Chapter 3 - The Crimson Stacks
The bedroom was silent except for the heavy sound of my own ragged breathing through the cotton mask. The sun had shifted, casting long, sharp shadows across the room, illuminating the swirling dust particles kicked up by my frantic work.
I stared at the decaying treasure chest carved into the heart of our mattress.
Thousands... no, hundreds of thousands of dollars. The top bills of each bundle were charred, stained, and encrusted with a dark, reddish-brown crust that reeked of iron and rot. The stench that had plagued my nights wasn't the smell of a dead animal; it was the smell of organic matter, blood, and chemicals decomposing together in a sealed environment, escaping through microscopic tears in the plastic every time Miguel’s body weight compressed the foam.
Why was there bloody money inside our bed?
My hands were numb as I reached into the cavity. I didn't want to touch it, but an overwhelming, terrifying need for answers drove my fingers forward. I picked up one of the ziplock bags containing a dark blue smartphone.
The phone was off. The screen was cracked across the corner, and the edges of the plastic bag were stained with the same foul, iron-scented crust.
I set the phone down on the floor beside me and reached in again, pulling out the largest of the leather-bound journals. The leather was stiff, warped by moisture, and smelled of chemical solvent and mildew.
I flipped open the cover.
The first page contained rows of hand-written dates, locations, and numbers going back nearly six years. The handwriting was indisputably Miguel’s—sharp, angled, precise, with his distinct forward-slanted capital letters.
October 12 - LAX - Unit 4B - Delivered (120k) January 19 - CHI - Manifest 88 - Cleared (200k) May 04 - DAL - Red Zone - Interrupted
I turned the pages frantically. As the dates progressed into the last two years, the entries became less like ledger records and more like detailed logs of surveillance. There were names—names I didn't recognize—accompanied by addresses, vehicle license plate numbers, and daily routines.
Sarah Jenkins - 4428 Miller Road, Scottsdale. Leaves at 7:30 AM. No security system. Single lock. David Vance - Apex Logistics. Keycard access code: 4912.
My eyes scanned the names, my horror mounting with every turn of the page. Miguel was not a sales manager. Or rather, his job as a sales manager was merely a shell, a convenient screen that explained his frequent travel, his irregular hours, and his sudden influxes of cash that he had always passed off as "performance bonuses."
Then I reached the back of the journal.
Tucked into a pocket inside the rear cover was a thick stack of printed photographs.
I pulled them out. The glossy paper felt cool against my trembling fingers.
The first photograph was a picture of our house—our home on Elm Street—taken from across the road through a long lens.
The second photograph was a picture of me.
I was standing at the local grocery store parking lot, loading bags into the trunk of my car. It was taken from inside a vehicle parked two spaces down. The date stamp in the corner of the photo was dated just four months ago.
The third photograph was another woman. She was young, blonde, sitting in the driver’s seat of a black SUV, laughing at someone off-camera. But across her face, someone had drawn a heavy red 'X' with a permanent marker.
And beneath her photo was a folded piece of official paper.
I unfolded it with fingers that no longer felt like my own. It was a police incident report summary from the Phoenix Police Department, printed from an online database.
Victim: Sarah Jenkins. Status: Deceased. Found in vehicle - Scottsdale, AZ. Cause of Death: Blunt force trauma / Unresolved.
The paper dropped from my hands, fluttering down to rest on top of the ruined, bloody stacks of cash sticking out of the slashed mattress.
May you like
The room seemed to spin. The air grew cold despite the desert heat outside. The man I had shared a life with, the man who had held me when my mother died, the man who kissed my forehead before leaving for the airport... was linked to a dead woman. And he had brought the bloody remnants of whatever dark world he inhabited into the very bed where I slept beside him.
Suddenly, the landline phone in the hallway began to ring.
