Page 44 of Go Alone

“Yeah. It looks like there was an advocacy group representing the squatters. I couldn’t find them because I was looking for housing advocacy groups, and that kept giving me a bunch of homeless shelters. I tried looking for squatters’ rights groups, and that gave me mostly a bunch of anarchist websites advocating an end of taxation, communal property, down with the government, yadda yadda, but I finally landed on a group called SEAL.”

Kate’s eyebrows raised. “SEAL? Like Navy SEAL?”

Marcus laughed. “Same word, but no. In this case, it’s the Society for Equitable Access to Land.”

“And they represented the squatters on the Brannigan properties?”

“They were the squatters on the Brannigan properties,” Marcus said. “There’s not much left except for a few news clippings and blurbs on archived web pages, but I got a list of names from the society and cross-referenced them with names from the other housing rights groups mentioned from the other cases. One of those names appears in all three groups.”

“Linus Varne?”

Marcus chuckled. “That would be perfect, but no. This guy’s name is Curtis Dalby.”

Kate straightened. “Do you have a description?”

“Not yet. I was about to run the name through the DMV.”

"Do that. Run it through Ohio court records and the National Crime Information Center, too, and see if anything comes up."

“Got it.”

Kate paced again, not from frustration or deep thought but from excitement. She could feel the shell surrounding the center of the case cracking. Just a little more, and they’d finally have the answer they needed.

“Yes!” Marcus pumped his fist.

“You’ve got it?” Kate asked.

“Well… not a photograph, no. But I have confirmed that Curtis Dalby lost his home due to Brannigan’s actions.”

Kate frowned. “We already knew that.”

“Yes,” Marcus said, lifting a finger. “But did you know that Deborah Holt rejected his application for a home improvement loan because his title was ‘distressed’?”

Kate’s eyes widened. “I did not.”

“And did you know that Howard Greer approved the rezoning of Brannigan’s homes for commercial property? And did you further know that the zoning request was filed under the name Linus Varne?"

Kate started. “What? How? How could he do that? Really?”

Marcus laughed. “He sure did. As for how? Well, I’m only just scraping the surface, but it seems that A-Plus Home Inspection was owned by a company called LV Holdings. I suspect that Howard didn’t want his name associated with these… shall we say, low-browed actions, so he created a company using a human-sounding name as a layer of obscurity to encourage the bureaucracy to look elsewhere.”

“Like aposematic camouflage,” Kate said.

“Like what?”

“Brightly colored and vibrantly patterned,” Kate replied.

He shook his head. “I don’t know about that. This is more like ordinary camouflage. Nothing to see here, just ordinary background noise.”

Kate’s eyes narrowed. “That seems…”

“Weak?” Marcus suggested. “Yeah, I would say the same thing. But that’s only because we’re looking hard for it. And even though we’re looking hard, we’re only just now figuring it out. I mean, hell, Anita’s been practically bursting a vein looking for Linus Varne the person, but she hasn’t found anything.”

“Because Linus Varne was never a person. It was a company.”

“Exactly,” Marcus replied.

Kate started pacing again. The pieces were falling into place. “So Howard Greer, Deborah Holt, and Raymond Brannigan all worked together to prevent these squatters from gaining a legal right to remain in their homes.”