Officers walking past, doors opening and closing. Nothing unusual. Then she found it. Timestamped 2 days before Alice's suspension. The footage showed Osmar standing in her doorway speaking to someone just out of frame.
Dove turned up the volume, leaning closer to the screen. The evidence log discrepancy needs to point back to Vincent directly. Osmar's voice said, low but perfectly clear on the recording. I don't care how you get her signature close enough. Just make sure it holds up long enough to justify opening a review.
A second voice answered, muffled but recognizable. Miller, it'll hold, Miller said. Corbin already worked out the details. Good, Osmar said. The moment this review opens, I suspend her.
That buys us time to bury whatever else she's been digging up. Dove felt her stomach drop. She sat frozen for a moment, staring at the screen, listening to the recording loop back to the beginning automatically. She played it again just to be sure she hadn't imagined it. She hadn't.
Osmar hadn't just failed to investigate the forged signature properly. She had ordered it. She had told Miller exactly what she needed the fabricated evidence to accomplish and then used it exactly the way she'd planned, suspending Alice the moment the review opened. Dove copied the footage onto a secure drive with shaking hands, checking twice to make sure the file transferred completely before pulling it from the system. She logged out of the terminal, tucked the drive into her jacket pocket, and left the records room like she'd never been there at all.
She drove straight to Alice's house, the same way she had the night she brought over Gordon's old phone. Alice opened the door before Dove even reached the porch, like she'd been waiting by the window. "Tell me you found something," Alice said. Dove held up the drive. "Everything. " They sat together at Alice's kitchen table, the laptop open between them, and Dove played the footage from the beginning.
Alice watched in silence, her face hardening with every word that came out of Osmar's mouth on the recording. When it finished, Alice sat back slowly, staring at the frozen image of Osmar's doorway on the screen. She said it herself, Alice said quietly. Out loud on camera she forgot was even running. She probably never thought anyone would actually pull hallway footage outside her own office.
Dove said. She's been protecting herself for so long. I don't think it occurred to her that the system you built would end up catching her, too. Alice let out a slow breath, feeling the full weight of everything come together at once. Gordon's unedited video from 6 years ago.
Fenwick's recovered metadata, proving the original coverup. Whitlock's sworn statement about witnessing the assault. And now Osmar's own voice caught on the very cameras Alice had installed, ordering Miller to fabricate evidence and orchestrating Alice's suspension in real time. Four pieces, six years of buried truth, all sitting on the table in front of her, finally complete. "This is everything," Alice said.