Chapter 4 - The Old Man’s Ledger
The room smelled of old vinegar and wet wool when the detective came in at four o'clock. His name was Harris; he had a grease stain on the lapel of his trench coat that looked like it had come from a cheap sausage sandwich, and his fingers were short and square, the nails bitten down to the pink meat.
He sat on the stool the nurse had left by the IV stand, his leather notebook open on his knee.
"We ran the identification check on the old man from the third window, Miss Davis," Harris said. He didn't look at my bandages; he looked at his own pencil lead. "The county coroner went into the house with the search warrant at noon. They found him in a bed made out of old army blankets and newspaper sheets behind the drywall wrapper in the hallway."
"Is he...?" The word stuck in my throat like a piece of dry bread.
"He's alive," Harris said. "Barely. His weight is down to eighty-four pounds, and he’s got the kind of bone thinning that comes from not seeing the sun since the Obama administration. But his mind’s clear enough to know who put the screws in the doorframe."
"My father," I said.
"Gregory and Brenda both," Harris said, turning a blue page in his notebook. "They had a joint ledger tucked into the butter compartment of the refrigerator. Every check from the state railroad retirement fund since 2016 was signed with a rubber stamp they had made at an office supply store in Toledo. They were drawing thirty-two hundred a month on a dead man's name while they kept the real Charles Davis behind the lath boards on forty cents of oatmeal a day."
Wyatt walked over to the bed, his hand coming down over my right hand where the tape from the IV line was starting to peel. His skin was cold, but his grip was steady—the grip of a man who had spent his youth holding onto things that were trying to fall into the river.
"What about the timberland, Harris?" Wyatt asked. "My firm paid the Davis family trust eighty-four thousand dollars for the right-of-way easement through the western section of the county. The title insurance was cleared by the municipal desk in Columbus."
"The Davis family trust was a fake, Mr. Campbell," Detective Harris said, his pencil making a sharp, horizontal line across the page. "Gregory drew the trust papers using the corporate seal from his old jack repair shop after it went into receivership in ninety-eight. The land didn't belong to the trust. It belonged to Charles Davis personally, under a patent grant that goes back to the canal company filings from 1852."
Vance stepped out from the shadow of the wardrobe, his gold pen held between his fingers like a scalpel. "The grand jury isn't going to look at an assault charge anymore, Harris. This is a federal felony under the RICO statutes—interstate transport of forged securities, identity theft of a state beneficiary, and modern servitude with an aggravating instrument."
"The prosecutor’s already drawing the indictment," Harris said, closing his notebook with a flat, leather snap. "They're picking up Melanie right now at the beauty shop on High Street. She was listed as the corporate secretary for the fake trust account at the Ohio National Bank. She signed forty-two of the withdrawal slips herself using her real name."
I closed my right eye, the yellow star-bursts from the blue flash camera finally fading out of the darkness behind my lid.
I remembered Melanie’s face from Tuesday night—the way her green wrap-dress had looked so clean in the amber light, the way her pink nails had twisted the fabric of her skirt while she told Wyatt he had chosen the wrong sister. She hadn't been angry because she loved him. She had been angry because she had spent three years sitting on the fender of his truck trying to clear the signature line before the state compliance board looked at the timber deed.
"She wanted the land," I whispered through the white tape over my chin.
"She wanted the seven million dollars from the Campbell buyout, Sadie," Arthur Vance said, his hand reaching down to pick up the brown envelope from the table. "If Wyatt married Melanie, the easement fraud disappeared into the marital property pool. The Campbell lawyers would have had to defend the title themselves to keep the state highway contract from going into default. You were the only piece of the ledger that didn't have a signature on it."
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"So they used the brick," Wyatt said, his voice dropping into that low, dangerous register that had nothing to do with the law and everything to do with the clay dust in the grass.
"They used the brick because they ran out of time," Vance said. "The state extension board had an audit scheduled for Wednesday morning at nine. If Gregory didn't have the marital waiver signed by the real line owner before the clerk opened the books, the whole house on Glenwood Avenue was going into the sheriff's sale by Friday afternoon."
