I moved out of the apartment my father had been helping me pay for and into an eight-hundred-dollar-a-month studio in Montrose. I drove my ten-year-old Civic. I wore jeans and T-shirts to family dinners. I smiled at Diane across the table and let her pat my hand and say that my father would have wanted us to stay close, sweetheart. I let her believe the performance was working.
And every night after everyone went home, I sat at my kitchen table with a laptop and a cup of black coffee, and I traced every dollar she had touched.
Here is what Diane did not know about me: she thought I was a mid-level analyst at an accounting firm, which was technically accurate but deeply incomplete. What she had never asked about, because she had never been particularly interested in who I was as opposed to what I might do to her plan, was that I had spent six years working forensic audits for a firm that specialized in fraud detection. I had helped the IRS build cases against people considerably more sophisticated than Diane. My entire professional life had been about following money through dark hallways until I found the room where it was hiding.
She wasn’t stealing from a grieving daughter. She was stealing from someone who did this for a living.
But I needed more than evidence. Evidence can be disputed. Evidence can be dismissed as fabrication by a paranoid woman with a motive to lie. What I needed was for Diane to commit, publicly and irrevocably, to a version of events that the documentation would destroy. I needed her to make her move in a venue where the consequences of being caught were specific and severe and entirely of her own making.
