The former employee attached to the ghost credential was named Ibrahim Lawal. Amara found that out by asking the question in three different systems. The personnel database had suppressed his name. Payroll had not. Neither had an old medical-insurance reconciliation stored on a server nobody remembered to clean.
Ibrahim Lawal. Systems analyst. Hired 2019. Resigned 2020.
Dead 2022.
Amara read the final line twice. Cause of death: road accident. She called Kolade into the room.
“You know him?”
He looked at the photograph on screen. “Vaguely. IT. Quiet. Why?”
“The ghost credential belongs to him.”
Kolade pulled out a chair.
“He’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“And somebody used his access last week.”
“Yes.”
She did not enjoy watching the facts land. The accident report was sparse. Single vehicle. Lekki-Epe Expressway. Two in the morning. No evidence of foul play.
Amara refused to make a murder out of an accident simply because she had already found one murder in the same case.
“What was he working on before he left?” she asked.
Kolade opened an internal project archive. The answer arrived within minutes. Data migration for historical records. Specifically, ownership and settlement files. Amara felt the thread tighten.
“He would have known where everything was.”
“And how to keep access after leaving,” Kolade said.
“Or someone using his credentials would.”
They reconstructed his last months at the company. Ibrahim had been moved temporarily into the chairman’s office to support a confidential digitization project. He resigned soon after. One email survived in an archived backup. From Ibrahim to Ade Senior’s executive assistant:
I have completed the Greco archive as instructed. The seventh item is not in the physical file. I have preserved the reference only. Amara sat very still.
“The seventh letter.”
Kolade read it again.
“He knew it existed.”
“Or knew something occupied that position in the archive.”
“Can you find the reference?”
Amara was already searching. The archive index had been deleted from the live system but remained in a backup snapshot. Entry seven was listed without contents.
Description: PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE — M.G. TO C.G. / LEGAL COPY.
C.G.
Amara thought of Chiara Greco, Matteo’s widow.
“It wasn’t to your father,” she said.
Kolade looked at her.
“It was from Matteo to Chiara.”
“Then why was it in my father’s file?”
That question was worse. Amara opened the system log attached to the index. The last person to access Entry Seven before its deletion had done so in 2019.
User: ILAWAL.
The same dead employee whose credentials were still opening Greco records. A notification appeared on her second screen.
The ghost account had just logged in again.
Amara and Kolade looked at each other.
Someone had been watching while they searched.