Acts of Desperation(63)

“Ok,” I said. “I remember you mentioning that, but what was weird about it?”

“Anders admitted to having a living trust.”

“A living trust?” I scowled.

“Yes, and it contained sixty thousand dollars. He requested, and Sarah agreed to, a funeral costing no more than twenty thousand dollars to be paid from said trust. He wants a grand display with horse drawn carriages, bag pipes, and a twenty-one gun salute so that everyone can celebrate his life.”

“Geez, that’s not narcissistic at all,” I said with a chuckle.

Jax laughed. “I know, but Sarah agreed and I was through arguing. But here is the red flag. He asked that it state—in these specific words—that the remainder of his estate, not his trust, but estate be divided up evenly between the two boys. Sarah thinks the remainder of the trust will be twenty thousand each, available when they turn eighteen so they have a small college fund. Anders knows the children and their security is a major weak spot for Sarah so he used that against her. And, I chose not to poke the sleeping dragon on his choice of terminology. He assumes everyone around him is dumb and he’s far superior so I let him think that, playing into his personality disorder. Again, in the meantime, Sarah raises the children and struggles, for years possibly, but when the money is found, it’s his one last ‘got ya’ from the grave.”

“What a complete shit.”

“He truly is.”

“I can’t believe he has a living trust. What a total slime ball.”

“I couldn’t agree more, but it was just another desperate measure to avert a financial mishap and to protect himself. So he had me write in that the amount left in his estate would go to the children. But of course, if Anders and Sarah weren’t divorced, the money obviously would have gone to Sarah.”

“God,” I said, shaking my head, and then slumped back in the chair. I knew Anders was conniving, but hearing and realizing all that he did was still shocking. He’d started protecting himself years before Sarah even suspected anything. He established his business so that it was worth nothing without him. He creatively cut his income and blamed it on Sarah so her support was cut in half. And now hearing that he’d established a living trust made me furious. But, I knew there was more and I craved the details. “So, what’s left in your discovery?”

“The big chunk of missing money I found. It’s the most devious thing he’s done yet.”

“I can’t wait to hear.”

“So right after he collapsed in our office that day, I started looking at his travel history. Sarah said he was always gone so it seemed the most logical place. I eliminated quite a few locations as nothing out of the ordinary when I found clients in each of those states. But what struck me most were his repeated trips to New York.”

“Yeah, Sarah said he went there a lot,” I said.

“But what I found most curious was he doesn’t have any clients there,” he added.

“Really,” I said. “That is interesting.”

“Even more so was while he was in New York, there’s no information on where he stayed—no hotel records, and Sarah said he’d be gone for a week at a time. I highly doubt he was sleeping in a car.”

“He could have had a girlfriend in the area. I hear he had plenty,” I said.

“It was a possibility. He started traveling there as soon as he started his business. But I noticed the trips to New York spiked shortly after Sarah filed for divorce. So I looked at his phone records. Surely if he had a girl in the area he would have been calling whoever she was a lot, right?”

“Right.” I nodded.

“But there weren’t any of those either.”

“O-k.”

“So then why was he going there so often? He didn’t appear to be staying anywhere, there were no phone calls to anyone in the area, and no clients to justify the trips—he was essentially off the grid for a week at a time.”

“Couldn’t he have used cash for the hotels? Cash doesn’t leave a trail.”

“Yes, but hotels still require a credit card to hold a reservation and human beings are creatures of habit. He used his credit card for everything, but it still wouldn’t explain the absence of phone records.” I sat, perplexed. “So I wondered, what does New York have that other cities don’t?”

“What?” I asked.

“Airports. New York is a huge travelling hub and you can go anywhere in the world from there.”

“Very true.” I agreed. “But so is Cincinnati.”

He chuckled. “Not as big as New York. And obviously he wanted it to look like he had business there. And side note, I’m not ruling this out as a possible location of a large real estate purchase that we don’t know about yet.”

“Oh my gosh! I’m such an idiot. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you’re an honest person. Honest people don’t do these things.”

“True,” I said, shaking my head while silently beating myself up for having been so obtuse.

“So then, I went through all of his credit card receipts—there has to be over a thousand in here. He deducted travel expenses from his taxes so he was meticulous with keeping track of those. Then I discovered a receipt buried deep within the rest whose number didn’t match any of the others. But what was most interesting was…it was in French.”