Chapter 3 - THE SIGNATURE I NEVER GAVE HIM
I looked at my name for almost a full minute.
ARDAN BOWMAN WHITFIELD.
Below it was a digital certification.
Date.
Time.
IP address.
Everything looked legitimate.
Except I had been standing on a stage in Boston when the authorization was supposedly signed.
Dorothea said:
“Did you approve this?”
“No.”
“Did you discuss it with Crispen?”
“No.”
“Did you give him access to your signing certificate?”
“No.”
She closed the file.
“Then we treat it as fraud until proven otherwise.”
The word made something inside me go cold.
Affair was painful.
Fraud was clarifying.
I stopped wondering whether Crispen loved me.
I started wondering what he had been doing with my mother’s money.
Victor arranged for the trust’s accounts to be frozen pending review.
Dorothea called the bank president personally.
At 10:47, Bowman Capital went into protective lock.
At 10:51, Crispen’s phone began ringing inside the house.
We could hear it from the street because he had stepped onto the porch again.
He answered.
Even from sixty yards away, I saw his posture change.
He started pacing.
Then he called me.
I let it ring twice.
Answered.
“Hey.”
His voice sounded too casual.
“Still awake?”
“Yes.”
“How was Boston?”
“Wet.”
He laughed weakly.
“Same in Minneapolis.”
I looked at him through the rain.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Miserable.”
Another lie.
Then his tone shifted.
“Quick question. Did Dorothea call you tonight?”
My heart hardened.
“No. Why?”
“Nothing. Just some paperwork issue.”
“What kind?”
“Trust stuff. Boring.”
My mother’s forty-eight-million-dollar trust was apparently boring now.
“I’m exhausted,” I said.
“Of course. Get some sleep.”
“I will.”
“Love you.”
I watched him say it from my porch.
Then he went inside.
Dorothea whispered:
“He knows the account froze.”
I ended the call.
“What happens now?”
“We do not confront him without knowing what he attempted.”
Victor’s phone buzzed.
License plate result.
The SUV Celia used was registered to Harrow Advisory LLC.
Dorothea frowned.
“I know that name.”
“Celia’s company?”
“No.”
Dorothea searched something.
Then looked at me.
“Harrow Advisory was paid by Whitfield Hospitality eighteen months ago.”
“For what?”
“Acquisition consulting.”
“How much?”
“Two point three million.”
My husband’s company had paid his senior vice president’s private LLC more than two million dollars.
That sounded bad enough.
Then Dorothea opened another record.
The money had not originated from normal company revenue.
It came from a bridge loan.
A bridge loan personally guaranteed by someone named June Bowman.
My mother.
May you like
The problem?
June had been dead for six years when the loan was signed.
