The lien on my father’s estate was real, and liens have clocks.

Somewhere out there a lender was waiting to collect on a debt my father didn’t know he owed, secured by a signature he didn’t write, and if I spent the next week weeping in a hotel, they would take my family’s home before my family even understood it was in danger.

The man who did this had counted on my grief to keep me slow.

It was going to be the thing that made me fast.

I photographed the last of the folder, closed the safe exactly as I’d found it, and walked out to my car as the sky over the foothills began to go gray.

Chapter 15 — The Forensic Accountant