Read Online The Tell-Tale Con by Aimee Gilchrist - Free Book Online Page B

minutes, that no one was paying any attention to me at all.  And really, I mean no one.  I hadn’t been glanced at in forever.  So I started moving around the perimeter of the room, watching to see what the myriad cops would do.  Still no one paid any attention to my actions.  I decided to see what would happen if I left the room.  I wandered into the partitioned off bathroom area and glanced around.  There was an office too. 
    No one yelled at me so I stayed back there.  This area of the house was much more interesting than the open area.  In the office, there were pictures of Nate’s family.  He had a sister, older from the look of the pictures.  I would have known from Harrison’s grandparents anyway, but being in the room full of pictures made it relatively obvious why Harrison looked so different from Van Poe. 
    His mother’s side of the family was East Indian.  When I had considered his obvious multicultural background, East Indian had never crossed my mind.  For good reason.  I’d only been in New Mexico for a few months, but I’d never, once, seen a person of Indian origin.  Even the Indian food grocery next door to Mr. Wong’s was owned by a Hispanic guy named Moe. 
    I discovered that Harrison’s uncle, Balveer Malhotra, worked for Sandia Labs, which a lot of people around here did.  But he was also the president of some kind of organization for people who made ceramics as a profession.  I had no idea what he made from ceramics.  All I could picture were those places where you could paint your own unicorn statue. 
    The office was extremely tidy and filled with books about everything from design to animal husbandry to quantum physics.  Maybe this room wasn’t only used by Balveer Malhotra.  Maybe it belonged to the whole family.  And that meant some of this stuff was probably Nate’s. 
    I took a pen from my purse and poked around on the desk a little, pushing papers around.  They were stacked in neat piles, and the police might notice if I rifled too much, so I moved a few papers, mostly bank statements and financial documents, that sort of thing.  Harrison’s name caught my eye, so I risked moving a pile to the right.  Disappointment flared when I saw it was just a piece of paper where someone had jotted, in bad handwriting, their bank account numbers.  Someone named C.A. Harrison had given the author twelve thousand dollars. 
    In a house like this, that kind of money changing hands was no big whoop.  I read up the page and saw that the author was Nate.  No one who kept an office this organized was going to keep their accounts that way.  I pushed again and spotted a checkbook that belonged to Nathaniel Malhotra.  A glance at the checkbook revealed that his account was at a local bank with an account number that was ridiculously easy to remember.  He should have been more careful with that checkbook.  Nate had a bipolar checking account.  It was up and down sporadically, though typically more down than up. 
    He got most of his money from his father, something I knew because his snazzy accounting system included large sums of money with plus symbols next to them and the word ‘Dad’ tacked on at the end.  But wherever he got his money aside, Nate had serious issues hanging on to a dollar.  He took out large cash withdrawals with alarming regularity.  As a person more familiar with the dirtier underbelly of the world we lived in, that suggested to me that Nate was into something like drugs or gambling.  But what did I know?  Maybe he liked kitten figurines and spent hundreds a month adding to his collection.
    Either way, it wasn’t mine to figure out.  The police would gravitate here when they stopped toying with the body and started looking for other kinds of evidence.  I was no cop, and I had no real desire to find out why Nate