Book 1 - Active Trust Read Online Free Page A

other party’s name, Michelle learned that he
had been paralyzed from the waist down. It was a shame, just
because the guy had one daughter in 1990, but couldn’t have any
more children following the accident.
    ‘Wow,’ she thought as she
learned more about Mr. McBride’s victim, Mitchell Rees. Apparently
he was really active in his own community and was just a victim of
being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    Michelle decided to burn more
time and went on to Facebook to search for Mr. Rees. He was an
older guy with distinguishing features like the kind of man who
would be in movies. Prior to his life changing accident, he was an
architect. His lack of mobility took away his driving force, so he
gave up and became a couch potato who just holed up in his house
and drank.
    Michelle was saddened by this
new information and wondered if the accident ever weighed heavily
on The Governor’s mind. She scrolled through Mr. Rees’ Facebook
feed to its earliest entry and found that he was once so enraged
over the accident that he vowed to return the favor and maim the
man who did it. Mr. McBride wasn’t yet governor then, but a man
without public office and with a whole lot of money and even less
brains.
    McBride had been a trust fund
baby to start with and inherited his father’s millions after a
heart attack claimed his life in 1987. The media had reported at
the time that McBride had been a wild playboy and was always drunk
or coked up. Michelle wasn’t sure if this news had anything to do
with the accident, but she was determined to find out.
    Michelle turned off her laptop
and stuffed it back into its carrying case and flagged down her
waitress for a check. Wanda returned to her table and asked, “Was
everything okay today, honey?”
    “It was fantastic.”
    “Here’s your check and I hope
you have a great day.”
    She pawed the check facing
downward onto the table and walked away. Michelle turned it over,
glanced downward at the total and fished out a twenty for the bill.
She put it on top of the check and left it on the table.
    Michelle got into her car and
decided that, in order to kill time, she would peruse the library’s
record of events from Mr. McBride’s car accident. Surely, they
would have some newspaper records of the incident and events
surrounding it.
    She entered the library, found
their microfiche area and began her investigation into the car
accident. There was something about the accident that didn’t sit
right with her and she had to settle the details in her mind.
    She looked through the records
and hit pay dirt when she located something about a fundraiser for
McBride to become Mayor back in 1993. He was seen celebrating and
rubbing noses with the upper echelon of the city. ‘One year
post-accident and he’s busy getting funds together to run for
Mayor’, interesting, she thought as she continued her search.
    She knew that she couldn’t
expect McBride to lay low and become dedicated to a man whom he
paralyzed, but she knew there was a piece to the puzzle that was
missing.
    Going backward through the
fiche, she found nothing for hours. At a time when she was just
about ready to give up the search, she came across a tiny blurb in
the Gazette with the headline: “DRUNK DRIVING ACCIDENT MAIMS
1”.
    She read through the small
article and found that it was exactly the thing of which she’d
spent all of her time searching. She printed off the sheet and
stuffed it into her bag. McBride was driving drunk after a night
spent partying with prostitutes and slammed his silver Mercedes
into the car that Rees was driving. After a head-on collision,
McBride walked away, but paramedics were left using the Jaws of
Life in order to pull Rees from the wreckage.
    Michelle was happy that her
curiosity was sated, but had a hankering for more information from
Chase Freeman. She didn’t want to wait and so she texted him, “Can
we meet now?”
    Her phone alerted her to a text
message immediately following