Chapter 2
I was a senior special agent in the FBI's Financial Crimes unit, Chicago field office, assigned to complex fraud investigations involving property crime, elder financial exploitation, forged instruments, and interstate money movement. I had worked that assignment for seven years. Before that, I had spent four years in white collar crime in the Washington field office. I had testified in federal court fourteen times. I had built cases that resulted in convictions for crimes ranging from mortgage fraud to the systematic financial exploitation of memory care patients by a network of facilities that had been operating in four states for eleven years.
What Kyle and Vanessa had done to my mother was not sophisticated. It was not clever. It was the most common variant of elder financial exploitation I encountered, executed with the specific confidence of people who believed they were dealing with a woman who was too old, too sick, and too trusting to protect herself, and a daughter who was too far away and too naive to recognize the architecture of what was happening.
They were half right.
My mother showed me the plastic grocery bag from under her blanket. Inside was a hospital discharge summary, a photocopy of the property deed for the Edgewater house, three motel receipts from a Days Inn on Cicero Avenue, and a crumpled business card from a notary named Robert Fisk whose office was on Devon Avenue. She had been holding onto these things with the instinct of a woman who understood, on some level, that she would eventually need them, even if she did not know why.
I photographed every document in the bag before I touched anything else. Eleven years of training in evidence handling made this reflexive. Then I looked at the property deed photocopy, and the deed transfer document, and the notarization dates, and I began to see the shape of it.
The transfer had been completed on a Thursday in October. My mother had been in the rehabilitation center until the following Monday. The notarization was dated two days before the transfer, which raised a temporal question about who had been present and in what condition, because the standard for valid notarization of a real property transfer requires the signer to be of sound mind and acting without duress, and I had a woman sitting beside me on wet concrete who had been three weeks out of open-heart surgery and heavily medicated when she had signed whatever Vanessa had put in front of her.
The motel receipts showed nine days of stays before the payments stopped.
The business card from Robert Fisk had a cell number written on the back in a handwriting that was not my mother's.
May you like
I took off my coat and put it around her shoulders. Then I walked three steps away and made the call that I had been running the checklist for since I sat down on the concrete beside her.
My supervisor at the Chicago field office picked up on the second ring because he was the kind of supervisor who kept his phone on at night for exactly these situations. I gave him the outline in the specific compressed language of someone who has been making these calls for eleven years: possible deed fraud, elder financial exploitation, forged notarization, interstate financial transfers through a commercial real estate structure, preservation request on all associated banking and property records before the subjects became aware of investigation. I gave him Kyle and Vanessa's names. I gave him the property address. I gave him Robert Fisk's name and the Devon Avenue address on the card.
