My Business Partner Forged My Signature to Sell Our Company. He Forgot I Kept the Original Napkin.

Part 3: The Long Game

Tom listened to the recording twice.

Then he called a friend of his at the FBI’s Charlotte field office.

Here is what I learned about forgery and interstate wire fraud over the next four months.

It does not move fast. It does not move the way it moves on television. There is no dramatic raid. There is no perp walk. There are subpoenas that take weeks to be answered, and forensic document examiners with waiting lists, and grand juries that meet on schedules set by people you will never meet.

What there is, if you are patient, is a paper trail.

The FBI subpoenaed the notary who had stamped the forged documents. She was a woman named Brenda who worked out of a UPS store in Gastonia. When shown the signatures she had allegedly witnessed, she said she had no memory of me. When shown a photograph of me, she said she had never seen me before in her life. When shown a photograph of Derek, she said, yes, that man had come in twice, and had brought papers already signed, and had paid her three hundred dollars in cash each time to stamp them without the second party present.

She had kept the cash in an envelope in her desk drawer. She had written Derek’s name on the envelope. She had done this, she told the agents, because she had a feeling.

People have feelings. This is a thing I have learned.

The forensic document examiner compared the signatures on the sale paperwork to fourteen samples of my actual signature going back a decade. The report was forty-one pages long. The conclusion was one sentence. The signatures on the Halverson sale documents were not written by Elaine Marsh.

Halverson Group, when presented with all of this, was not happy. They had wired four point two million dollars for a company that had not, legally, been theirs to buy. Their lawyers began sending Derek letters. Then they began sending Derek’s lawyers letters. Then they filed suit.

Through all of this I did nothing publicly. I went to work every day. Derek and I passed each other in the hall and I said good morning and he said good morning and we did not otherwise speak. The employees knew something was wrong. They did not know what.

I kept the napkin photo in my phone. I looked at it sometimes at night. My handwriting from eight years ago, younger and rounder. Derek’s handwriting next to mine, the D of Derek in the same confident loop he still used. Below the signatures, in my writing, three words I had forgotten I wrote until I zoomed in on the photo one night in bed.

*Trust is everything.*

I had written that on the napkin. I had written it and Derek had signed underneath it.

I stopped looking at the photo after that.

In February, five months after the wire transfer, the federal indictment came down. Wire fraud, forgery, identity theft. Derek was arrested at his home on a Wednesday morning. I did not see it. I heard about it from Marcy, who called me in tears.

“Elaine, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have told you. He told me, he told me you knew, he told me it was all agreed.”

“Marcy,” I said. “It’s okay. Come to work tomorrow. We have a lot to do.”

I did not entirely mean the okay. I said it anyway. Marcy had a daughter in community college and a husband on disability and she had been afraid, and I was not going to add to what she had already been carrying.

Halverson’s civil suit against Derek settled fast, because Derek had no leverage and a lot to lose. Most of the four point two million came back. Halverson, having no interest in owning a company they had never legally purchased, unwound the deal.

Brightline Logistics was mine again.

Sixty-forty. In my favor. As it had always been.

Derek’s personal assets, what was left of them after his legal fees, were part of a separate civil suit I filed for damages, emotional distress, and breach of fiduciary duty. My attorney told me to ask for eight hundred thousand. We settled for six-fifty. He would pay it in installments over the next twelve years, out of whatever he earned after his release, which the prosecutor was estimating at four to seven years in federal prison.

Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, over twelve years, from a man who had tried to steal two and a half million from me in an afternoon.

I signed the settlement papers on a Tuesday. My hand shook a little.

I thought I would feel triumphant. I did not.

I felt tired.

I drove home from Tom’s office and I sat in my kitchen and I did not turn on the lights. My daughter called from college and I let it go to voicemail. The cat came and sat on my feet.

Around nine at night the doorbell rang.

I was not expecting anyone.

I looked through the peephole.

It was Marcy. She was holding something wrapped in a grocery bag.

I opened the door.

“I didn’t want to give this to you at the office,” she said. “I found it last week. In the back of Derek’s bottom desk drawer. Under some old files.”

She held out the grocery bag.

I already knew what it was.

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