“The documents your husband hid. Safe deposit boxes, flash drives, papers—anything he might have left behind. And stay away from Keller.”
“I don’t know anything about any documents! You searched my whole apartment, you didn’t find anything.”
The stocky man punched her in the stomach—not hard enough to do serious damage, but enough to knock the wind out of her.
“Don’t play dumb. Mark was a careful guy. He would have left himself an insurance policy.”
Susan doubled over, gasping for breath. The tall one knelt beside her and spoke in a low voice.
“You have 24 hours. Find what we need, or your kids will get hurt. And don’t even think about going to the police. We have people there, too.”
They left her in the alley, melting back into the downtown crowd. Susan made her way to a nearby bench and sat down, her hands shaking uncontrollably. Threatening her children was the last straw. She couldn’t pretend she could handle this alone anymore.
At the urgent care clinic, a young doctor with tired eyes examined her. He diagnosed her with soft tissue bruising and suggested she file a police report. Susan declined, saying she had just fallen.
“You know,” the doctor said as he filled out her chart, “we had a similar case recently. A man who also ‘fell,’ also refused to file a report. It was your husband, about a week before his accident.”
Susan looked up.
“What did you say?”
The doctor glanced around, making sure no one was listening.
“Mark Morrow was brought in with broken ribs. The official story was that he fell down the stairs. But I’ve seen enough assault victims to know the difference.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because Mark was my friend. We were in premed together before he switched to law. He was a good man. He didn’t deserve to end up like that.”
The doctor introduced himself as Andrew Wallace. He told her that Mark had come to see him not just for treatment, but also just to talk. He’d been extremely stressed in his final months, terrified for his family.
“He left something with me for safekeeping,” Andrew said quietly. “He asked me to give it to you if anything happened to him. But only to you, in person.”
He opened a safe in his office and took out a small flash drive.
“Mark said this has everything you need to know about his problems, and that it would help protect you and the kids.”
Susan took the flash drive with trembling hands. For the first time, she felt a glimmer of hope. Andrew suggested she view the contents right there in his office, on a computer that wasn’t connected to the internet.
The drive contained a single video file, shot on a phone. Mark was sitting in the same office where Susan now sat, but he looked exhausted and frightened. The video was dated three days before the accident.
“Susan, if you’re watching this, it means something happened to me,” he began, looking directly into the camera. “I am so sorry for everything. For the lies, for Alina. For dragging our family into this mess.”
He explained how, a year and a half ago, Victor Grant had approached him with a proposal to help with a land deal. He needed Mark to handle the legal paperwork to sell a piece of city-owned land to a private company. On paper, it was all legal, but Mark quickly realized the land was worth ten times the official sale price.
“I refused, but then they brought in Alina and the little girl. They told me she was my daughter. They showed me a fake DNA test. They threatened to tell you, to sue me for child support, to destroy our family.”
Mark explained that he’d had no choice but to agree. His job was to create the legal justification for the deal and find a way to launder the profits. The loan from Grant’s bank was part of that scheme.
“I started collecting evidence of their crimes: documents, recorded conversations, bank statements. It’s all in safe deposit box number 347 at the bank branch on Garden Street. The key is hidden at home, in a secret compartment behind my classic literature collection.”
At the end of the video, Mark named everyone involved. Besides Grant and Keller, the scheme included the deputy mayor, the head of the city planning commission, and several other officials. The total value of the fraud was over five million dollars.
“They’re going to kill me,” Mark finished. “But you’ll have the proof. Take it to the State Attorney General, bypass the local authorities. They have people there, too.”
The video ended. Susan sat in stunned silence, grasping the sheer scale of it all. Her husband wasn’t a traitor. He was a victim of blackmail who had tried to protect his family the only way he knew how.
Andrew placed a hand on her shoulder.
“What are you going to do?”
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