“I couldn’t find anything out about his mom.”
“So did they just… start running cons together when he was older?”
“Meet Declan Martin, age forty-five.” Arty brought up a mugshot.
“One of his marks finally caught him, huh?”
“Yeah. Drake would have been roughly eighteen at this time. And he drops off the face of the earth for a few years. I can’t find anything about where he’d been.”
“He probably had access to his father’s money. Can’t imagine they put that shit in the bank. Probably took a tour of the world for a bit before he ran out and had to come back and continue his father’s work.”
“Except he didn’t choose sweetheart cons.”
“Maybe he had more hang-ups than his old man about banging rich older ladies.”
To that, Arty shrugged.
“So, how did he get started in these kinds of real estate cons?”
“He started small. It seems like the first real cons were rental fraud. Drake would advertise properties he didn’t own. Then he would require the mark to wire a security deposit and first month’s rent. Then he would disappear.”
“Asshole.”
“From there, there was seller impersonation fraud. He would assume the identity of a property owner—usually one where the actual owner was out of state—then hire a real estate agent, push for a fast, below-market cash sale, pocket the money, and take off before the real owner realized what went down.”
“Then he just kept working his way up to development scams.”
“Yeah, he spent a lot of years doing rental and seller impersonation cons. I’ve found at least two dozen victims there. Millions worth of money.”
“Did Daddy Declan proud, it seems. Why would he move to this if that was working?”
“There’s a lot of money in development. And a lot of ways to hide some of it disappearing. I don’t think he pulled a big con like he did on your friend much. This seems newer. I should have found more evidence of it if it was something he’d been doing for a while.”
“But?”
“But… this is where the most noise I am finding online is. The people who got scammed out of this kind of money.”
“The women?” I asked.
“Yeah. He seems to target women.”
“He can use his good looks to his advantage that way. Charm ‘em, get ‘em to start seeing a future with him. Distract them. Then rob ‘em blind.”
Anger, black and ugly, swirled inside me at the thought of Lula—already a woman who didn’t trust easily—realizing she’d gotten duped. She was so hard on herself about everything. I couldn’t imagine how badly she beat herself up about letting that happen.
Then having to reduce her whole life she’d busted her ass to get for herself.
It really was no wonder she was so hesitant to let herself trust her growing feelings toward me.
“Has anyone ever gotten close to nailing this guy?” At Arty’s silence, I pressed, “Arty?”
“That brings me to this.” Using the house, he clicked on a new window, bringing up a news article from two years before.
About a murder.
And a mystery surrounding the woman’s missing fortune.
My heart had tripped into overdrive as I leaned over Arty’s chair to read the details of the article, the comments from law enforcement, the bafflement of her living family members.
