Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 75323 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75323 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Did he finally learn how to keep house?
Or had his friends simply hired someone to handle things for him?
Arty was sitting at his desk, his multiple monitors casting his face in a blue glow.
“Do you ever lock your door? This isn’t the nicest neighborhood.”
“Knew you were coming,” Arty said, squinting at something as he scrolled so quickly that I got queasy when I tried to look.
“So, you found something?”
“I found a lot of things.”
“About Not-Drake.”
“Actually, his name is Drake. Conmen use the same first name a lot,” he explained, clicking around, bringing up nearly a dozen different pages, layering them on top of each other. “But his last name isn’t Holland, obviously. He’s been Drake Holland, Hammond, Burr, Calvin, Valentin, Murphy…”
“So, he’s a lifelong conman.”
“That he is. Hundreds of victims all over the world. Only one managed to get a picture of him, though. About five years back.”
He clicked to a screen and produced the image.
And, yeah, that checked.
The guy looked exactly like the kind of man Lula could have seen a future with. Tall, handsome, well-groomed, that confident air of a man who had done well in life.
Mix that with the on-paper qualifications that must have been impressive enough for her to believe he was someone safe and successful enough to put her trust in. To invest her savings in.
“So, I’m guessing he has no social media.”
“Never, from what I can tell. Though, there are a lot more holes in the internet than there used to be. That whole ‘the internet is forever’ thing isn’t as true as they try to make us believe.”
“How far back were you able to track him?”
“That’s what took so long. He has moved around… hundreds of times. All through his life. Back to elementary school.”
“Army brat?”
“Son of a conman,” Arty told me. He flipped the screen. “Meet Declan Martin.”
“Did he run real estate cons?”
“No. He liked the classics. He ran Casanova cons.”
“Sweetheart cons? He made rich women fall in love with him.”
“Then drained them dry and left them penniless. One after another after another. All across the United States. Even a few abroad.”
“And he dragged his son along with him.”
“A good way to disarm women who might otherwise be suspicious of strange, charming, handsome men.”
“Good point. So Drake watched his old man con women his whole life. No mom?”
“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.