Chapter 7 - The Room She Never Told Me About
The motel still existed off Interstate 55, forty minutes from our old Joliet warehouse.
Room 214 had been renovated twice, but the owner kept archived registration logs for insurance reasons.
Evelyn had rented it under her maiden name on the afternoon she died.
I stared at the copy of the registration card.
"She told me she was meeting a museum donor that day."
Rachel asked, "How did she die?"
I hated the question.
"Car crash. Rain. She lost control on Lakeshore Drive."
June said nothing.
The motel owner remembered very little, but he found a storage receipt stapled to the old guest record. Evelyn had rented a small locker at a bus terminal nearby.
The locker company had gone out of business.
Its property had been transferred to a private storage warehouse.
By evening, we were standing in front of a rusted metal unit while a manager cut off a replacement lock.
Inside were two boxes.
One contained copies of Caleb's payroll documents.
The other contained letters in Evelyn's handwriting.
I recognized it immediately.
Marcus,
If you're reading this, then I waited too long to tell you.
My hands shook.
She wrote that she had discovered Victor and Stephen using domestic payroll and labor vendors to create cash pools. Some of the money covered bribes. Some funded off-book freight contracts. She feared Victor had started using my reputation to scare employees into silence.
She had planned to confront me after gathering proof.
Then came the paragraph that broke me.
You trust Victor because he stayed when your father died and everyone else ran. That loyalty is real, but it is not clean. He believes protecting the Blackwell name gives him permission to become worse than our enemies.
The final letter was unfinished.
A sound came from outside the unit.
Metal scraped concrete.
Rachel turned.
The warehouse lights went out.
June whispered, "Marcus."
A vehicle engine started nearby.
Then flames climbed the far wall.
Someone had poured accelerant along the aisle.
"Move!" I shouted.
Smoke filled the corridor. Rachel grabbed one box. I took the other. June stumbled, coughing.
A burning shelf collapsed behind us.
We reached the side exit and found it chained from the outside.
June looked at me through the smoke.
"They locked us in."
May you like
Then my phone rang.
Victor's name lit the screen.
