed right, since it was where my dad started the business anyway.”
“So that was it? What about the excess?”
Leila shrugged. “Most of the excess was destroyed. Yes, we lost money at first, but we got the board of directors to wait out the slump, so we could move our focus completely to armor.” She stared
