Page 124 of False Evidence
Kendall’s head dropped into her hands. “Williams told me I was to let the transactions go through, or my role in getting the charges dropped would be revealed to JT and Lee. I would lose everything. My job. My best friend. Face legal charges.”
She raised her head again. “I’m no dummy. I knew Williams couldn’t implicate me without revealing his part. But he…” She dropped her head again. “Oh god. I can’t believe I’m saying this.Fuck!”
She slammed her fist on the table. “After…after the vial showed up again in my nightstand, I found out where Williams lived and showed up athishouse. With a crowbar.”
“Oh fuck,” Alexandra said on a sharp exhale.
“Yes, I’m stupid. I was so angry and broken. That fucker made me give him a blow job, but he had to be lying about everything. I don’t know what I wanted to happen. He wasn’t home, so I smashed his windows. It was winter, and I was wearing a hat and scarf and gloves. But…”
Alexandra thought she was going to lose it in the pause that followed thebut.
“I cut my arm on a shard of glass. Badly. I fled, but I had to go to the emergency room to get stitches. A week later, I received a police report from an anonymous email address. It listed the evidence collected from the vandalism, which included coat fibers and blood. DNA would be run when a suspect was identified.”
Again, she faced the camera. “I fucked myself.”
She took a deep breath and continued, “And so I let the money flow. I told myself actively stealing from the company and letting embezzling that had been going on for years to continue were two different things. Most days, I believed it. Some of the projects ended, and the amount of money being stolen dwindled. Then, about five years ago, I received new instructions. Anonymously this time. I was told to phase out the remaining payments. I was so thrilled! My nightmare was ending.”
She huffed out a breath. Then she dropped back in her seat, took off her shoes, and dropped one, waited a moment, then slammed the second shoe on the coffee table. “That, of course, is the other shoe dropping. My next instruction was to do two cost estimates on some of my new proposals—one for T&D with slightly inflated numbers. Nothing noticeable, butjust enough, and the other more accurate with specific specs. It took me months to figure out who I was working for—it usually takes months for projects to be awarded. A pattern emerged. Not all the projects I did two estimates for went to the same company if T&D didn’t win, but the majority went to one company.”
“Moss & Delano Architects and Engineers,” JT said at the same time Kendall did.
Alexandra gripped his hand. There was still a chance Calvin Moss wasn’t complicit and JT could move forward with the sale.
Kendall looked wryly at the camera. “Of course, I dug into MDAE and learned that Russ was working for them. Buried under sixteen layers of subcontracts so JT would never know. It was well known among A&E firms that JT wouldn’t hire any sub that employed Russ. So Russ had to hide. He worked for a bunch of companies that had subcontracts with T&D, but his part was always small and hidden. With MDAE, his role wasn’t small, but it was deeply hidden.
“Honestly, it was a relief when I was told MDAE was buying T&D. I couldn’t be blackmailed anymore. I would befree. I was fairly certain Russ would move out of the woodwork and into the official executive branch, butIwouldn’t need to hide that from my employer. No more double estimates. No more nightmares. Hell, I’d learned that Officer Williams had moved to Maryland State Police a few years ago. We no longer lived in the same town or even the same county.
“I was going to be free.” She picked up a shoe and studied it and set it down. “It wasn’t so much a shoe drop as a wakeup call. I ended things with Brent for good at the same time I was forced to do double estimates. I was no longer able to fool myself into thinking he was ignorant of what was going on. I mean, I stillwantedto believe he was ignorant, but I was done lying to myself. Honestly, I’ve felt nothing but hate for him for the last five years. If we stood at a crosswalk and a bus was coming, I don’t think I’d hesitate to push him in its path. I mean, I might get away with it.
“I never left work at the same time he did. Too much temptation. Think of the possibilities of a crowded Metro station…” Her voice sounded dreamy, then she sighed. “For the last eighteen months, I’ve been seeing someone new. Not an engineer. He doesn’t work for Talon & Drake. He’s an event photographer and the nicest guy.” She nodded to the camera. “Mark Kaufman. He gave me the camera that’s recording this and taught me how to use it. It’s got different lenses. Zooms and stuff, which has come in handy these last few weeks. So now we’re going to do a little slide show. I’m going to splice in the photos into the video. I’m not great at this, so bear with me.”
The screen went black, but Kendall kept talking. “Pausing for dramatic effect, but let me set the scene. A month ago, my boyfriend and I met for lunch in Bethesda because it was one of my in-office days. We were sitting in the front of the restaurant near the window, and he’d just given me a new zoom lens, which I was testing out. I raised the viewer window to my eye—I really prefer that to the screen—and zoomed in to a restaurant across the street. I nearly dropped the camera at what I saw.”
The screen flashed, and an image appeared. There, in crystal-clear HD, was a plain-clothed Officer Corey Williams seated across from Calvin Moss.
Alexandra slapped a hand over her mouth. Around the table, others gasped and cursed.
“Now, like me, you might be wondering why my worst fucking nightmare is having lunch with my very near future boss. Lucky for us, the information that a tech savvy person can find on the internet is a lot more detailed than it was sixteen years ago, when I first started searching for information on Williams. It’s even better than it was five years ago, the last time I checked. The other difference between then and now is I added Moss to the searches.”
The screen changed to show a graphic with a family tree. “As you can see, they’re second cousins.”
JT shot to his feet. “Goddammit.”
Kendall continued speaking from the grave. “Once I had that, the pieces came together. I still don’t know how Williams and his partner ended up taking the initial 9-1-1 call, but I’m guessing they were waiting in the wings after Brent and Russ showed up to threaten Alex.
“Remember, everyone was scrambling because Russ royally fucked up and was caught drugging Alex’s drink. There was video of him trying to convince her to take a sip—that didn’t go missing, by the way, just the vial and glass. Anyway, they’re in a panic. Russ shows it by assaulting Alex. Brent knows he fucked up for letting him in the apartment. They probably just planned to scare her. I’m guessing Brent took the vial from the nightstand while they were there and replaced it on New Years. Williams used the missing vial to terrify me. I don’t know if Brent knew what he made me do. I think Williams made his own rules.
“I was a puppet, all my strings being pulled by different men. One who claimed to love me. One who raped me. One who manipulated me into providing him with a victim for a scheme I’m only just beginning to understand, and one who pretended to be a voice of wisdom but hinted at how useful I’d be as a spy as long as Alex was with JT. I was thoroughly trapped. But now…now that the last pieces of the jigsaw have come together, I look at the picture and I have no fucking proof.”
She shook her head. “Nothing but a stupid vial that could contain anything and doesn’t connect to Russ at all. Just me and Brent.”
She held up her arm to show the scar that she’d told Alexandra she’d gotten when she slipped on icy steps outside their apartment building and was cut by a jagged piece of metal on the old iron railing. “The evidence only implicatesme. I’m the one who kept the money flowing to Russ’s slush account. I’m the one who gave Calvin the specs to win the projects. I’m the one who was on my knees.
“The only way for me to win is to kill the deal. And so I will. But if I fail because Moss and Williams figure out what I’m doing, well, I’m going to document what Idoknow. Proof or not, the truth matters. I’m doing this for Alex. For Gemma. I love you both. Gemma, I hope I get to meet you. I’m going to do my best to compile everything and hand it to Alex on Saturday. The files on this disk include everything I’ve gathered so far. I’ll keep updating until I give this to the police, stop the sale, or am found out and silenced.”
The video ended without fanfare, but the next video was an addendum. “Oh! I broke up with Mark because I didn’t want to drag him down with me if this got ugly. And I figured I might have to have sex with Brent to get him to talk and couldn’t bear the idea of cheating on Mark. Which I did. You have the recording of the fun conversation I had with Brent after sex saved to the hard drive along with my diary.
“Mark doesn’t know anything, but…I really hope he can learn why I did what I did. He was the best thing to happen to me in a long time and for the first time, I think I get how Alex felt about JT when he wasn’t being a raging ass. Here is his website. Tell him I loved him.”