41 #3
"You were at Miss Werner's apartment from approximately 8:35 p.m. to 12:22 a.m., based on driver logs and security gate records. Your driver remained in the vehicle most of that time. There is no record of anyone else handling your phone,
but local deletions would only require access to the device while unlocked."
Trevor's mouth tightened. "Vanessa knew my passcode."
"Yes."
"Because I gave it to her."
Marcus did not answer.
That silence accused more cleanly than speech.
Trevor returned to the desk and picked up the tablet again.
He scrolled down to the message archive.
There were no messages from Dorothy that night.
Not one. That, too, was wrong. If Dorothy had called nine times and he had not answered, why had she not texted?
Unless she had. Unless those were gone too.
Or unless whatever had happened had been urgent enough that only a voice would do, and when his voice did not come, there had been nothing left to type.
He thought of Dorothy's composure at the foundation event when the rumor touched the hospital.
The sudden stillness in her face. The way Sebastian had reached her first, not touching, but close enough to catch the change.
The way Victor's fury had sharpened. They knew something.
Or at least Dorothy knew, and the men around her recognized the wound without owning its details.
Trevor sank slowly into his chair.
For the first time in years, he did not feel like the head of Raymond Group. He felt like a man sitting before a closed door with blood on the threshold, trying to remember why he had never noticed the stain.
"Sir," Marcus said quietly.
Trevor looked up.
"There is more."
Something in him resisted. "What?"
"The local phone backup from that period contains an anomaly. It does not restore the deleted calls themselves because the deletion synced after the fact, but there is a system notification log showing repeated silenced incoming calls from Dorothy's number between 8:41 and 11:02 p.m.
The calls were not merely missed. They appear to have been manually dismissed or silenced while the device was active."
Trevor stared at him.
Marcus's voice lowered. "That means someone saw them come in."
The office tilted, though Trevor did not move.
Someone saw them.
Not network failure. Not dead battery. Not a phone forgotten in a coat pocket while he comforted Vanessa.
The device had been active. The calls had been dismissed.
The records had later disappeared from the phone.
Dorothy had reached for him again and again, and someone had looked at her name lighting the screen and chosen silence.
Trevor's hand closed over the edge of the desk.
The bandage pulled against the cut.
He welcomed the pain.
"Send me everything," he said.
Marcus nodded once. "Already done."
"And get Mrs. Laurel on the phone."
"Yes, sir."
Marcus turned toward the door, then paused. "Sir?"
Trevor did not look up.
"If this concerns Miss Perry's medical privacy, there may be limits to what we can ethically pursue without her consent."
Trevor looked at him then.
The fact that Marcus said it, knowing the risk, told Trevor exactly how far he had fallen in the eyes of the people who served him well enough to challenge him only when necessary.
"I know," Trevor said.
Marcus seemed relieved, though only slightly.
"I will not steal her records," Trevor continued, his voice rougher now. "I want my own. I want my phone, my night, my failure. That is mine to investigate."
Marcus bowed his head. "Yes, sir."
When the door closed behind him, Trevor remained alone with the restored log.
He read it again, from the beginning.
Vanessa: I don't feel well.
Trevor: I'm coming.
Dorothy: missed.
Dorothy: missed.
Dorothy: missed.
Vanessa: answered.
Dorothy: missed.
Dorothy: missed.
Dorothy: missed.
Dorothy: missed.
Dorothy: missed.
Dorothy: missed.
The sequence became a story with no mercy in it.
A woman calling from somewhere he should have been. A man sitting beside the wrong fear. Another woman, perhaps, watching the phone light up and making a choice that would echo for years.
Trevor did not yet know what happened to Dorothy that night.
Not fully.
But suspicion had begun to take shape, and it was so terrible that some instinctive part of him tried to reject it before thought made it solid.
He would rather discover almost anything else.
An illness. An accident. A panic attack.
A humiliation she had hidden. Anything but the reason the word obstetrics kept returning like a bell tolling from a room he had locked himself out of.
His phone vibrated.
For one breath, he thought it might be Dorothy, and the foolish hope of that nearly sickened him.
It was Marcus.
A file attachment appeared.
Trevor opened it.
The screen filled with the table he had already seen, but now the missing entries were expanded with carrier verification, device activity markers, and the contact name assigned in his phone at the time.
Dorothy Raymond.
Nine times.
The restored call log showed Dorothy called him nine times.