A guilty woman, they had argued, would have every reason to make that phone disappear, because it might contain records of the very conflict that had driven her to murder.

The phone’s disappearance, they said, was not evidence of anyone else’s involvement; it was evidence of Elena’s cunning.

And the jury had accepted that, as juries do, because it fit the story they had already been given.

But there had always been another possible reading of the missing phone, one the defense had raised and been unable to prove: that the phone was missing because the real killer had taken it, precisely because it contained something the killer needed to hide.

If Vance’s phone held records of business dealings, of money, of the kinds of private arrangements that powerful men keep off the books, then the phone was not the loose end of Elena’s crime.