Dirty Rotten Scoundrel by Liliana Hart Page B

Maybe the corpse offered them a better deal.”
    “Jesus, Jack,” I said, rolling my eyes.
    He pulled the money out and set it on the table. “An eve n two million dollars.” He pulled one of the bills out and held it up to the light. “And it’s real as far as I can tell, or the best counterfeit I’ve ever come across. A nice nest egg in case of an emergency. How many accounts did the FBI seize when they started the investigation into your parents?”
    “There were the regular accounts at the local bank, both personal and business. They had a couple of savings accounts as well, a retirement account, and a brokerage account. All of the money in them was normal for people of their age , careers, and income. Then they had the four offshore accounts, each under different aliases. The smallest was just over a million dollars. The largest had just under sixteen million. The FBI wasn’t really forthcoming with information after that. I don’t know if they ever found out where the money came from. If they did, they didn’t share that news with me.”
    “So another two million in cash just to be safe. Your parents were planners. They’d have an escape if things started to go to shit—money, IDs, safehouses.”
    I stared down at the money, knowing if Jack could see my face he’d be able to tell what I was thinking. My parents had had a contingency plan in place. They’d faked their death by driving their car over a cliff and staged it to look like a lovers’ quarrel turned suicide. They’d planted the scenes nicely. Arguing loudly at the restaurant where they’d had dinner over a man who’d shown too much attention to my mother—a man she’d supposedly acted too familiar with.
    There’d been other fights and a shoving match that had garnered attention from the local police. They’d had too much to drink and had gotten in the little two-seater convertible my dad had rebuilt, and then they’d sped down the narrow two-lane road up the side of the mountain, swerving to avoid cars head on.
    There had been witnesses that had seen them drive over the side of the mountain. They saw the car swerve out of control and they all said there’d been no sign that the brakes had been used. The cops were quick to label it a double suicide after the way my parents had set the stage. They didn’t investigate much at all. And the bodies they’d recovered from the scene had been beyond recognition. Only dental records had confirmed their deaths, and obviously that had been as big a lie as the rest of it.
    “I’ll start on the next one while you deal with that,” I said. I sliced into the third box and wasn’t surprised to see passports, cell phones, and driver’s licenses under multiple names. “Guess you were right about the planning.”
    I was almost on autopilot now, slicing and dumping the contents, scanning through them quickly while my heart raced inside my chest. This is what my father had come back for. Money and fake IDs so he could slip through the cracks. He hadn’t come back for me. To tell me it had all been a big misunderstanding. That I had the wrong idea about the kind of people he and my mother had been.
    Jack’s hand squeezed my shoulder and I dropped my head down, bracing my hands against the table.
    “It doesn’t get any easier,” I said. “Every time I think I’ve put it behind me I see the proof of what they were. For a long time after the FBI came to question me I lived in a state of denial , even though they had irrefutable proof. I couldn’t believe that all of that had happened right under my nose. That my own parents had lied to me and betrayed me.”
    “It should n’t make you feel guilty that you love them. They’re your parents, Jaye. You want them to be good and honest and kind. And it doesn’t make you less that you still have hope for that somewhere inside you. Their job was to love and protect you. It’s not your shame but theirs that they couldn’t manage to do it.”
    As