Chapter 6 - Forty-Seven Missing Seconds
Samuel took one step backward.
The detective beside him noticed.
So did I.
"Nobody leaves," I said.
Samuel stared at the recorder.
"Richard, you know me."
"I knew my fiancee too."
Claire pulled Noah behind her.
Martin moved between Samuel and the doorway, not aggressively, just enough to make the point.
Samuel raised both hands.
"Margaret came to me before she died. She was worried about irregularities inside the company."
"Why did she say you knew why?"
"Because she asked me to investigate."
"And you never told me?"
His eyes hardened.
"Your wife had just died in a car crash. You were barely eating. She had accused three senior executives without proof. I thought I was protecting you from one more thing you could not fix."
I moved closer.
"Name the executives."
He named them.
Two had retired.
One had died.
Convenient.
The detective paused the recorder.
"We need a forensic copy. Nobody should keep playing the original."
Martin nodded.
Within an hour, a digital forensics technician from the county lab arrived with equipment. He copied the recorder's storage while we sat in the breakfast room under the eyes of two detectives.
Noah slept curled against Claire.
Samuel drank water but did not touch the sandwich Tom placed in front of him.
I watched his hands.
They were steady.
Mine were not.
The technician returned with a laptop.
"There is an edit in the recording."
Claire looked up.
"What kind?"
"Forty-seven point two seconds were removed. Not corrupted. Removed."
Samuel leaned forward.
"Can you recover it?"
"Maybe fragments."
I looked at him.
He noticed.
"What?"
"You knew exactly when Margaret recorded that message."
"No, I did not."
"When the tape played, before anyone gave a date, you said she came to you before she died."
"Because that is when she came to me."
"Which night?"
He exhaled through his nose.
"October seventeenth."
The technician glanced up.
"There is no timestamp in the visible file."
Samuel's chair creaked beneath him.
"She called me that evening. I remember because it was two days before the board retreat."
Martin's phone vibrated.
He looked at the screen, then held it toward me.
An email from Helen.
SUBJECT: URGENT - FOUND SECOND ADMIN PATH.
I opened it.
A legacy executive credential had been used repeatedly to approve the duplicate device.
The credential belonged to the Office of Corporate Strategy.
Samuel had run that office until three years ago.
I did not show him yet.
The technician tapped his headphones.
"I recovered something. Very short."
Claire sat upright.
He connected the laptop to a speaker.
Margaret's voice emerged through a layer of digital noise.
"...you introduced her to Richard..."
Then a scrape.
The clip ended.
Samuel frowned.
"That makes no sense."
He was right.
Vanessa had entered my life eighteen months after Margaret died.
I looked at the technician.
"Play it again."
He did.
Margaret's broken voice filled the room.
"You introduced her to Richard..."
Not Vanessa.
Another woman.
May you like
One Samuel had introduced to me before Margaret died.
