The Man in the Service Elevator
Chapter 06 - The Man in the Service Elevator
The leaked medical files contained a clue. One scanned page carried a faint vertical line caused by a damaged copier at St. Matthew’s records office. Gabriel identified the machine and reviewed access logs obtained through Nora’s attorney. The files had been copied by an employee using a temporary badge issued to Richard’s security consultant, Owen Price.
Owen had also entered the medical residence through the service elevator twenty minutes before Nora fell.
Security photographs showed him leaving with a black equipment case. His face was partly hidden, but a distinctive scar crossed his right hand. Gabriel found the same hand reflected in a promotional photograph of Meridian Maternal Technologies.
Owen was not only a security consultant. He was the shell company’s secret operations manager.
Police located his apartment empty. His bank account had been drained, and a one-way ticket to Lisbon had been purchased under another name. Before he could leave, immigration officers detained him at the airport.
Owen denied involvement until investigators showed him the forged digital certificate and the threatening message sent from the executive floor. He then asked for protection.
His statement changed everything.
Richard had created Meridian four years earlier to siphon money from the trust and build a private fund for buying control of Cole Dynamics after the merger. Vanessa discovered the scheme during an internal audit. Instead of reporting it, she joined him. Richard promised to make her chief executive once Ethan’s voting power was weakened.
Nora’s questions threatened both of them.
Owen admitted he had modified the suite camera and copied Nora’s credentials. He also admitted sending the threat, but he claimed he did not know Vanessa intended to hurt Nora. His job was to erase the diagnostic packet after the incident.
He had failed.
The packet had automatically been mirrored to a HavenGrid disaster-recovery server in Iceland. Owen had no access to that server because Richard refused to pay for the premium maintenance account.
Gabriel almost laughed at the irony. Richard had risked lives for millions but had been too cheap to spend nine hundred dollars on the access level needed to erase the final copy.
Recovering the packet required a court order and cooperation from HavenGrid’s European office. It could take days.
Meanwhile, the merger vote was forty-eight hours away.
Richard called an emergency board meeting to remove Ethan for “emotional instability” and appoint Vanessa interim chief executive. If he succeeded, he would control company servers, legal teams, and enough influence to bury the investigation.
Nora realized they could not wait for the video.
They needed Richard and Vanessa to believe the packet had already been recovered.
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The truth had not yet arrived.
But perhaps the fear of truth could make the guilty reveal where they had hidden the rest.
