The account was in my name. My full legal name, Walter James Brennan, printed at the top exactly as it appeared on every document I had ever signed. But I had never opened it. I had never funded it. I had never authorized a single transaction on it. And the balance at the bottom of the page made my chest go tight: two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars had moved through it in eleven months. Withdrawals. Transfers. A pattern of them, steady and deliberate, draining out almost as fast as they appeared. And the mailing address, the one where every prior statement had gone, was not my house on Sycamore Drive.<\/p>\n
It was Andrew and Bethany’s house on Ashford Lane.<\/p>\n
I set the letter down very carefully, the way I used to set down a cracked support beam before deciding whether the whole structure was compromised. Someone had opened an account in my name, routed the statements to my son’s address so I would never see them, and used it as a channel to move money that had to be coming from somewhere. I picked up the phone and called Raymond Hayes, the forensic accountant who had spent thirty years finding exactly this kind of thing. “Raymond,” I said. “That account you mentioned. I’m looking at it. I need you to tell me where the money came from, and I need you to do it quietly.”<\/p>\n
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