and photo albums. I’d purposefully avoided telling Wilson about them, figuring I’d ship them off to Becky and at least some small good would come from all of this. Now that the cops had the Topanga property in their sights, I guessed it would be another twelve years before any of Sharon’s things could be claimed. I stared down into the drawer, sizing things up. Then I ducked out into a supply room and returned with three cardboard file boxes and some packing tape. The pictures could go in one and I could cut the others to fit around the chest. I had to do something while I waited for the all clear from Wilson.
I stacked the photo albums on the edge of the desk and lifted the chest out of the drawer. Becky had said it was a family heirloom and it looked it. I crouched down and tugged at the heavy brass lock. When I pulled down on it, it was solid. But I noticed the screws around the hasp were loose and, when I pulled directly out, I could see them separating from the wood. I didn’t want to damage the box, but curiosity got the better of me. Becky hadn’t seen it in a dozen years, she wouldn’t know the difference. I pulled a little harder and the screws popped loose, leaving the brass lock and hasp in my hand as I fell back on my ass.
“Shit,” I muttered, staring dumbly at the lock dangling from my fingers. I guessed the chest might be older than I thought. But since it was open I reached out and cupped the brass handle on the lid, throwing it up and back. The chest flew open, the lid catching on brass chains just before folding all the way over, leaving me to stare foolishly inside. The box was filled with crisp and tightly packed hundred dollar bills.
Almost instinctively, I crawled over to the door, locked it, and leaned against it gawking at the money. Now it made a little more sense. Someone did go back into Steele’s house after the murder. Someone was trying to find something, and that same someone still was. I crawled back over to the chest and ran my fingers across the surface of the bills. How much was it? Enough to kill Ed Snyder over, that was for damned sure. Enough to kill me too.
It was simply unbelievable, unreal. I emptied the box slowly. The bills were bound in stacks of a hundred, crisp and new and a half-inch thick. I piled them in short stacks of ten. Five-inch stacks of hundred dollar bills: one hundred-thousand dollars each. I lined up the stacks across the top of my desk, one, two, three, four, all along the desk. They just kept coming, one after another.
There were so many that I forgot what I was handling until I stood back to see it all. When I finished, I had fifty little stacks. I surveyed the rows and columns of money I’d arranged with pride. I’d managed to fit them all neatly on the top of the desk. Fifty little stacks, a thousand bills per stack: five million dollars in cash.
***
It was late in the day and I was still sitting in my office waiting for Detective Wilson to call. I had driven myself mad with fear, pacing around the office, asking myself what I should do. I was terrified to even leave the room. I thought of Snyder’s last words to me as he leaned across the seat of his car: We’re gonna blow this thing wide open. Or maybe it would blow us wide open.
I’d gathered the cash into a pile on the desk and was unsure what to do with it. At first I placed it in one of the cardboard boxes I’d brought in for shipping, but that didn’t even hold the half of it, there was too much, so I put the rest back in the chest. My movements were frantic, pointless. What I really wanted was for the money to go away. So I put the lid on the box and closed the chest. Problem solved.
I collapsed in my chair and tried to think logically. Maybe I could just mail it to Becky the way it was. If they caught me I could claim I never opened it, claim ignorance. But she was rich. She didn’t need the money. It seemed like a waste to send it to her.