Page 27 of Crash and Burn

Maggie was beyond dog tired, but there wasn’t going to be any sleep. What she’d planned had been snatched away.

The FBI was coming, and they were going to search her house. If Maggie was lucky, they would wait the six hours she requested, but there was no guarantee. If they knew what she had in mind, they would come back sooner.

The search they were intending to do had just pushed Maggie’s agenda forward.

“You need sleep,” Sebastian told her, his warm hands resting on her shoulders and making her want to do what he said.

“I have to document the whole house before they tear it up.”

“Document?”

“Photograph every room. Copy all the papers.”

He frowned at her. “Are they going to take Sabbie’s paperwork?”

Maggie nodded, “And everything they find that might be pertinent. I don’t think I can fight it, it’s a murder investigation—well, actually an ongoing multiple murder investigation. I don’t want to fight it. I want them to have the evidence they need to find this guy—” or both of them, she thought. “But I need copies of those documents for myself.”

Maggie sighed. Aunt Abbie had been horrible at paperwork. This was going to be a mess.

Luckily, she had Sebastian on her side. “Then, point me in the right direction.”

“First, I have to change.” She was not going to rummage through drawers and closets and boxes of old documents in her suit. Sebastian, always on his game, asked where he could start while she was changing.

“We need photos of every room, from many angles. Be sure to get every item on a tabletop or a shelf.”

“Like documenting a house for fire insurance.”

She hadn’t thought of it that way. “Yes!”

“I’ll start in the living room then.”

She emerged a few minutes later, more comfortable in her jeans and t-shirt. She had her hair up and her sneakers on but hadn’t washed off her makeup. It was a little much for rummaging around but she had to get started.

Sebastian finished the living room and they headed up to Abbie’s office together. She had to prioritize in case the FBI came back sooner.

While Maggie had hoped to find neat stacks of paperwork that she could feed through the photocopier, she’d only found a few slim stacks that worked. She let Sebastian carry the box down to the office and copies those. The rest she started photographing.

Between the two of them with their phones, they'd managed to make pretty short work of all the paper inside, and even catch the backside of several things. Abbie's accounting system had been just as terrible as her renter’s documentation—notes written on the backs of receipts and more.

Maggie pulled out a napkin with one line about a rental agreement, a date, and two signatures. “Well, that won’t hold up in court.” She sighed and snapped a photo anyway. The date was old enough that no one was going to come after her for anything, at least.

At least Maggie now had pictures of the box and everything in it.

Sebastian asked, “Do we organize it and put it back in nicely?”

All Maggie could say was, “If they check it, our fingerprints will be on everything. And I'll tell them the truth, that we’d been looking through the house for over a week and checking all the records. She didn't have it organized. I don't see any reason for us to make it neater than she did.”

So the two of them haphazardly shoved the contents back into the box. Maggie thought it looked exactly as it had when she found it, and they put it back where it had been originally—in the back of the closet.

“Did you put it back for a reason?”

Maggie looked around the room. “I’m not trying to mess up evidence. If it's important that it's in here, then we should leave that information for the FBI.”

Just as they confiscated the jewelry box, the Feds were very likely going to confiscate lots of items from her home. She could only hope they didn't stab the furniture and check the stuffing. She didn’t have the funds to replace it.

It was then that Sebastian tried again to convince her to get some sleep.

She shook her head. “The office has other papers, her drawers are full of crap,”That I should have cleaned out before. But when would she have done it? She was renovating and watching Hannah! “And we need to check every room.”

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