Leo Driscoll bought a crashed 2012 sedan at a county auto auction for $850 to salvage its engine.
The full truth of Julian’s deception twisted my stomach into knots. The pre-dawn light made the garage feel even colder.
“There’s more,” Maya said, her fingers flying across the screen again, pulling up even deeper layers of the decrypted conversation. “He wasn’t just planning the frame. He was planning the escape.”
More messages flashed on the screen, detailing Julian’s meticulous efforts to stage his own death.
“Got the body,” Julian wrote to “Ghost.” “Unclaimed. From a morgue three states over. No one will miss him.”
My eyes widened. An unclaimed body. That was why no DNA had been done on the “fatal crash” victim. Marcus hadn’t identified Julian’s body. He had identified a stranger’s body, unknowingly helping Julian’s elaborate fraud.
“I put my dental tags on him,” another message from Julian read. “They’ll think it’s me. Burned beyond recognition, of course.”
He had meticulously planned it, right down to the forensic details. The image of the burned-out sedan, a grim roadside spectacle, now had a new, more sinister meaning.
“He set the car ablaze on the highway,” I murmured, piecing together the events. “With the other body inside. Made it look like he burned to death.”
Maya nodded, her face pale. “And left Marcus to take the fall for everything. The missing two million, the ‘murder’ of his brother… He fled south, according to these texts.”
A cold, hard anger settled in my chest. All this time, I had seen Marcus as the villain, the murderer, the ruthless brother. But Marcus was the pawn. A lamb led to slaughter by his own sibling.
The frantic injunction, the lawsuit, the foreclosure threats—they weren’t Marcus trying to cover up a murder. They were Marcus, or Moretti, trying to find whatever Julian had left behind to clear his name or recover the stolen funds.
The deadline for the subpoena loomed, just a few hours away. I now held the key to everything: Julian’s full confession, his plot, the evidence of Moretti’s stolen money, and Marcus’s innocence.
“We need to make sure this gets into the right hands,” I said, pushing away from Maya’s laptop. “But not Judge Harrison’s. Not Moretti’s.”
The thought of surrendering this drive to Moretti’s corrupt judge made my blood run cold. It would disappear, and Marcus would be left to face a mob hit for crimes he didn’t commit.
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