Dominic saw the photograph at 9:47 PM.
His office was empty. The floors below had gone dark an hour ago, the building settling into the particular kind of silence that only arrived after the last of the staff had gone—the ventilation, the distant hum of servers, the occasional sound of the elevator moving somewhere between floors. He had been aware of it without paying it much attention. The hours after sunset were when the day's information became easiest to evaluate. No interruptions. No requests for five minutes that always became twenty.
He had been working through the afternoon's remaining reports. Routine material. Financial projections. A meeting summary. Market analyses forwarded by the regional team. He moved through them efficiently, closing each one before opening the next, his attention steady but not engaged in any way that required effort.
Then the notification came through.
