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“That’s right.”
“Any last name to go with that?”
“Sorry, no,” I said. “My brother told me a different version of how he met Phil though. He told me that…uh… Phil sold pot and that’s how they met.”
“Your brother used to buy pot from Phil?” Officer Manolo asked.
“Yes,” I said, realizing that I’d just outed my brother.
I felt like a complete idiot, but the officer seemed calm and unhurried. “Where is your brother?” he asked.
“I… I don’t know,” I replied.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Yesterday morning,” I replied.
“Does he have a contact number?”
“Yes,” I said.
After I had given him Brent’s contact number, he thanked me for talking to him and left. The moment he was gone, I raced through the apartment as alarm bells went off in my head. I had ignored my instincts this whole time in favor of what Brent, my so-called brother, had told me. It was time to stop listening to what I was being told and start listening to what my gut was telling me.
I looked through every nook and cranny of the apartment and that was when I remembered the locked closet in Brent’s room. There had to be something in there that he was hiding, right? His room was never locked, so I walked in and looked around. I went straight for the closet, but as I expected, it was firmly sealed off. There was a tiny lock, but no key in sight.
I tried to pull it open, but the lock held. I decided not to resort to breaking it open just in case there was nothing insi
de. That would be a tough one to try and explain to Brent in any case. So I found a hairpin and tried to jimmy the lock. I had to watch a couple of tutorials on YouTube, but after almost forty minutes of trying, I finally got it right and the closet door clicked open.
With a deep breath, I pulled the door open and looked inside. It was a mess of clothes and shoes and old, broken things that Brent should have thrown out a long time ago. It just looked like a bunch of forgotten stuff that he’d thrown in there when he was lazy.
I rifled through everything, but nothing out of the ordinary jumped out at me. I was starting to feel really silly about my suspicions when suddenly I noticed a little latch that seemed to be built in to the wall. Frowning, I pushed aside everything surrounding it. I realized that it wasn’t built into the wall. It looked almost like a makeshift safe—except that it was a tiny chest that looked like a singular cupboard. I pulled the latch and it opened out slowly, but I couldn’t see what was on the inside.
Unwilling to let it go, now that I had found something, I pulled harder and put my hand inside. There didn’t seem to be much there, but I was pretty sure I was holding something bag-like. I pulled it out and realized I was looking at a Ziploc bag that held a white dusk like substance. It took me two seconds and then my heart went cold with realization.
“Oh my God,” I whispered to Brent’s empty apartment.
I put my hand inside and removed every single thing that was held inside. There were three more Ziploc bags with equal quantities of the white powder and a few more with large quantities of pot.
I rushed to the living room and grabbed my phone. I fumbled with it for a moment before I managed to find officer Manolo’s number.
“Hello?”
“Officer Manolo,” I said, with my heart beating hard. “This is Megan.”
“Megan… is everything all right?”
“Um, not exactly,” I stammered. “I… I stumbled across something in my brother’s closet. There was a hidden panel there…”
“What did you find?” Officer Manolo asked, and his tone suggested he already knew what I was about to say.
“Drugs,” I replied shortly.
“Come to the station,” he said. “I’ll meet you there as soon as possible.”
“I… should I bring—“
“Yes,” Officer Manolo replied. “I’ll notify my colleagues.”
