He had no idea that in the span of that short conversation, he had handed a federal investigator two recorded felonies, and that the only thing I had been doing while I sat there with my fists clenched was collecting them.

Chapter 10 — The Channel

Twenty minutes after Trent left, I forwarded the audio recording through an encrypted federal channel, directly to the regional field office of the task force I served on.

By noon, three separate agencies were actively involved: the state attorney general’s public-corruption task force, the FBI, and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service — that last one because one of Trent’s shell companies had recently received federal subcontracting funds tied to a military transit project, which meant the Prescotts had not merely committed local corruption.

They had, without understanding the magnitude of it, stolen from a federal defense program, and pulled the full attention of the United States government down onto a rural county that had spent twenty-two years believing itself beyond anyone’s reach.