Chapter 5 - The Corporate WhistleblowerWe took the red flash drive to Marcus Vance, an independent cyber-forensic specialist who had worked with Lucas during his union days.
Inside his secure office, Marcus slotted the drive into an encrypted terminal.
The screen illuminated with hundreds of internal emails, wire transfer receipts, and digital maintenance logs from the county transit garage dated over the last three months.
âOh my god,â Marcus breathed, his eyes scanning the data rows. âThis isn't just negligence, Sarah. This is deliberate sabotage.â
The logs showed that Denise Porter had manually accessed the maintenance scheduler the night before. She had ordered the installation of a faulty glycol-based heater core on Mariaâs busâa component she knew would leak toxic, sedating fumes into the driver's cabin once the heater was turned on for the winter routes.
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More terrifyingly, the files contained a signed contract from the shell company offering a five-hundred-thousand-dollar payout to Deniseâs brother if the bus suffered a 'spontaneous mechanical failure' before the upcoming federal safety audit.
They wanted the bus to crash to destroy the evidence of their systemic fraud, and they wanted to blame it all on Lucasâs supposed 'revenge plot.'
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