She was seventy-four, lived with her husband near Toledo, and had received messages from a man claiming to be their estranged nephew.
The voice told Hazel that the nephew had been forced to work for a technology specialist named Evan Reed in Bellhaven.
The voice supplied my home address and said police would arrest the nephew if she contacted them.
Hazel had not sent money.
She had called an old colleague who recognized the pattern of a scam and helped her report it.
Detective Ward contacted me only after Hazel agreed to share the recordings for examination.
I was not permitted to call Hazel directly, and I had no wish to invade her privacy.
The voice on her message did not resemble Molly’s.
Yet the metallic click at the eight-second point was almost identical.
The files also shared an unusual drop in the right audio channel for a fraction of a second.
That technical similarity suggested they had passed through the same recording chain or export process.
It did not identify the person who made them.
“The equipment is ordinary,” I warned Alina during our next meeting.
“Many recording programs could produce this artifact.”
“Could someone deliberately copy it?”
“Absolutely.
If they knew it was being used as a fingerprint, they could add it to mislead us.”
She smiled faintly.
“You keep removing my shortcuts.”
“Shortcuts are why people are accusing me of kidnapping a teenager.”
The smile disappeared.
“Fair point.”
The fourth week after the attack, Gloria received a letter from a bank she did not recognize.
It thanked her for applying for a home-equity loan.
The amount was sixty-eight thousand dollars.
She called Marian first.
Then she called Rachel Soto.
Together they contacted the bank’s fraud department and secured the application records through the appropriate process.
Gloria had not applied for the loan.
The application used her name, her birth date, and an old copy of her driver’s license.
The phone number belonged to a prepaid account.
The email address resembled hers except for one extra letter.
A scanned signature appeared to have been pasted from another document.
Gloria remembered signing paperwork that Derek had brought over in a yellow folder during the first week of Molly’s disappearance.
He had told her he needed proof that the house was insured because reporters might arrive.
She had been too exhausted to ask why.
Now the yellow folder took on a different meaning.
Marian asked Derek to attend a family meeting.
