Chapter 16 - THE ACCOUNT WITH HER NAME
“Diana is the beneficiary?” Arthur repeated.
Sloane explained that the account had been opened by a shell company years earlier and designated for Diana upon the death of a trustee. The designation didn't prove she owned the money. It proved Roland had been building a way to move it.
Arthur forwarded the documents to Moreno. Within days, investigators sought a freeze on the account while its ownership and source were examined. The money stayed where it was.
Diana called from a number Arthur didn't recognize. This time she sounded frightened.
“Roland said it was my inheritance,” she said. “He told me Evelyn stole it.”
“It's money taken from people like Maria Navarro.”
“I didn't know about the forged settlements.”
“You knew enough to threaten my grandmother.”
Silence.
“There's a difference between being lied to,” Arthur continued, “and what you chose to do after you believed the lie.”
Diana asked for protection. Arthur told her to call her attorney and Detective Moreno. He wasn't going to become her secret rescuer, not after the damage she'd done.
The next afternoon, detectives detained Roland Pike after locating him at a private airfield outside Fort Worth. The man listed as dead in the old newspaper clipping was alive, older, and remarkably calm. His identification documents carried a different name.
When Moreno told Arthur, he felt no triumph. The arrests wouldn't rebuild a lost home or put dinner on a table twelve years earlier.
Evelyn watched him close the call. “What happens now?”
“The truth gets tested,” he said. “And we still owe people money.”
That evening a small package arrived from the police evidence unit. It held his mother's wedding ring, recovered from Roland's rented car.
Beneath the ring was a folded note that had never appeared in the photographs.
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It was addressed to Arthur in Diana's handwriting: I know where Roland hid the original witness list. I can prove there was one more name.
