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Not even saying hello, I walked blindly down the stairs. “The police have just left. I didn’t know about a storage place, Eva never mentioned it, but I’m just leaving to go there now.”
“Good. I’ll meet you there.”
The whole way, my mind was torn into so many directions, and my focus was in the wind. How I didn’t crash, I don’t know, but my mood was even worse by the time I got there.
Seeing Harry standing next to a door with 32 on the front, I shoved my hands in my pockets and stared at it, wondering what was on the other side. Knowing Connie was in prison, it could be all of her stuff. Then again, maybe Eva kept things in it that she didn’t want to get rid of but also didn’t want to have in her house. People did that.
A man I’d never met before walked forward to where the lock was and opened it with a zip tie— a freaking zip tie—and then stood back for us after he pushed the door open.
Looking around us, I frowned. “Isn’t there a manager for this facility?”
“Gave him two hundred to look the other way,” Harry shrugged. “He also showed me the paperwork for the place. She started renting it two months after Connie was sentenced and pays it every month on the same day.” He turned and moved through the door, hitting the button for the light. “The guy said she doesn’t come very often, but she was here yesterday and only spent about twenty minutes in it before she left.”
Following him inside, I looked around. I’d half expected there to be piles of money around the place, maybe even some safes or whatever other shit was associated with thieves. The reality was underwhelming.
Couches, furniture, and boxes with the names of rooms or items written on them were piled neatly around the space.
Walking over to the dining table placed in the middle of the room, I rubbed my finger over the grooves in the top of it, an image of a young Eva and her siblings making those marks as they did their homework on it in my mind.
“What are we looking for?”
“Files, papers, banking records, random numbers,” Harry reeled off as he squatted in front of a box and lifted one of the flaps on the top of it to peer inside. “Boxes can hide folded pieces of paper, so can pockets.”
Turning in a circle, I stopped on some boxes near me, the word ‘papers’ catching my eye. Dragging it over to one of the chairs, I began going through it, skim reading each page inside until my eyes began to blur and my headache reached the stage of morphing into a migraine.
On the last paper, I found something that made me frown. “Hey, says here Connie got one hundred grand from Roy Green the day after she was arrested. He transferred it directly into her account from one that was under the name of Midland Stage, but the reference says R Green.”
Passing it to Harry, I squatted down and began putting the papers back into the box when there was a loud gasp from the front door, and I looked up to see Eva staring at us with a baseball bat in her hand. Seeing me, she relaxed for a moment but then tensed back up again.
“Joshua, wha-what are you doing here?”
Beside me, Harry watched her, his eyes taking in everything as he scanned her from head to toe, the financial statement still firmly in his hand.
Pushing my fingers through my hair, I tried to come up with an excuse that would be plausible, but I just couldn’t think of anything.
I’d just opened my mouth to speak when Harry did it for me. “You’re Connie Ray’s daughter?” Moving her eyes to him, Eva nodded. “My uncle was one of your mom’s victims, James Owens.”
She flinched as he said the word ‘victim,’ but other than that, her expression had become so guarded she wasn’t giving anything else away. “Your mom and Roy took twenty million dollars from him, and we’re here to find where she hid it.”
“Well, Joshua could have just asked me about it instead of doing this. Mom has no money in her accounts, and the little that she did have went toward paying her legal bills at the time.” She smiled, but it was forced. “In the interest of being transparent to a relative of one of the victims, the rent we get on her house goes into an account, and I use it to pay for repairs and taxes on the property.”
“That’s not exactly true,” Harry volleyed back, his voice dry as he held up the bank statement. “Says here, Roy sent her one hundred thousand dollars the day after she went to prison.”
Eva frowned. “He can’t have. I have access online to her bank account, and there’s definitely not that amount of money in it.”
Slowly, he moved toward her, the piece of paper held out. “See for yourself.”
Like it was a rattlesnake, she recoiled but then took it from him and skimmed the page. “I- how? She doesn’t even use this bank?”
Shrugging, he held his hand out for the paper. “I’ll send you a copy of it if you’d like. That way, when you next go and have another mother-daughter day at the prison, you guys can discuss it while you braid each other’s hair and discuss who else you’re going to fuck over.”
Her swift intake of air was audible across the room, and I was moving before I even realized, grabbing Harry’s shoulder, and pushing him away from her.
“There’s no need to talk to her like that, man.”
“Use your brain, Joshua, not your dick. Even if she didn’t know about it before, she knew about it when she brought all this shit here. How else would a statement dated after Connie was incarcerated get in a box of her shit?” Harry clipped, stepping into me. “She’s lying out of her ass.”
Grinding my teeth together, I stared him down, unwilling to open my mouth in case I dug a deeper hole with either of them. He had a point, but I knew her, and there was no way Eva was involved with this or would help her mom with the fucked up shit she’d done.
