Chapter 4 - The Audit
At 2:00 PM, Maeve and I sat inside the conference room of her boutique midtown tax consultancy. Spread across the massive glass table were three banker boxes of subpoenaed financial records, banking statements, and corporate filings for *Paws & Pearls Luxury Pet Resort LLC*.
Maeve adjusted her reading glasses, a highlighter clenched between her teeth. She pulled a thick stack of green-bar ledger paper toward her and shook her head in disbelief.
"Sloan, your sister isn't just an idiot," Maeve said, sliding a document across the table to me. "She’s a generational criminal. Look at page twelve."
I scanned the numbers. It was the original underwriting application for the $65,000 Small Business Administration loan that I had supposedly "co-signed" two years ago.
My stomach dropped into an icy void.
"This isn't my co-signature," I muttered, tracing the handwriting. "The slant is completely wrong. It's written in Blair’s looping cursive trying to mimic mine."
"Keep reading," Maeve urged. "Look at the attached income verification."
I flipped the page. Attached to the loan file was a counterfeit federal W-2 tax form bearing my name, but the reported annual salary wasn't the $135,000 I actually made at the bank. It was listed as **$345,000**.
Blair had created a fraudulent tax document using my name, inflated my earnings by over two hundred thousand dollars, forged my signature as the primary guarantor, and used that inflated line to secure not only the original $65,000 loan, but an additional **$180,000 commercial line of credit** through a regional credit union in Savannah.
"My God," I whispered, the room spinning slightly. "She didn't just borrow sixty-five thousand. She drew down on a revolving credit line for nearly a quarter of a million dollars."
"And look where the money went," Maeve added, dropping another binder on the table with a loud thud. "Out of that two hundred and forty-five thousand dollars, less than twenty thousand went into actual pet grooming equipment. Here is a transfer for forty thousand dollars to a luxury auto boutique for a down payment on a Porsche Macan. Here is sixteen thousand dollars to a cosmetic surgical center in Beverly Hills. Here is nine thousand dollars to a boutique hotel in St. Barts."
"And the monthly interest payments?" I asked.
"She was paying the minimum interest charges out of the secondary checking account that you just decoupled from your personal overdraft," Maeve said grimly. "Now that you pulled your account, the credit union’s automatic draw bounced yesterday morning. The loan went into technical default at midnight."
"Which means they're going to come after the guarantor," I said, cold fury replacing my initial shock. "They're going to come after me."
"Not if you burn the house down first," Maeve said, leaning forward. "If you try to pay this or negotiate, you validate the debt. You have to file a formal criminal affidavit of bank fraud against Blair with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance. You have to officially disavow the signature."
"If I do that, Maeve... Blair faces real federal prison time. Forgery, wire fraud, identity theft against a financial institution."
Maeve leaned across the table, her gaze piercing and uncompromising. "Sloan, listen to me very carefully. On Christmas Eve, your mother threw your nine-year-old child's dinner across a room. Your father watched and ate his turkey. Your sister mocked his tears. Then she stole your Social Security card from your childhood home, tried to lease high-end furniture, and left you holding a quarter-million-dollar criminal debt that could ruin Knox's entire future. Do you still think you have a sister?"
I looked down at the counterfeit W-2. I remembered Knox sitting on the floor of my parents' mansion, trembling while gravy soaked into his little church shoes. I remembered him asking me at the gas station if Santa would hate him because he spilled water.
May you like
"No," I said, picking up my pen. "I don't have a sister. Call Detective Reynolds. And tell him we have enough paper to put Blair Whitmore away for a decade."
***
