Then she crossed back into Kennedy’s second bedroom. It looked a little scarce this time, Deven immediately noticed. There weren’t as many clothes scattered around and she wondered who had taken them. Benji, maybe? But why?

She stepped over a few discarded shoes with no mates, some more papers, and walked into the closet of the bedroom. The built-ins carried into here as well, though smaller to accommodate the tight space. A few loose hangers hung on the rack while more trash littered the floor. Bench seating with drawers underneath formed a U-shape, and Deven absently pulled and closed the drawers, nothing of too much importance grabbing her attention. A shelf lined the top with shoe boxes, and she reached above, pulling one down. Red bottoms, she noted, eyeing the expensive shoes nestled in the tissue paper. And the crisp leather was indicative they had never been worn. Boxes two and three appeared to be the same, snakeskin boots and six-inch heeled sandals, respectively. Deven had just about given up as she leaned up to place the boxes back in their original positions. She fell short, the boxes tumbling from her hand and scattering around her like confetti. Damn. She stooped to pick them up, noting that one box had touched a corner of the U-shaped seating, pushing it inward to reveal the removable bench. Deven frowned, curious why she hadn’t noticed it before. She lifted the wood and peered inside, her eyes rounding like saucers.

More shoeboxes, but this time they weren’t filled with shoes. But what they were filled with was even more disturbing. The first thing Deven noticed was the stacks of money, neatly bundled with currency sleeves and arranged in ascending order by bill denominations. Just eyeballing it, Deven figured it was over $50,000. She touched the bills, crisp like they were straight from the printer, but real as real can be. Deven sat back on her heels, her mouth agape.

Her eyes caught the passport books and driver’s licenses next, organized just as neatly next to the bills. Deven picked up the IDs and flipped through them. Lisa Turner. Maya Watson. Rochelle Holmes. Vanessa Kirk. All different names, addresses, and identifying information. But the pictures were all Kennedy. Sure, she had various hair sizes and colors, braids, blonds, and wigs, and even the facial features had slight variations with makeup or surgeries, but the woman in the picture was clearly the same. “Oh my God,” she whispered, looking at the grinning picture of Kennedy on Melissa Trainor’s ID. She ignored the passports, already knowing they were going to serve as affirmation.