“Complete disappearance of your assets and quite possibly your disappearance as well. That note about making it look like an accident. We take those threats very seriously.”
Detective Chen photographed every document, then carefully placed them in evidence bags.
“We’ll need to coordinate with the FBI on this. Interstate fraud, identity theft, conspiracy. This is much bigger than a local case.”
“What about Jolene and her brother?”
“We’ll put out a BOLO, be-on-the-lookout alert, for both of them. Do you have any idea where they might have gone?”
I thought about it. In 5 years with Jolene, she’d never mentioned friends or family beyond her mother and the brother she’d claimed didn’t exist. She’d always said she was a private person, that she preferred small social circles.
Now I realized it was because she’d been lying about her entire background.
“Her mother,” I said suddenly. “She’s been visiting her mother twice a week for 2 years. If that woman even exists, she might know where they went.”
Detective Chen nodded.
“We’ll need that address.”
I gave her the address Jolene had given me for her mother’s apartment, though I realized now I had no idea if it was real. Everything Jolene had told me was suspect.
“Mr. Hartwell, I want you to understand something,” Detective Chen said as she gathered her paperwork. “The people who did this to you are sophisticated criminals. This wasn’t a crime of opportunity or desperation. This was a carefully planned, long-term operation designed to steal your entire life savings and possibly your life itself.”
“How long do you think they’ve been doing this?”
“Based on the level of organization and the quality of the forged documents, this isn’t their first time. There are probably other victims out there who don’t even know they’ve been robbed yet.”
After Detective Chen left, I sat alone in my house, or what used to be my house, trying to process everything I’d learned.
The woman I’d loved for 5 years was a professional criminal. The life we’d built together was an elaborate con game. Even the house I was sitting in had been stolen from me through forged documents and identity theft.
But what scared me most was realizing how close I’d come to losing everything, including my life.
If I hadn’t gotten that call from the bank, if Margaret hadn’t been suspicious, if I hadn’t found those documents when I did, I might have disappeared entirely. Another accident victim in a scheme that had probably claimed other lives.
My phone rang just after 7 in the morning.
Margaret from the bank.
“Mr. Hartwell, I got your message. Are you all right?”
“I’m alive, which is apparently better than I should have expected,” I said, and told her about what I’d found.
“Dear God,” she said when I finished. “Mr. Hartwell, there’s something else you need to know. I did some more research after you left yesterday, and I found evidence of similar attempts at other banks in the area. Different names, different faces, but the same pattern. Couples where one spouse gradually gains access to all the other’s financial information. Then a man appears who looks remarkably like the victim.”
“How many other cases?”
“At least three that I can find just in our area. And Mr. Hartwell, in two of those cases, the original account holder died in accidents shortly after large sums of money were withdrawn from their accounts.”
The room started spinning around me.
Two people were dead. Two people who had probably trusted their spouses the same way I trusted Jolene, who had probably never suspected they were being set up until it was too late.
“There’s something else,” Margaret continued. “I checked your account this morning, and there was another attempt to access it last night. At 3:17 a.m., someone tried to transfer your entire retirement savings to an offshore account.”
“Did it go through?”
“No. After yesterday’s incident, we put a hold on all transactions. But Mr. Hartwell, they’re not giving up. They’re still actively trying to steal from you, even after their cover was blown.”
I thought about the timeline I’d found. The plan that had been so carefully laid out over 2 years. They’d invested too much time and effort into this to walk away empty-handed.
They were going to keep coming for me until they got what they wanted or until someone stopped them.
“What do I do now?” I asked.
“You stay somewhere safe and you let the police handle this. But Mr. Hartwell, you need to understand that these people are desperate now. Their plan failed, their cover is blown, and they’ve got nothing left to lose. That makes them extremely dangerous.”
As I hung up the phone, I realized I was no longer safe in my own home. The people who had been stealing my life for 2 years knew every detail about my routines, my habits, my hiding places. They knew when I left for work, when I came home, when I was vulnerable, and now they knew I discovered their plan.
I packed a bag with essential documents and clothes, then drove to a hotel across town. I paid cash and used a fake name, something I’d seen in movies, but never thought I’d need to do in real life.
As I sat in that anonymous hotel room staring out at the parking lot, I tried to figure out what I’d done wrong. How had I been so blind? How had I lived with someone for 5 years without seeing who she really was?
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Jolene hadn’t just been pretending to love me. She’d been studying me, learning my weaknesses, my blind spots, my capacity for trust. Every kiss, every conversation, every moment of intimacy had been data collection for a criminal operation.
I’d been married to a predator who looked like the woman of my dreams.
And somewhere out there, she and her brother were planning their next move.
I stayed in that hotel for 3 days, jumping at every sound in the hallway, checking the locks on my door every few hours. Detective Chen called twice daily with updates. But the news wasn’t good.
Jolene and Marcus had vanished completely. The address Jolene had given me for her mother’s apartment turned out to be a vacant unit that had been empty for 6 months. The bank account they tried to transfer money to was closed within hours of the failed attempt, and the trail went cold there.
But on the third day, Detective Chen called with news that made my blood run cold.
“Mr. Hartwell, we need to meet. There’s something you need to see, and it’s not something I want to discuss over the phone.”
We met at a coffee shop downtown, far from anywhere Jolene would know to look for me. Detective Chen looked tired, like she’d been working around the clock, and the folder in her hands was thick with new documents.
“We’ve been investigating the other cases I mentioned,” she said, sliding into the booth across from me. “And we’ve uncovered something much bigger than we initially thought.”
She opened the folder and pulled out a series of photographs.
“Do you recognize any of these people?”
I looked at the photos. Three couples, all appearing happy and in love. In each photo, the women looked different. Different hair colors, different styles of dress, different facial structures.
But something about their expressions was familiar. A calculating quality in their eyes that reminded me of Jolene.
“I don’t recognize them,” I said.
“Look closer at the men.”
I studied the male faces in the photos, and my stomach dropped. They all looked like variations of the same person. Different hairstyles, different clothing, but the same basic bone structure, the same facial proportions.
They looked like brothers.
“These are all Marcus?” I asked.
“We think so. We think Marcus Reeves, or whatever his real name is, has been assuming different identities and targeting men who fit a specific profile. Financially stable, socially isolated, trusting personalities.”
Detective Chen pulled out another set of documents.
“And the women aren’t random either. We think they’re all the same person.”
I stared at her.
“What do you mean?”
“Plastic surgery, hair dye, colored contacts, even dental work to change the shape of her face. The woman you knew as Jolene has been married at least four times under different names. Each time, she and Marcus spent two to three years setting up their victims, then they drain their assets and disappear.”
The coffee in my cup had gone cold, but I couldn’t have swallowed it anyway.