Someone had unlocked it remotely. Someone had needed them both in that room. He was not the variable that had been chosen at random. He had been chosen because he was the most disposable variable available, a black man with a mop and a dead wife and a child to protect, someone who could be paid off or frightened off or destroyed, depending on which approach proved necessary.
He sat with that knowledge for a long time in the quiet kitchen. And when he was done sitting with it, he picked up his phone and called Victoria. She answered on the second ring, which told him she hadn’t slept either. He told her what he had put together not as a theory, but as a sequence of events laid end to end with the gaps filled in by the only logic that made them coherent.
Victoria listened without interrupting. When he finished, she said very carefully, “Gerald doesn’t move without authorization. He never has.” Darius said he knew. She said she needed to see what he had.
He told her he didn’t have documents, he had memory and pattern. She said that was more than she currently had access to and asked if he could come to her. He dropped Marcus at school and drove to Victoria’s building thinking about how different this felt from every other time he had come here. No anger, no ultimatum, just two people who had been outmaneuvered by the same hand and were finally standing on the same side of it.
Victoria opened the door herself. She was in a plain white shirt and dark slacks. No jewelry, no armor. There were papers on the dining table, a laptop open, a glass of water with a ring mark beneath it that she hadn’t wiped up, the kind of detail that told Darius more about her current state than anything she could have said.
They sat at the table and went through it together. Victoria pulled up internal communications she had retained on a personal device scheduling records, a series of calendar entries showing Richard Hayes meeting privately with three board members in the six weeks before the gala meetings, not logged in any official company record. Darius laid out the full timeline of what he had heard and when. Then Victoria pulled up one more file, an internal security log from the night of the gala.