I turned on my desk lamp, got the purse out from behind the box of papers, and set it down. I took out the wallet first. This was the only thing I’d really looked at, but not very carefully. Stefanie Knight carried three different Visa cards, a Master-Card, a bonus points card for a major drugstore chain, and, of course, the driver’s license I’d examined earlier. I withdrew other things from the purse, an item at a time. A brush with several blonde hairs caught in it. Half a dozen lipsticks and lip liners and various other lip things I didn’t know much about. Those tampons still in the paper wrapper. Some handfuls of coins that she’d obviously just thrown into her bag rather than slip into her change purse. VW and house keys, film canister, receipts from grocery stores, drugstores, self-serve gas stations, some dating back more than two years. Three ballpoint pens, one of which looked dried up, three nail files, half a dozen eyeliners. Two white letter-size envelopes, thick with papers. Real estate papers, I guessed. The flaps were tucked in, not sealed, so I decided to take a peek into one of them.

I felt as though someone had suddenly stomped on my chest.

Money. Lots and lots of money.

All fifties. Dozens and dozens of them in the first envelope. Dozens and dozens of them in the second envelope. Thousands of dollars. I couldn’t begin to guess how much.

I felt that what had quickly developed into a very bad situation was now a hell of a lot worse.

Chapter 14

14

they were crisp, new fifties, and I emptied both envelopes and spread the money out on the desk next to my computer. I counted out the bills in stacks of twenty, for $1,000 each. It took about five minutes, and when I was done I had twenty piles, for a total of $20,000.

That would buy a lot of low-fat cookies.

I’d never seen this much cash in one place before. I wasn’t even sure I’d ever seen so much as a thousand dollars in cold, hard cash before. When I went to the grocery store, I was lucky to find six bucks in my wallet. Evidently, when Stefanie Knight went to pick up some bread and milk, it was a major event. She didn’t want to take any chances on running short.

In her wallet she’d had only $25 in bills. No fifties. But these two envelopes of cash were something else again. What was she doing with this kind of money? What would anyone be doing with this kind of cash? Normal, upstanding, regular law-abiding people did not walk around with $20,000 on them. Even people for whom $20,000 was lunch money. I doubted even Bill Gates walked around with $20,000 in his wallet. (You’d throw your back out, for one thing, when you sat on it.)