Chapter 3: Death by Data Dictionary

The rain had finally stopped, leaving Data City shrouded in a damp haze. Dash D. Board trudged back to his office, his mind racing. McCoy had played it cool, too cool, and Dash didn’t trust anyone who could spout “scalability” without breaking a sweat.

Back at his desk, he flicked on his ancient monitor, the screen crackling to life. He pulled up the latest dataset Annie had sent over—a partial snapshot of the KPIs before they vanished. The data was incomplete, riddled with NULL values and strange anomalies.

“Where are you hiding?” Dash muttered, running another query. He was looking for patterns, anything that could explain how the KPIs had disappeared—or who had made them vanish.

Just as he was about to dive deeper, the phone on his desk rang. Dash hesitated. The landline rarely rang, and when it did, it was never good news.

“Dash D. Board,” he answered.

“You’re in over your head, Board.” The voice on the other end was distorted, robotic, like it had been filtered through an old voice modulator. “Stop digging before you get buried.”

“Who is this?” Dash demanded, gripping the receiver tighter.

“Call me… Row Shadow,” the voice said, mocking. “Let’s just say I know things. Things about McCoy, about the KPIs, about you. You keep looking, and you’ll end up in the recycle bin.”

The line went dead.

Dash slammed the phone down, his pulse quickening. Row Shadow. It sounded like a hacker alias, someone who’d been sniffing around the system, maybe even part of the plot.

He leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. Whoever this Row Shadow was, they knew something. And they weren’t going to make it easy for him to find out what.

The next morning, Annie Lytics showed up at Dash’s office with a bag of donuts and a stack of printouts.

“Thought you could use some fuel,” she said, dropping the papers on his desk.

Dash grabbed a donut and gestured to the pile. “What’s this?”

“Schema diagrams,” Annie said, sitting down. “I traced the dependencies for the KPI tables. It’s messy, Dash. Real messy. Half the joins don’t even make sense, and there’s a lot of undocumented processes.”

Dash frowned, flipping through the diagrams. She wasn’t kidding—it looked like a spiderweb designed by someone who’d never heard of normalization.

“Anything stick out?” he asked.

Annie nodded. “Yeah. There’s a table called kpi_backup that’s supposed to store historical data for recovery. But when I queried it, it was empty.”

“Empty?” Dash leaned forward. “That’s impossible. Backups don’t just disappear.”

“Exactly,” Annie said. “But here’s the thing—it was wiped at the same time the cleanup script ran. Whoever deleted the KPIs didn’t just stop at the main tables. They went after the backups too.”

Dash’s stomach sank. This wasn’t just a case of sloppy data management. This was deliberate. Someone had gone to great lengths to make sure the metrics were gone for good.

“McCoy,” Dash muttered. “It’s gotta be him. He has the access, the motive—”

“But does he have the skills?” Annie interrupted. “I mean, McCoy talks a big game, but he’s not exactly a hands-on guy. If he wanted the KPIs gone, he’d need someone to do the dirty work.”

Dash nodded slowly. She was right. McCoy wasn’t the type to get his hands dirty. That meant there was someone else involved—someone with the technical chops to pull this off.

“Row Shadow,” Dash said.

Annie frowned. “Who?”

“Someone called me last night, warned me to back off,” Dash explained. “They knew about the KPIs, the cleanup script, everything. I think they’re the one who actually wiped the data.”

Annie’s eyes widened. “Did they say anything useful?”

“Just a name,” Dash said. “And a threat.”

“Well, they’re not wrong about one thing,” Annie said, crossing her arms. “This is dangerous. If someone’s willing to wipe backups and cover their tracks this thoroughly, they won’t think twice about going after you.”

Dash smirked. “Good thing I’m not afraid of a little danger.”

By mid-afternoon, Dash and Annie were back at the Data Warehouse, poring over the server logs. Eddie T. Loader had reluctantly let them in, muttering something about “liability” as he handed over admin access.

“Here,” Dash said, pointing to a log entry. “This is when the cleanup script ran. And look at this—a remote session was active at the same time. Someone was logged in, running commands.”

Annie leaned over his shoulder. “The session ID is anonymized. Can we trace it?”

“Already on it,” Dash said, typing furiously. After a few moments, he frowned. “The session came from an external IP address. It’s masked, but I can trace it back to a VPN.”

“Whose VPN?” Annie asked.

Dash hesitated, his fingers hovering over the keyboard. “There’s only one way to find out.” He pulled up a connection map, tracing the IP hops until he hit a final destination. When the location resolved, he stared at the screen in disbelief.

“What is it?” Annie asked.

Dash leaned back, rubbing his temples. “The VPN endpoint is registered to… McCoy Technologies.”

“McCoy’s company?” Annie’s jaw dropped. “That’s practically a smoking gun.”

“Maybe,” Dash said cautiously. “Or maybe someone wants us to think it’s McCoy.”

Annie frowned. “You think someone’s framing him?”

Dash shrugged. “Could be. Or it could be McCoy covering his tracks. Either way, we need more proof.”

He pulled up another set of logs, this time focusing on the timestamps. Something caught his eye—a sequence of commands entered manually during the cleanup.

“These commands,” Dash said, pointing to the screen. “They’re… sloppy.”

“Sloppy?” Annie asked.

“Yeah,” Dash said. “Look at this syntax. It’s inconsistent. Whoever ran this isn’t a pro. They’re experienced enough to know the basics, but not enough to hide their tracks perfectly.”

“So… not Row Shadow?” Annie guessed.

Dash shook his head. “No, this feels… amateur. Someone who had access but wasn’t used to this kind of work. Someone who might’ve been coerced.”

Annie’s eyes narrowed. “You’re thinking McCoy hired a fall guy.”

“Exactly,” Dash said. “Now we just need to find out who.”

As they packed up for the night, Dash couldn’t shake the feeling that they were running out of time. Whoever was behind this wasn’t just stealing metrics—they were rewriting the rules of the game. And if Dash didn’t crack the case soon, the whole system could come crashing down.