“We have formal complaints from two commercial banks in Queens,” Adams said. “And three more from local business owners here in Brooklyn.”
“For the fourteen thousand dollars?” I asked.
“For grand larceny,” Detective Adams said. “The fourteen thousand he took from your joint account was just the cash he needed to clear his immediate overdrafts before he left for Florida.”
I rubbed my gold wedding ring in the silence that followed, my thumb tracing the worn metal band.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“We have a unit checking his residence on Union Street twice a day,” Adams said, closing the folder with a sharp snap. “But he has not been back since they returned from Miami.”
He stood up, pulling a white business card from his pocket and placing it next to my coffee cup. “If he calls you, do not negotiate. Call me immediately.”
“What about my mother?” I asked. “Is she involved in this?”
Adams stopped at the door, his hand on the brass knob. “Your mother has not been named in the bank warrants yet, but she was sharing his address in Miami.”
The door closed with a heavy click, leaving only the low drone of traffic from the street below.
“There is more, David,” Julian said, standing up and motioning toward the hallway. “We need to go to the conference room.”
The main conference room was cold, the large glass table covered in neat rows of white paper and blue-covered folders.
Julian walked to the end of the table and slid a heavy three-ring binder across the glass toward me.
“I spent the night going through the corporate registry for your engineering firm,” Julian said. “The secondary account we found yesterday was only the tip of the iceberg.”
I opened the binder. The first page was a copy of a structural safety certification for a three-story residential renovation on Eighth Avenue.
At the top of the page, the letterhead read Vanguard Engineering, using the exact address of my Park Slope office.
“I have never seen this document,” I said, my finger tracing the margins. “I do not do residential structural work in Brooklyn.”
“Mark does,” Julian said. “Or rather, he sold the service to people who did not know the difference.”
“How could he do that?” I asked. “You need a licensed professional engineer’s stamp to file these with the Department of Buildings.”
Julian flipped to the back of the folder, revealing a photocopy of a municipal filing form.
In the bottom right corner, in the official state registry box, was my license number: 084211.
“He pulled your registration details off the state public database,” Julian said. “Then he created a fake corporate entity using your name as the sole proprietor.”
“That is identity theft,” I said.
“It is much worse than that,” Julian said, his voice dropping an octave. “He sold eleven of these fake structural reports to local families who were doing major structural renovations.”
“Eleven?” I asked.
“Eleven that we have found so far,” Julian said. “He charged them between eight and twelve thousand dollars cash for each inspection.”
I stood up, walking to the window that looked out over the gray slate roofs of the brownstones.
If any of those buildings had structural issues, if a support beam failed or a ceiling collapsed, my name was on the safety report.
“The city will pull every permit associated with those eleven properties,” Julian said. “And the state licensing board will suspend your credentials the moment the district attorney files the indictment.”
“He did not just steal your cash, David, he sold your name,” Julian said, his eyes fixed on mine.
