Quirky Sleuths. Big Murders. Very Bad Alibis.
County records technician Remy Calder knows institutions rarely make things disappear dramatically. They assign a code, move a box, change a retention category, and wait for everyone to stop asking. So when deputy county administrator Claudia Mert is found dead beside a locked shredding bin during a late-night records purge, Remy immediately dislikes how tidy the destruction looks.
Her estranged brother Jax was seen inside the annex. His access appears in the system. The county is preparing to launch a transparency initiative the next morning, complete with press releases, cheerful posters, and the inconvenient problem of a murdered records reformer.
Then Remy notices the disposal code. It is too perfect. The cart contains categories that should never have been destroyed together, meaning someone understood how bureaucracy looked but not how records actually worked. To clear her brother and stop evidence from vanishing by policy, Remy has to prove that sometimes the cleanest paperwork is where the dirtiest secret is hiding.
