The Mourning Mail (final release candidate #8)

Chapter 54

"Has any of that helped Antara's murder investigation?" I asked.

"A cartage company had reported the truck stolen," Doug answered, "the one that rammed you in the Uber and killed Antara. But I learned that company had been a Strike Response client during a union-busting conflict, and made the authorities aware of the relationship. The Strike Response operative who drove it into you and killed the driver is looking at a life sentence."

"Was that it? There were a lot of other people involved...," I said.

"There have been other repercussions," Doug replied. "The trucking company's trying to get ahead of the coming lawsuits. You might want to board that train, Debra Ann – I know you don't need the money, but you could always donate it to a good cause, and the company really should pay for what they did."

"I'll give it some consideration," I said with a smile. I should ask Bill Hanniquet his opinion, I thought.

"But they've offered a settlement to Antara's heirs," Doug continued, "which should enable the family's move into a larger home. Charges are pending for a few others with lesser crimes related to Antara's death. But you know how these things go - only contractors and low-level employees would serve any actual time. Still, Strike Response did fire two management team members so far. On the surface, it looked like that was going to be the extent of it."

"' On the surface?'" I asked.

"Meaningful justice may have arrived on another train altogether," Doug replied with a wry smile. "Some people—me included - think that the original Strike Response warehouse break-in was at least partially a diversion. That was the one that resulted in those false reports of stolen weapons and ammunition. We think the actual goal was to breach Strike Response servers and at the same time, access their paper files. Others believe a brilliant hacker worked independently to hit those hard drives, and the timing was purely coincidental.

"But somebody broke into Strike Response's offices. They took tens of thousands of confidential documents from their computers and file cabinets."

"Harry's shown me that correcting inequities is something we can sometimes do outside our formal judicial systems. I'm sure it was also purely coincidental that Claire became a partner in Harry's agency," I said. "And that he seems to be grooming her to take over the business eventually."

"Oh, of course... lots of co-inky-dinks," Doug said, laughing. "Either way, by the time the first person realized the document theft, the damage had spread too far to contain. Legitimate after-the-fact activity had overwritten the deleted space on those same servers. There was no way to recover the originals or identify the offending transactions. No one could tell the rightful day-to-day modifications of a file and its permissions from whatever the hacker might have done. And too many hands had been in those file cabinets since to investigate the heist properly."

"This part of the story I do know something about," I said, "Batches of those documents have begun turning up all over the Internet in regular releases."

"And that's proved devastating to Strike Response," Doug added. "A half-dozen of my articles were about Strike Response's demise. The depth and breadth of the crimes in which Strike Response has engaged as a regular part of their business are genuinely astounding. Federal, state, and county prosecutors have started investigations, made arrests, and even gotten a couple of guilty pleas as they've gone after more than one hundred upper management and staff. All based on information from those exposed documents."

"So that's why they folded so quickly..." I murmured.

"The revelations demolished Strike Response's reputation for discretion and trustworthiness literally overnight," Doug added. "The activity in their parking lot's been nothing but process servers, lawyers, and law enforcement coming and going. The company closed its sales offices last Thursday. They made it all of maybe a week after the day several websites published the first tranche of documents they received from that anonymous source."