Daniel was interviewed several times. He described the roadside appointment, his hiring, the routing pilot, the discrepancies in the transportation budget, and the confrontation at the archive. He did not present himself as the hero of the case. He spoke about Marcus's route notebooks, Fiona's questions, Meera's financial checks, and Mr. Lawson's careful storage of old records. Whenever investigators asked how he had noticed something, the answer usually included another person who had seen it first.
Victoria spent those first days surrounded by lawyers and board members who spoke about risk in voices carefully stripped of emotion. Several advised her to stay away from the investigation of her father's death, saying that emotional involvement could damage her credibility. She understood their concern, but she refused to allow it to become an excuse for ignoring the question. She asked for an independent review of his final medical records and gave investigators the original voicemail he had left for her.
The message lasted less than a minute. Henry sounded tired, but unmistakably himself. He asked Victoria to come to dinner, mentioned that he had found inconsistencies in some partnership accounts, and said he needed to talk to her before the next board meeting. Near the end, he added, "Don't let anybody hurry you into an answer just because they've already made up their mind."
Victoria listened to it once with an investigator and did not listen again for several weeks. Every word made her remember the call she had not answered. Daniel never told her she should stop feeling guilty. He did remind her that her father had chosen to leave a message because he wanted a conversation, not because he intended to place a lifelong burden on her.
The medical review produced no simple revelation. Henry had an established heart condition, and the available records supported the finding that a cardiac event caused his death. Investigators also examined the hours before he became ill, including a contentious meeting connected to company accounts and inconsistent reports of when staff had first noticed his distress. Some questions remained open. No investigator could honestly tell Victoria that the documents proved Richard had killed her father, and no one expected her to regard the financial betrayal as unrelated to the stress surrounding his last days.
"So we may never know everything," she said after receiving the preliminary report.
"You may not," Daniel answered.
She stared at him. "I hate that answer."
"I would, too."
For the first time, she began separating two forms of justice she had allowed to become tangled. One concerned the misuse of company money and the exploitation of her father's name after his death. The other concerned the private question of whether someone had knowingly contributed to his final crisis. She could pursue both without pretending one had already proved the other.