Page 69 of Conceal

Downloads.

Pictures.

A folder containing photographs of several women stops me, but when I click through them, they seem to be consensual pictures from women he’s slept with. Selfies. Breasts. Asses. A few short videos I immediately close.

I don’t need to know that much about Vitale’s sex life.

There are tax records, invoices, legal correspondence, scanned identification documents, and dozens of spreadsheets.

I open the most recent spreadsheet.

It looks like inventory for one of his clubs.

Bottles, cleaning supplies, limes. Nothing unusual.

The first several hours give me nothing. There’s an accounting spreadsheet that I’ve saved that might be promising if I can translate some of the line items on it.

I find evidence of bribery, but we already know he bribes cops.

I find payroll records for people who almost certainly don’t exist.

I find invoices for meat, liquor, and cleaning services that cost ten times more than they should.

Money laundering.

At four in the morning, I find a folder labeled Fleet Maintenance.

Inside are service records for trucks belonging to three different businesses.

A meat distributor, a linen company, and a waste-removal service. Doesn’t exactly scream mafia activity. I almost close it, but then something catches my eye. The mileage listed doesn’t make sense.

One truck supposedly traveled more than six thousand miles in a week. Another received four oil changes in the same month. A third has fuel receipts from Maryland, New York, and Canada within a forty-eight-hour window.

I don’t know what it means yet, but I save a copy of it, too.

Then I keep looking.

At five-thirty, I find an encrypted folder hidden several layers deep inside what looks like tax filings. The name is a string of random numbers and letters, but it was accessed three days ago.

I click it, but a pop-up prompt for a password appears.

Shit.

I could use Axel’s password hacker, but I don’t want to wait another several weeks. Every day in this prison is too much. Vitale’s latest form of torture is fucking whatever woman he has against my door.

Not an ounce of me is jealous, but he wakes me up, and it feels violating. Like he’s proving a point that even though we’re married, he can do whatever he wants. I want out. Yesterday.

Then a thought occurs to me. Vitale is arrogant, and arrogant people think they’re smarter than everyone else.

I do a control+F for “passwords,” and sure enough, the idiot has a spreadsheet of his saved passwords. Perfect. Sure enough, there’s an entry for this file. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel so hopeless anymore. I can feel I’m on the verge of something. What? I don’t know. But he has so many other records not password-protected, so this must be important, right?

At first, I can’t understand what I’m seeing. There are several spreadsheets and folders assigned male first and last names. A dozen of them. I click into one of the folders as I open the spreadsheet. What I find makes my coffee almost come back up.

I push the laptop away as if I can distance myself from the evil I think I’ve just found.

“No...” I whisper, covering my mouth with my hand in horror. I take a few fortifying breaths before pulling my laptop back into my lap. I have to do this.

Within one man’s folder are more folders, these with female names. I pray I’m wrong, but brace myself for the worst when I click into a folder named Anita.