Chapter 3
Then I said: do not contact the subjects. I want every bank record, transfer, signature, and surveillance image preserved before they realize anyone is investigating.
My supervisor said he would have the preservation requests filed within the hour.
I went back to my mother and held her hand.
"They think they stole your house," I said. "They have no idea they just handed the FBI a case."
She looked at me with the expression she had worn when I was eight years old and had told her someone at school had hit me, and she had said: what did you do next. The expression of a woman who has always been more interested in the response than the injury.
"What happens now?" she said.
"Now," I said, "we go somewhere warm. And then we let the process work."
I put her in a hotel that night, a good one, because she had spent enough nights on wet concrete and she was not going to spend another one anywhere that was not warm and clean and safe. I sat at the desk in the connecting room and typed notes until three in the morning, building the timeline from the documents in the grocery bag and the call records I had from my own phone from the six weeks of evening calls with Kyle and Vanessa, cross-referencing what they had told me against the dates on the documents my mother had kept.
The picture that emerged was clean in the way that amateur fraud is often clean, which is to say the individual components were simple and the composite was straightforward and the only thing that had protected it was the assumption that no one with the relevant expertise was paying attention. Kyle had used his real estate contacts to identify a title company that processed high volumes of transfers and had a notary on staff who was willing to work quickly and without excessive scrutiny. The transfer price was below market, which would trigger a review flag in any systematic property fraud analysis. The receiving entity was an LLC Kyle had registered in Delaware six months before my mother's surgery, which told me the operation had been planned well before her hospitalization, which meant the surgery had not created the opportunity but had simply provided the timing.
By morning, my supervisor had confirmed the preservation orders were in place and had assigned two agents from our financial crimes team to support the investigation. By that afternoon, we had the banking records showing the transfer of proceeds from the property sale into three accounts, two of which were registered to entities whose beneficial ownership traced back to Kyle and Vanessa through a chain that was not complex enough to be professionally constructed but was complex enough that they had believed it would be adequate.
May you like
It was not adequate.
The search warrant was executed on a Wednesday morning. I was present. That was not standard procedure for an agent with a familial relationship to the complainant, and I had disclosed the relationship to my supervisor and to the assistant United States attorney handling the case, and they had determined, after reviewing the specifics, that my presence during the warrant execution was appropriate given that I had been the first responding agent and had secured the initial evidence and my relationship to the case was now documented and managed rather than concealed. I was not the lead agent. I was not authorized to question Kyle or Vanessa. I was present because the assistant United States attorney had determined my presence served the interest of the proceedings, and because I had asked, and because the answer had been yes.
