Melted: A MaxTul AU story

Sixty-eight: . . . and Before That: Getting Caught Up

Author's note: Initially, the idea was to have one chapter titled "Before . . . and Before That," but then I realized that the Plustor/Taina bit ("Before) was too long to merely be a half chapter, so I split it up. Someday, I may combine the two again, but this weekend is not that time.

Besides, Kuhn Bagnet's bit got too long as well.

**

Michelle Bagnet was disappointed that she couldn't stay at the farm the entire time the Team 2 Crew was there. She really didn't have time to go on the trip to the farm in the first place, but there was no way she was going to miss seeing Pong and Max's face when they saw the Tappitak family again. Twelve hours on the road (six hours there and six hours back) was definitely worth it. She had driven to the farm on the morning that the team had left to be there when they arrived. She spent the evening with them all and then headed back around 3 am the next day. She had a full day of work the next day, which included meetings that she couldn't rearrange.

When she had seen the quality of the pictures Kim was taking, she had talked to both Kim and Sinjai about the possibility of having her share them on social media. She thought it would be a good move for both Sinjai and Tul, but also she already felt left out—lonely for the warmth that the farm and all those people who clearly cared about each other provided.

To be honest. She also just wanted to see all the pictures.

She sighed. Those pictures were such a contrast to the pictures she was looking at right now. She laid out the pictures on her desk to look at them all together. Mik had brought them to her this morning. They showed a number of pictures of Plustor with the men who had attacked Max. She didn't know this at the time, but they were some of the pictures that Taina Pakorn would show her husband in a couple of days.

The problem with the pictures is that though they clearly showed that Plustor knew the men and gave money to the man who gave those two guys money (same bag of money in each of the pictures—Taina didn't have those), they didn't show any money changing hands between Plustor and those men. A good lawyer would argue that Plustor had no control over what the other man did with the money.

The other pictures showed Plustor talking to another guy, who right after (Michelle loved time stamped pictures and stills from CCTV cameras) went to visit the men in jail. She knew from the meticulous notes Mik gave her that this man visited the relatives of the men in jail, including the boy that she had bailed out. It was actually how she found out where he lived because he had given the police a fake address. It helped Mik follow up and provide the information packet on him and his sister that Michelle would see and cause her to ask Mik to bring the kids to her later.

Now, her focus was on Plustor. As much as she disliked the man, she still believed in innocent until proven guilty. The fact that a person had shady friends/acquaintances didn't mean they were also shady themselves. She, herself, knew plenty of people in prison, who were about to be in prison, or who should be in prison, but she didn't consider of herself a guilty person. She played by the rules most of the time; it was helpful to really know the rules very well. In any case, she wasn't going to accuse Plustor of anything without concrete proof.

She got that when Naak visited her. Naak Paraada had sent a message requesting a meeting with her. Michelle's administrative assistant reviewed many such requests for meetings with her every day; she didn't relay each one to Kuhn Bagnet but had taken this directly to her boss because it mentioned Max. She knew from years of experience that Michelle Bagnet wanted to see any missive that included information about her daughters, Max, Itty, Chalida, or Chimon right away. The admin did a preliminary background check on Naak to make sure she was who she said she was in the letter and shared that information as well. Michelle had agreed to the meeting because she was curious. How did this person know Max? Was this some kind of scam? Did Plustor send her himself?