Page 39 of Out of Control

I moved on to the second email containing relevant surveillance videos from outside of the Morelli law offices.

Nobody was monitoring the van in person after its initial setup; it acted as a beacon, a place where the nearby cameras could transmit their videos, the footage collected daily and monitored by someone on our task force for anything that could be of use. This was the email I’d been waiting for.

I popped open the video attachment, seeing the feed from the camera set up to peer into the glass front of Morelli & Morelli, Attorneys at Law. And who should I see entering, but Athena fucking Kane.

I checked the timestamp: it was Wednesday morning, right before I saw her in the neighborhood. That liarwasin the area for a damn good reason: fucking us all over. I pressed play, wanting to memorize every detail for when I threw my clear-cut evidence back in her face. I watched her shake hands with Carlo Morelli, was greeted more stiffly by Angelo, and the three of them headed into a back room.

The video ended abruptly, and I quickly clicked to the next one, time-stamped forty-two minutes later. Athena exited the back room with the men, accepting a very European goodbye from Carlo with a kiss on each cheek, and a thoroughly American harassment of a pinch on the behind. After seeing her interaction with Lombardi I expected her to deck him, but she just gave him a playful smack on the shoulder before giving a final wave and walking out.

My mouth dropped open in shock.

Was Athena fucking Carlo Morelli, too? If not, why else was she there? With both men. She was in the back with them for almost an hour. What the hell was going on in there? Why did she lie to meoverandoverandoveragain? This betrayal hurt in a different way, but I could do something about this one. I wouldn’t let this one go. Not this time.

I couldn’t answer all my questions, but I knew someone who could. And shewasgoing to answer them this time. From an interrogation room if need be.

sixteen

Athena

It was way too early in the day to crawl back in bed and sleep, so after I got dressed in some comfort clothes of shorts and a tank I decided to get some more things taken care of around the house.

I’d been trying to get one big project done each week and one little project each day since I’d come to town a couple weeks ago. I hadn’t decided if I was going to sell the house or keep it to rent out. Hell, I’d even been floating the possibility of moving back home and living in the house myself, but at this point I didn’t want to be in the same state as Lucas Blake, nevertheless the same city.

No, I was going back to Seattle once this mess was over, but I still needed to make improvements to the house for future buyers or tenants, whichever way I decided to go.

I found a screwdriver and tightened the loose knobs on the kitchen cabinets. I got out a stepstool and cleared the cobwebs, then got down on my hands and knees to scrub the baseboards.Mom understandably let a lot of the cleaning slide when she was sick but that meant there was a lot of dust and grime to deal with along with everything else.

I made my way back up to the attic. I began tackling one box tucked away up there at a time, but all that halted when I found information Mom never wanted me to see—information she was squirreling away for a rainy day, but died before that could happen.

Her death certificate said she died of a blot clot in her lungs that developed due to her drug regimen from the cancer, but the truth was a lot more grisly. Her doctors couldn’t treat the blood clot they detected because an anti-coagulant would cause her brain to bleed out because, well, she had a subdural hematoma in her head from an assault.

But the assault and resulting brain bleed wasn’t her cause of death, the blood clot was, so her death couldn’t be investigated as a murder. And a frail woman with cancer could have just as easily had a fall that caused her head injury. With no witnesses, what was the proof she was ever attacked?

The proof was in the box Margaret Keenan had hidden in her attic.

I wiped the tears that were forming before they could fall, then brought the whole box back downstairs. The job at the Morelli law office was my last lead; I needed to reread all the information Mom collected to prepare me for the second interview. I didn’t know how much alone time I might have at any point in time, and I needed to know instantly if something I got my hands on would be useful or correlate with the strands of evidence I already had.

My mom was an accountant, working for Hirsch & Martin Accounting for thirty-five years. She would often accept work contracted out from other companies because she cosigned on my student loans and was determined to help me pay them off. They were almost paid off already—one of the perks of working in high-powered criminal defense—but she wanted to contribute, wanted to work her ass off when she should have been taking it easy, even before her fatal diagnosis.

The regular (crooked) accountant for Carlo and Angelo Morelli got into a car accident, right during prime tax season. He delegated the work out to someone he trusted—ironic, since he trusted someone to be untrustworthy—who over-committed and got behind in his other work at the firm, had a mental breakdown in the office, and was fired and escorted out by security.

Mom was one of the few people with enough time in her schedule to accept outside commitments, and she had the terrible luck of being handed the Morelli account.

I sighed while I navigated my way carefully down the attic ladder, imagining the deep frown line between her eyebrows that must have appeared when she began examining the accounts. My mother, the good-hearted, strong-willed person that she was, documentedeverything.

Her spidey senses tingling, she logged every phone call she made to the Morelli office, asking for receipts for the ridiculous amounts that were claimed thus far in their accounting software.

Why would such a small law firm need to buy $7500 worth of printer toner at one time? She saw they received a consultfee for $6,250 on June 14th, so could they tell her who they were consulting with? It looked like their assets increased by $150,000 in the third quarter, but what was added to the portfolio to come up with that number?

Oh, Carlo Morelli had a perfectly reasonable explanation each time, also noted in her files. Every answer was fine in and of itself, but together those answers were contradictory. Nothing made sense when you added it together.

I made it down the stairs and into the living room. Placing the box on the coffee table, I sat in front of it on the couch then began the tedious process of sorting out all the paperwork, bringing one pile at a time to my whiteboard displays. I grabbed a handful of magnets from the little box sitting on the mantle and got to work putting all of Mom’s hard work out for everyone else to see.

I flipped the middle board featuring my timeline around to the blank backside. I’d already labeled it “Trail of Evidence” in big letters across the top, but I was waiting for the right moment to put everything up.

My mom was careful, but maybe a little too cautious. If she’d let anyone know what she was doing—if she hadn’t hidden all the paperwork—then maybe someone in charge would have begun investigating her death sooner. But then again, maybe if she’d had everything in the open all the evidence would have disappeared at the same time she had her “fall”.

I shook my head. What ifs didn’t help anything.

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