“How did he get my CAD templates?” I asked. “The drawings look exactly like my industrial design layouts.”
“He had your old laptop for three weeks last spring,” Julian said. “The one you left in your mother’s basement when you were moving apartments.”
I had forgotten about that computer, an old silver machine I thought was broken.
“We have to go to the hospital,” I said. “Maya needs to know this before it hits the newspapers.”
The light in Maya’s hospital room was dim, the gray winter afternoon casting long shadows across the linoleum floor.
Liam was asleep in the clear plastic bassinet beside the bed, his chest rising and falling beneath his thin flannel swaddle.
Maya was sitting in the vinyl armchair, her right hand pressed flat over her surgical incision as she watched me walk in.
“You have that look on your face,” she said softly. “The one you get when a project is behind schedule.”
“It is a bit more than a schedule issue, Maya,” I said, pulling a wooden stool close to her chair.
I took her hand. Her skin was warm, but her fingers were tense, winding around my own.
“The police are looking for Mark,” I said. “They have open warrants for bank fraud.”
“Did he spend the rest of the fourteen thousand?” she asked.
“The fourteen thousand is gone,” I said. “But he took much more than that. He used Vanguard Engineering to sell fake structural safety inspections to local families.”
Maya looked down at Liam, her fingers tightening on mine. “How is that possible, David?”
“He forged my professional license,” I said. “He signed off on major construction projects in Brooklyn using my credentials.”
“Oh, David,” she whispered.
“If any of those buildings are unsafe, the liability falls on my firm,” I said. “The state could revoke my license permanently.”
“But you were in Germany,” she said. “You have the passport stamps to prove you were out of the country.”
“That protects me from criminal charges,” I said. “But it does not protect my professional reputation. If the local papers get hold of this, no municipal contractor will ever hire me again.”
“Eleanor knew,” Maya said, her voice turning cold. “That is why she called you from the hotel in Miami. She wanted you to drop the investigation before the police uncovered the fake contracts.”
“We cannot drop it now,” I said. “It is out of our hands. The district attorney is already drafting the warrants.”
Maya looked toward the plastic bassinet, her eyes wide with a quiet, heavy focus. “What do we do now?”
“I have to go to the precinct,” I said. “The detective has the original files they took from Mark’s house.”
The seventy-eighth precinct station on Sixth Avenue smelled of stale coffee and wet floor wax, the fluorescent lights overhead buzzing with a low hum.
Detective Adams met me at the front desk and led me through a gate into the main detective bureau, a room crowded with metal desks and gray filing cabinets.
He pointed to a small wooden table in the corner where several large plastic evidence bags were laid out in a row.
“We executed the search warrant on Mark’s home office at noon,” Adams said, pulling a chair out for me.
Inside the first plastic bag was a heavy steel embossing stamp, the kind used to press an official corporate seal into paper.
“Is this yours?” Adams asked.
“No,” I said, leaning closer. “My seal is locked in my office safe. But this one looks identical.”
“We found it in his desk drawer, tucked behind some tax forms,” Adams said.
He reached into the second bag and pulled out a five-page document printed on heavy bond paper.
It was a safety certification for a structural wall removal on Tenth Street, dated December twelfth.
“The homeowner paid nine thousand five hundred dollars for this,” Adams said. “She thought she was paying your firm.”
I picked up the document, the thick plastic of the evidence bag crinkling under my fingers.
At the bottom of the final page, in the official signature block, my name was written in dark blue ink.
The letters were perfectly formed, the long sweeping line of the capital D matching my handwriting exactly, even down to the small, precise dot I always left inside the lower loop.
It was a perfect replica.
The knock on my apartment door came at twenty past seven the next morning, before the kitchen faucet had stopped dripping.
I opened it to find a short man in a salt-stained nylon jacket holding a clipboard and a thick manila envelope. He had a smudge of blue ink on his thumb and did not look me in the eye.
“David Miller?” he asked, his voice flat with the indifference of someone who delivered bad news for a living.
I nodded, and he slid the envelope into my hand before I could ask who had sent him.
“You have been served,” he said, turning back toward the stairs without waiting for a signature.
I pulled the stapled documents from the envelope and leaned against the cold wood of the doorframe.
The first page bore the blue stamp of the Kings County Supreme Court, listing my engineering firm as the primary defendant in a civil suit.
A homeowner named Arthur Vance was suing me for eighty-five thousand dollars, alleging that my company had taken his deposit for a foundation stabilization project and abandoned the work.
I had never heard of Arthur Vance, but my name was written on the contract in bold black ink, directly above the forged signature I had stared at the night before.
The document claimed that I had personally visited his home in Flatbush on the second of November, a date when I was still working twelve-hour shifts at the refinery in Munich.
The phone in my pocket began to vibrate against my leg, the screen displaying an unknown number from a local area code.
I did not answer it, choosing instead to pack my briefcase with the legal papers and head straight to the hospital.
At the hospital, the fourth-floor corridor smelled of floor wax and green tea. I passed the nurses’ station, where three women in blue scrubs were whispering while looking at a desktop monitor.
One of them looked up as I walked by, her eyes lingering on my face before she quickly turned back to her screen.
I pushed open the door to room 412, where the quiet room was illuminated by the low gray light of the winter morning.
Maya was sitting up in bed when I entered, her right hand pressed flat over her surgical incision as she stared at her phone screen.
The hospital room was quiet except for the low hum of the monitors, but her shoulders were stiff and her face was pale.
