“Do it,” I said. “And Trent? I need access to the public records database. The paid tier.”
He didn’t ask why. He just typed in his credentials.
For the rest of the afternoon, I didn’t write code. I dug.
I started with the obvious: my parents’ bank accounts. Or rather, the ones they thought were private. My mother was the treasurer for the Greenleaf Charity Gala, a local prestige event. My father was a ‘consultant’ for small businesses. Melissa was… well, Melissa was a spender.
I pulled tax records. I pulled credit card statements linked to our home address. I pulled email archives from the shared family cloud they thought I didn’t have the password to.
What I found wasn’t just mismanagement. It was criminal.
There were “loans” taken out in my grandmother’s name three years after she died. There were invoices for “event coordination” from the charity gala paid directly to a shell company registered to Melissa—funds that were used to buy designer handbags and trips to Tulum. My father had been taking “consulting fees” from contractors to overlook zoning violations on properties he managed.
