Page 34 of Devil's Retribution
“Not too competent, I hope. His hard copies may help narrow down his location, but I haven’t run across any addresses. Or criminal confessions.”
I looked up at him with a slight frown. He was one to talk about crime. “I would have thought it was actually pretty rare for someone to leave evidence like that lying around, just for the taking. Right now, I wish it wasn’t.”
He nodded, then got up and walked around the desk, running his hands underneath its top surface and checking the back. “Let’s see if he hid it someplace.”
I nodded and started taking out the drawers, searching for false bottoms or hidey holes, I looked between his blotter and his desk, and inside his desk organizer, but found nothing. We rummaged around for another five minutes like that, until finally Viktor said, “Aha!”
He pulled away a section of desk trim that was loose, revealing a small cavity where a thumb drive rested. “I believe this may be what we were looking for,” he said as he held it up.
I smiled with relief. “Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
***
After thirty minutes of scrolling through files, what we had, were records going back so far that some of them were literally scanned copies of paper documents. The dates stretched back to when I had been a child. There were copies of our legal guardianship paperwork, amid a flurry of legal documents that I had to scroll through carefully. “It looks like he was in some kind of legal battle after my parents’ death.”
A frown deepened on my face as I read on. Viktor had gone quiet. After a few more moments of reading, I felt myself go cold.
“Oh God,” I mumbled, my heart beating fast.
“What is it?” He moved in next to me, eyes scanning the screen.
“It says here my parents’ will left everything to me and my sister. Every penny. He contested the will. At length. But they had been very careful about how they worded it, and he fought a long time and lost.”
My throat tightened. My parents’ estate came to over five hundred million dollars in early nineties money. Money that was supposed to be mine and my sister’s.
“Once he lost the suit...” I started clicking through to other documents. “That’s when he started working on the adoptions. Me, my sister, he- he never told us that was our money. He just took it and used it. And he got to because he was our legal guardian.”
My heart hurt as my brain did the math. Viktor saw the look on my face and glanced away, sympathy creeping into his expression.
“He adopted us to get our parents’ money. Then he built his financial empire on that cash.”
I reread everything, trying to come to a different conclusion, but I couldn’t. Uncle Charles had gone after my parents’ cash almost on the day of their deaths. The first of the legal letters had been sent out even before their funeral.
“He doted on you so that you would not suspect,” Viktor said quietly. “He manipulated you, and the whole time...”
“He was robbing us blind.”
Sadness, hurt, confusion... all the appropriate feelings of an innocent woman wronged suddenly melted away in a blast furnace of rage. I pushed away from the keyboard and covered my face with my hands, shaking with the urge to find my uncle myself and beat the crap out of him.
“That vulture. That absolute goddamned vulture.” My eyes were stinging, but I wasn’t worried about shedding tears. The anger made me feel like a blast furnace inside—like any tear that fell would evaporate instantly from the heat of it.
“I thought your uncle was already wealthy when your parents died,” Viktor started, stopping short when I laughed.
“Yeah, yeah, he was. But…” I wiped my eyes impatiently. “Apparently, he didn’t like sharing his own father’s fortunes with his brother. Or his nieces.”
Viktor let out a sigh. I looked up at him again and was surprised to see that he looked relieved. “What is it?” I demanded.
“One of the things I could never figure out was why he stepped in for you and your sister. I knew him as a greedy, evil man first. What he did for you stood out. It didn’t make any sense to me until now. I thought it had to be done out of kindness and love.”
“Guess it’s easy to fake kindness when there’s a half-billion-dollar payout attached,” I said bitterly.
I tried to push on with my reading, but the screen blurred in front of me and all the words on it turned into nonsense. It felt like I was being strangled. First, I lose my parents… then my sister… then my uncle turns out to be… this…
“You need a break.”
I looked up at Viktor in shock. “I can keep going—”
“Of that I have no doubt.” He took my hands and gently but firmly drew me to my feet. “I’ve seen you soldier on through terrible circumstances with poise. But you have been doing too much of that lately, and this particular revelation has to hit home.”