Chapter 4 - Digging the Dirt
By Thursday morning, my dining room table looked like a federal war room. Detective Thorne had come over, bringing boxes of financial records he had quietly subpoenaed under the radar. Sarah was pouring coffee, while Leo was at school, safely out of the crossfire.
"You really kicked the hornet's nest last night," Thorne laughed, sifting through a stack of bank statements. "Evelyn called the precinct four times trying to get you arrested for trespassing at a public meeting."
"Let her panic," I said, running a highlighter over a printed spreadsheet. "Panic leads to mistakes. Look at this."
I slid the paper across the table. "I tracked the wire transfers from Apex Realty Solutions. Every time a house in Pine Valley was foreclosed on by the HOA, Apex bought it at auction for pennies on the dollar. But look where the money goes after the flip."
Thorne adjusted his glasses. "Cayman Islands routing number. But the originating account..."
"Is the Pine Valley HOA reserve fund," I finished. "She’s not just stealing homes. She’s embezzling the community’s reserve cash to fund her sister’s shell company, using that money to buy the stolen homes, and then pocketing the profit offshore."
"It's a closed-loop money laundering operation," Sarah gasped, staring at the numbers. "She’s stealing from the very neighbors she's supposed to represent to buy their own stolen houses."
"Exactly," I said. "And she’s doing it fast because the reserve fund is supposed to be audited next month. She’s trying to seize my house to flip it and replace the missing cash before the auditors arrive. If she doesn't get my equity by Friday, the whole house of cards collapses."
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Thorne pulled out his phone. "I’m calling the DA. We have enough for a warrant."
"Not yet," I stopped him. "If we arrest her now, she clams up, and her sister in Delaware burns the offshore records. We need to catch her in the act of executing the fraudulent deed transfer. We wait until tomorrow."
