Chapter 6 - The Missing Evidence
The police interview took place three hours later in the quiet sanctuary of my hospital discharge room, filtered through the dull ache of prescribed painkillers and the heavy weight of betrayal. Detective Marcus Vance—no relation to the doctor, though they shared the same unflinching gaze—sat across from me with a worn leather notebook open on his knee. I had already given him a full, unvarnished account of the evening: Grandma Evelyn’s phone call six weeks prior, the discovery of the unauthorized four-hundred-thousand-dollar transfers through Meridian Family Services, Aunt Marlene’s veiled threats in the rose garden, and Kendra’s violent shove at the dessert table. But when Detective Vance asked for the physical documents—the bank statements, corporate filings, authorization logs, and transfer dates that constituted the smoking gun—I had to look down at my hands and utter the most frustrating words an investigator could ever speak: “They’re gone.”
“Gone?” Detective Vance repeated, his pen pausing over the paper. “Mr. Morgan, you’re telling me you carried four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of forensic evidence into a room full of the very people who stole it, and you didn't secure digital backups?” I felt a hot flush of embarrassment rise up my neck. Of course I had digital backups stored securely on an encrypted cloud drive and on my home workstation hard drive. But physical hard copies—the exact signed logs bearing Aunt Marlene’s digital authorization signatures and the corporate registration documents linking Meridian Family Services to her suburban address—had vanished from my jacket pocket during the melee at the dessert table. Someone in that room had acted with chilling efficiency, capitalizing on the chaos of shattered glass and screaming relatives to pick my pocket while I lay gasping for air on the polished floor.
“They took the physical file,” I admitted, my voice raspy and strained. “In the confusion after I fell, someone lifted the Manila envelope from my pocket. It had all the original printouts.” Detective Vance closed his notebook with a soft, decisive snap and leaned back in his metal chair. “Well, Lee, that makes our legal battle significantly more challenging, but not impossible. Without the physical papers, defense attorneys will claim the digital files were altered or fabricated. However, if your grandmother is willing to cooperate and formally testify that she never authorized those withdrawals, subpoenaing the bank records directly will give us everything we need. The question is: where is your grandmother right now, and is she willing to stand up against her own daughter?” I froze. I hadn't seen Grandma Evelyn since the moment the cake was cut. When I asked the nurse who wheeled me out of the ballroom, she had been told that Mrs. Morgan was exhausted and had retired early to her private suite upstairs at Hawthorne House. But given what I now knew about my family's coordinated corruption, I wasn't certain Grandma was sleeping peacefully at all.
