Page 41 of Out of the Shadows
“I just spoke with Beth O’Neill. Poor woman barely slept last night she’s so worried about those boxes. Tess is borrowing Tom’s truck, and we’ll bring them to the office.”
“Don’t tell me you want me down there.” Margo loved the field. She detested going into the office and all the work that was required there.
“No, Tess and I have this, and we might bring in Rita’s interns.”
Aunt Rita, her mom’s younger sister, still ran the law office they’d opened after Margo’s mom left the county attorney’s office. They shared the building with Angelhart Investigations.
“Have you tracked down Vincent Hedge?”
“I started the process. Which is why I called you. The legal secretary for Thornton and Hedge is now working for another law firm. I reached out to her last night, and she left a voicemail for me this morning, saying she would be available at eleven if I wanted to come to her office and talk. You should do that.”
“You speak their language.”
“Would you like to go through the files instead?” her mother asked.
“Send me her name and address,” Margo said.
Margo finished with her mom, then called Luisa.
The youngest Angelhart was born eight years after Margo. While Jack, Tess, Margo, and Nico were born in five years, Luisa came along much later. She was beautiful, brilliant, and stubborn. Her parents had wanted her to go to college—she had above a 4.0 GPA and could have done anything she wanted. Lu, instead, enlisted in the Marines out of high school and was now in college on the GI Bill. Her MOS—Military Occupation Specialty—was computer related, and when she left after six years of service, she had advanced computer security skills. Lu didn’t have to go to college—her skill set was in high demand—but she’d told Margo that she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, and thought a couple years in college would help her make decisions.
Regardless of any uncertainty, Lu was an overachiever who could do anything she put her mind to. It was kind of scary at times.
Margo, however, gloated over the fact that she had beat Lu at the gun range two weeks ago. Friendly-ish competition, Army versus Marines.
Margo arranged for Luisa to relieve her at the Barrett house, then called Jack to give him the info. It felt right working as a team. While Margo wasn’t going to forget about her investigation into the murder of Dr. Devin Klein; she knew in her heart that her dad was innocent. But for now, working with her family gave her peace that she hadn’t expected.
Lu arrived at nine thirty. Margo introduced her to the kids, then left for downtown Phoenix, a forty-minute drive south.
Lorraine Perez was more than happy to talk. Margo suspected that her mom had smoothed the way.
“John and Vincent handled mostly family law issues,” Lorraine explained. “Vincent was divorced, John a widower. They both had two grown children and doted on them.”
“Why did Vincent close the office after John died?”
“He had wanted to retire for a while, and he was only working part-time anyway. John was taking fewer cases—I think some of the family issues were beginning to get to him. Divorce and custody issues are never easy, but John said there was more anger in the last few years, more vindictiveness. It’s one reason he started branching out into contract law—simple things like NDAs and working with corporate lawyers, things like that. But then the NDAs began to irritate him. And Vincent, he was seventy-five I think? Without John, there was no reason to continue. He moved all the active cases to another attorney, and I boxed up the office.”
“Why the storage unit?”
She looked sheepish. “He asked me to take care of cleaning out the office, and I didn’t know what else to do—I’d already taken another job, and I didn’t know what he wanted to save or not. He’d already thrown out and shredded so much, and given away a bunch of furniture and all their law books, so I assumed he wanted to keep what was left.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“I did, but when he didn’t respond, I told him that I’d put the remainder of the furniture and files in a storage unit. I explained that I’d paid for the first month up front with petty cash from the office, but he would need to call with his credit card. He said he would.”
“Where is Vincent? You told my mom he moved out of state.”
“I think he did, but he never got back to me after that email. His daughter lives in Florida, I still have her contact information.”
Lorraine looked it up, wrote the details on a note pad, and handed it to Margo.
“This gives us a place to start,” Margo said as she stood. Then she asked, “Do you know if there was anything other than case files in the boxes?”
“No, I really don’t. I’m sorry. I was in a rush to get out of the office because the landlord had a new tenant, and Vincent wasn’t helping.”
“Thanks for your time,” Margo said and left.
It was a five-minute drive from where Lorraine worked to the Angelhart offices. As soon as Margo walked in, Tess called out from the conference room, “I was just about to call you.”
