Chapter 3: The People Behind the Entries

They used Green’s office for the interviews, one person at a time, with Jenson in the corner chair asking the theft questions and Rita asking everything else.

Green didn’t make them drag the restart out of him. “That was me. The scanners had been throwing faults for weeks. Misreads, dropped events, the same pallet showing in two places. The vendor’s advice was to restart the interface, so I did, at shift change, when it would hurt least.” He rubbed his eyes. “It didn’t fix anything. The faults came back the next morning.”

“And in the meantime?” Rita said.

“Workarounds. Manual confirmations. If I shut the docks down to chase a scanner problem, I’ve got sixty drivers in the yard and cargo missing its vessel. So we kept moving.”

“We’ll need the original operational records preserved. Not the customer reports. The device logs, the exception queue, the transfer paperwork, the maintenance history on the scanner interface. All of it, as it stands.”

Green was quiet for a moment. Robert watched him work out what the exception queue would show about how the building had been run, and whose signature was at the bottom of that.

“There’s a backlog in there,” Green said. “Transfers that were never acknowledged at the other end. That’s mine. I let it build.” He picked up his desk phone. “Steve? Preserve everything on the scanner side. Copy the logs, the configuration and the exception records as they stand right now, and from here on nothing gets deleted, purged or tidied until these people say so. The docks keep running. If an operating setting has to change, it changes, and it’s logged. Yes, all of it.” He put the phone down. “You have access to whatever the company owns. I’ll put it in writing.”