Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(75)

Prior to this I had never seen a power-of-attorney form before. It appeared to be a readily available template that had to be filled out, signed, witnessed, and notarized. The notary turned out to be someone named Tracy Hamilton, whose place of employment was listed as an Anchorage branch of the First Alaska National Bank. The names of the two people who had signed the form as witnesses weren’t familiar to me, but I suspected they were most likely some of Tracy’s fellow bank employees who’d been drafted to guarantee the authenticity of the signatures on the documents. I was about to move on when I noticed the date on the document in my hand—November 6, 2018. That made my weary eyes pop wide open.

November 6? That was only a little over a month ago. The last time Helen Sinclair saw Roger Adams in the flesh had been at the end of September. If he’d become ill at some point after that, his decline had to have been incredibly rapid. When I saw him yesterday, Roger had appeared to be at death’s door. So how had he been a little over a month ago? What had been his physical condition then? Would he have been well enough at that point to travel back and forth between Homer and Anchorage and to show up in person at a bank branch? And why go that far? I wondered. If someone living in Homer needed a notary public, wouldn’t they go looking for one that was less than a four-hour drive away?

I made a note of Tracy Hamilton’s name and the bank-branch location on my Reminders app so I’d be able to call her first thing on Monday morning to ask about all this. Then I returned to analyzing the sales agreements. They were full of the usual gobbledygook, boilerplate legalese that in my opinion is usually designed to cover the behinds of the real-estate agents involved rather than to offer any genuine protection for either buyer or seller. It wasn’t until the very last page of the first one that I hit the bombshell—and that came in the final section, the one outlining the disbursal of funds.

Proceeds of all three sales were to be wired to a numbered joint account belonging to Roger D. Adams and Shelley Lorraine Adams. So far so good, but the kicker came in the address details. It turns out that the joint account was held in trust by the First Commercial Bank of Sri Lanka, with headquarters in Colombo!

Sri Lanka? I’d heard the name, of course, but I had to check on my iPad to come up with the country’s exact location on the planet—just north of a group of islands called the Maldives where the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean meet up. Once I knew that much, it didn’t take long to sort out that in terms of offshore banking, institutions located in the Maldives are considered to be among the top ten of preferred options for one simple reason: Funds deposited there are well out of reach of scrutiny and oversight from the IRS!

Bingo. Who do you suppose had opened that account? Todd had yet to provide an answer to that question, but I for one was reasonably sure that Roger Adams himself had absolutely no idea that his name was attached to a numbered account in the wilds of Sri Lanka. And right now I was willing to bet good money that he hadn’t been physically present at that notary’s office in Anchorage either.

And suddenly I had a clearer view of what Shelley’s game plan was. She didn’t need Roger dead. She was keeping him alive and under wraps while she systematically liquidated his assets and looted his estate. Once the funds landed in Sri Lanka, she’d be able to transfer them to an account listed in her name only. Ultimately, when Roger died, it wouldn’t matter in the least if he’d rewritten his will, because what had once been a multimillion-dollar estate would have been drained dry.

So Shelley Loveday Adams wasn’t just a suspected serial killer, she was most likely also engaged in wire fraud. As long as there were some properties still in Roger’s name, the man probably wasn’t in immediate danger, but I wanted that woman brought to justice before she had a chance to grab all his money and run. Suddenly waiting around until Monday to speak to the notary from the bank branch in Anchorage was no longer acceptable. I needed her number, and I needed it now!

Law-enforcement agencies have access to databases that aren’t available to the public. There’s better than a fifty-fifty chance that Todd Hatcher shouldn’t be able to utilize some of the ones he uses on a regular basis. But this time things were different. If in the near future someone from the FBI came around asking how it was that I happened to know so much about Shelley Adams’s clandestine dealings, I needed to be able to show them that I had connected all those dots in an aboveboard fashion.

With that in mind, I picked up the phone and dialed Anchorage detective Hank Frazier’s cell.

“Hey, Beau,” he said. “What’s up? Did you ever cross paths with Marvin Price?”

“I sure did,” I told him. “He’s been a huge help. We have a lead on a vehicle that might have been involved in my missing-persons disappearance. We’re hoping that we may still be able to obtain forensic evidence from that.”

“Good to hear,” Hank said, “though from your tone of voice, I expect there’s a but coming.”

“You’ve got me there,” I said. “I do have a but, and it’s a big one. I still need your help.”

“What kind?”

“There’s a good chance my person of interest in the original case is now involved in some fraudulent real-estate transactions that will deplete her ailing husband’s estate and leave him virtually penniless while she’s living it up on proceeds transferred to offshore accounts.”