Chapter 143: Don’t Connect the Dots

Chapter 143: Chapter 143: Don’t Connect the Dots

The old archive room at the football club was quiet, smelling of dust and old paper.

Daisy arrived twenty minutes before Ben. She didn’t touch her camera. She just sat at the small wooden table, staring blankly at the bright screen of her phone.

She kept rereading Zane’s text messages from the night before.

You asked about the former finance director today.

Don’t ask about him again.

Some questions get people hurt.

The heavy metal door groaned open. Ben walked in, carrying two cups of coffee. He took one look at her pale face and set the cups down on the table.

"You didn’t sleep," Ben noted, pulling out the chair beside her.

Daisy quickly locked her phone screen. "Neither did you."

Ben didn’t deny it. He opened his briefcase and pulled out his thick notebook. His jaw was set tight.

"We’re not confronting Zane," Ben stated firmly.

Daisy frowned. She looked at him. "Why?"

"Because we’re journalists, Daisy, not detectives," Ben explained, uncapping his pen. "We don’t accuse people based on cryptic text messages. We need something we can actually prove on paper."

Daisy let out a slow breath. She knew he was right. That was the rule.

They buried themselves in the paperwork.

They returned to the 2019 financial ledgers. Ben meticulously compared payment dates, shell company names, and internal club reports. Daisy stood over the desk, photographing the relevant documents one by one.

After an hour, they found a distinct pattern. Several massive, unexplained payments had been quietly routed through a handful of different external companies.

But one specific company appeared repeatedly in the margins.

Kessler Sports Consulting.

Daisy slowly lowered her camera. She looked at Ben.

"Kessler?" Daisy asked quietly.

Ben didn’t immediately answer. He stared at the printed name, his pen hovering over his notebook. He carefully wrote the name down and circled it twice.

"Could be a coincidence," Ben said.

"And Zane Kessler just happens to work here in the exact same building?" Daisy asked, raising a highly skeptical eyebrow.

"Exactly why we verify it before we write it," Ben replied calmly.

They didn’t rush out to accuse Zane. They just quietly started looking for the invisible connection.

An hour later, Ben contacted the former club accountant they had interviewed the previous day.

The man reluctantly agreed to speak with them again, but this time, he absolutely refused to meet anywhere near the stadium. They met at a noisy, crowded diner a few miles away.

Sitting in a corner booth, the nervous accountant finally gave them a massive piece of the puzzle.

He hadn’t been the one who discovered the financial discrepancy in 2019.

Daniel Mercer did.

Mercer was the club’s former Financial Operations Manager. According to the nervous accountant, Mercer noticed that several massive payments didn’t match the club’s official corporate records.

Mercer raised the issue directly with senior management.

A few weeks later, Mercer abruptly resigned. Then, he completely disappeared from the club and the sports industry entirely.

"Did he tell anyone exactly what he’d found?" Daisy asked, leaning across the sticky table.

The accountant hesitated, looking nervously around the diner.

"He tried," the man whispered.

"Who did he tell?" Ben pressed.

The accountant looked incredibly uncomfortable. He gripped his coffee mug.

"People who didn’t want to hear it," he answered.

Back at the club archive, Daisy sat at her laptop, rapidly going through digital folders of old photographs from 2019.

She was desperately looking for a clear picture of Daniel Mercer.

Instead, her sharp eyes caught something entirely different.

She opened a photograph taken outside the stadium during a major regional football tournament. In the background of the shot, there was a small group of high-level club officials standing near the VIP entrance.

One of the officials was holding a thick blue folder. It was marked with the exact same financial department code they had been investigating all morning.

Daisy leaned closer to the screen and zoomed in.

Then, she noticed the digital timestamp in the corner of the photograph.

She went completely still. Her heart gave a sudden, hard thump.

"Ben," Daisy said.

Ben immediately stood up from his paperwork and walked over to her chair. "What?"

She pointed directly at the date on the screen.

"This was the exact week the discrepancy was discovered," Daisy whispered.

Ben leaned down, resting one hand on the back of her chair. He studied the photograph closely.

Then, Daisy noticed something else.

A footballer appeared in the far background of the shot.

Daisy zoomed in.

Her fingers went still on the mouse.

She knew that face.

Mason.

He wasn’t featured prominently. He wasn’t even looking at the camera. He was simply walking toward the practice grounds in his training kit.

"What was Mason doing here?" Daisy asked.

Ben looked at the photograph again, his brow furrowing.

"He was a senior that year," Ben reminded her. "Team captain."

"I know," Daisy said, her voice tight.

She stared at the date on the screen. Something about the timing bothered her deeply, but she couldn’t quite figure out why.

The archive door suddenly creaked open.

Zane Kessler walked in, holding a fresh stack of media schedules.

His eyes immediately landed on Daisy’s laptop screen. He stopped walking.

For the very first time since they had met him, Zane’s easy, effortless expression disappeared. His face went cold.

"Where did you get that?" Zane demanded softly.

Daisy casually turned the laptop toward him.

"The digital archive," Daisy answered smoothly.

Zane walked closer. He looked at the photograph. He looked at the officials. Then, he looked at Mason in the background. Finally, he looked directly into Daisy’s eyes.

"You should leave that one alone," Zane warned.

Ben immediately stepped closer to Daisy, his posture subtly shifting into something protective.

"Why?" Ben challenged.

Zane didn’t answer him.

"You know something about this?" Daisy asked, watching his face carefully.

A long, tense pause filled the small room.

"I know enough to tell you that you’re asking questions about something much bigger than missing money," Zane said quietly.

Then, he turned around and walked right out the door.

Now, Ben and Daisy were even more confused.

Daisy turned in her chair and looked at Ben.

"That was incredibly weird," Daisy breathed.

"Very," Ben agreed, staring at the closed door.

"Do you think Mason is connected to this?" Daisy asked, her voice dropping.

Ben shook his head.

"We don’t know," Ben said firmly.

"But his name wasn’t even in the financial records," Daisy pointed out.

"Exactly," Ben nodded. He pointed a finger at the photograph on the screen. "That’s exactly why we don’t make the connection yet."

Daisy looked up at him. She offered a tiny, tired smile.

"You’re being very responsible," Daisy teased lightly.

"Don’t sound so disappointed," Ben muttered, walking back to his desk.

"I was hoping for the dramatic, conspiracy-theory version," Daisy joked.

"We’re journalists," Ben reminded her.

"Unfortunately," she sighed.

Ben sat down at his laptop and began quietly going through the old digital newspaper archives.

He ran a search for the tournament date from the photograph. He quickly found an old local sports article.

Mason had been one of the club’s standout players that season. But as Ben read further down the page, he froze.

The article mentioned that Mason was expected to pursue professional football after university.

Ben opened another tab and searched deeper.

Florida.

Then Europe.

Then the injury.

Ben paused.

He checked the dates again.

The financial discrepancy had been discovered in 2019.

Mercer had raised his complaint shortly afterward.

The tournament photograph had been taken that same week.

Mason’s career-ending injury, however, had happened years later, after he had moved to Europe.

Ben stared at the screen.

The massive gap in time should have made a connection impossible.

"We need more," he whispered.

Daisy noticed his dark expression across the room.

"What did you find?" Daisy asked, standing up.

Ben hesitated.

"Something about Mason," Ben finally said.

She walked over. He silently turned his laptop screen toward her and showed her the timeline he had just pieced together.

Daisy quickly read the text. Her face slowly changed as she processed the information.

"His injury?" Daisy asked quietly. "But that happened in Europe. Years later."

"I know," Ben confirmed.

"Then why are you looking at it?"

"Because the timing of his departure from this club is too close to Mercer’s complaint," Ben admitted.

Daisy looked back toward her own computer screen. The image of the unbothered Mason walking in the background of the photograph suddenly felt entirely different. It felt heavy.

The quiet tension in the archive room became too heavy.

Daisy turned back to the center table and reached for another physical file to distract herself.

Ben reached for the exact same file.

Their hands completely touched over the manila folder.

Neither of them pulled away immediately. The heat of his skin against hers was entirely distracting.

Daisy slowly looked up at him.

"We’re becoming terrible at this," Daisy whispered.

"At what?" Ben asked, his voice low.

She gave him a very pointed look. "You know."

Ben almost smiled. The corner of his mouth twitched.

"You’re the one who keeps falling," Ben reminded her smoothly.

"And you’re the one who keeps catching me," Daisy countered.

A heavy beat passed between them.

"Maybe stop," Ben suggested softly.

"Maybe you stop falling," Daisy countered.

Daisy rolled her eyes, but a smile pulled at her lips. Neither of them moved their hands for another long second.

Then, Daisy finally pulled the file free from his grip.

"Work," Daisy announced.

"Finally," Ben muttered, taking a slow step back.

Before they could pack up to leave for the afternoon, Daisy’s cell phone buzzed loudly on the table.

She picked it up. It was a new text message.

From Zane.

Don’t connect Mason’s injury to 2019.

Daisy completely froze. The air left her lungs.

She wordlessly turned the phone around and showed the screen to Ben.

Ben’s face hardened instantly into absolute stone. Because they had never, at any point, told Zane Kessler that they were looking at Mason’s old injury.

And more importantly, why would Zane specifically warn them against connecting a 2019 scandal to an injury that happened years later?

"How does he know?" Daisy whispered, genuine fear creeping into her voice.

Ben looked at the chilling text message. Then, he looked at the photograph on her laptop.

He didn’t answer.

Ben reached over and carefully put the physical photograph back into its proper folder.

"We’re not writing anything yet," Ben ordered quietly.

Daisy nodded in total agreement. "We’re finding out what actually happened first."

Ben looked at the digital image of Mason’s photograph one last time before closing the laptop.

Mason was smiling in the background, walking across the grass, completely unaware that this photograph had just reopened a story someone desperately wanted buried.

Daisy stared at the blank screen.

"What happened to you?" she whispered.

Ben snapped the folder shut.