Chapter 6 - The Freezing of the Assets
The main branch of the Portland National Bank was filled with the quiet, expensive dignity of old money, its high marble pillars muffling the sound of the light rain outside. I stood in the manager's office, flanked by two uniform officers, while the branch director turned a small silver key inside the security locker mechanism.
The safety deposit box slid out with a heavy, metallic scrape.
I opened the lid. Inside, tucked neatly between stacks of bearer bonds and expensive diamond jewelry my mother had mistakenly believed were lost during her last housecleaning, were two pristine, valid passports under the names Eric and Vanessa Whitman. Attached to the passports were two first-class, one-way tickets from Vancouver International Airport to Zurich, Switzerland, dated for December 27th.
Yesterday.
They were supposed to be on a plane across the Atlantic while my mother was still recovering in the hospital room.
"They were going to leave her with nothing," Officer Miller said, shaking his head as he logged the jewelry into the evidence bags. "Not even a memory."
"They forgot one thing, Miller," I said, holding up a small, secondary passbook hidden at the bottom of the box. It was a corporate ledger for a high-end antique boutique Vanessa operated in the Pearl District. "They used the boutique's business registration to list my mother as a secondary debtor for a commercial line of credit worth half a million dollars. They didn't just drain her savings; they active-loaded her name with their corporate liabilities so the creditors would go after the farmhouse the moment they left the country."
My phone buzzed. It was Sam Vance from the Major Crimes office.
"Claire, we have a situation at the jail. Vanessa’s lawyer finally showed up—not Pendelton, but a public defender assigned by the state. The moment Vanessa found out the offshore account had been flagged by the federal financial network, she started screaming that she wanted to turn state's evidence. She’s throwing Eric under the bus as we speak."
"Does she think that saves her?" I asked, stepping out into the marble lobby of the bank.
May you like
"She thinks she’s getting probation," Sam chuckled darkly. "She’s currently detailing every single time Eric put his hands on your mother. She’s even giving up the location of the secondary stamp Torres used for the forgery. She’s got it hidden in a hollowed-out dictionary in their townhouse library."
"Tell the prosecutor to take the statement, Sam," I said, looking out at the rain. "But tell them no deals. You don't get a discount on your sentence when you only confess because the exit door got locked."
