Chapter 4 - THE ACCOUNT THEY COULD NOT TOUCH
At 9:12 the next morning, my phone displayed six missed calls from First Continental Bank.
I called from the hospital bed.
A fraud investigator named Samantha Reed answered.
She asked me to verify my identity using questions my family did not know.
Then she delivered the news.
Someone had attempted to transfer my entire savings balance at 3:47 that morning.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
The request had been submitted electronically using the power-of-attorney documents recovered from my hospital room.
The destination was a business account belonging to Connor’s company.
Whitaker Crown Apparel.
The transfer had failed because my bank had already placed a protective freeze on the account.
Detective Ortiz had contacted them hours earlier.
“They tried again after Mom was arrested?” I asked.
“The electronic request was scheduled in advance,” Samantha explained.
“It appears the paperwork was prepared several days ago.”
My family had expected me to sign.
But they had also prepared for the possibility that I would refuse.
The transfer documents contained a digital signature that looked almost identical to mine.
The signature had been copied from an old mortgage payment authorization.
The notarization belonged to a man named Calvin Ross.
He was a friend of my father’s.
He had notarized the documents without ever seeing me.
Samantha continued reviewing my accounts.
Her voice gradually changed.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There are additional transactions.”
My parents had maintained limited access to an old checking account I opened when I was nineteen.
I thought the account had been closed years ago.
It had not.
Over the previous seven years, money had been moved through it in small amounts.
Nine hundred dollars.
Fourteen hundred dollars.
Twenty-two hundred dollars.
The transfers were disguised with labels such as household reimbursement, medical expense, and family loan.
Together, they totaled more than eighty thousand dollars.
“I did not authorize those,” I whispered.
Samantha paused.
“There are also three credit cards in your name.”
“I only have one.”
“These were opened using the Oak Brook address.”
My mother’s house.
The house whose mortgage I had been paying.
The cards were nearly maxed out.
Luxury hotels.
Designer clothing.
Restaurants in Miami.
Private car services.
A twelve-thousand-dollar charge at a Las Vegas nightclub.
Connor’s networking trips had not merely been funded by me.
They had been built on my stolen identity.
I closed my eyes.
My head throbbed beneath the bandage.
“Freeze everything,” I said.
“All accounts.”
“All cards.”
“All automatic payments connected to my parents.”
Samantha asked whether that included the mortgage, utilities, insurance, and property taxes for the Oak Brook house.
I thought of my mother lifting that machine.
May you like
“Yes.”
For the first time in five years, my family would have to pay for its own life.
