Page 61 of Raff
I’d only been inside once before, when I’d been working on something with the Golden Glades crew. But as I parked, I mentally prepared myself for the mess I would find inside: the overflowing trash, the flat surfaces covered in coffee cups, the laundry that was scattered and musty smelling.
So when I pushed open the door, I was shocked to find it relatively clean inside.
Did he finally learn how to keep house?
Or had his friends simply hired someone to handle things for him?
Arty was sitting at his desk, his multiple monitors casting his face in a blue glow.
“Do you ever lock your door? This isn’t the nicest neighborhood.”
“Knew you were coming,” Arty said, squinting at something as he scrolled so quickly that I got queasy when I tried to look.
“So, you found something?”
“I found a lot of things.”
“About Not-Drake.”
“Actually, his name is Drake. Conmen use the same first name a lot,” he explained, clicking around, bringing up nearly a dozen different pages, layering them on top of each other. “But his last name isn’t Holland, obviously. He’s been Drake Holland, Hammond, Burr, Calvin, Valentin, Murphy…”
“So, he’s a lifelong conman.”
“That he is. Hundreds of victims all over the world. Only one managed to get a picture of him, though. About five years back.”
He clicked to a screen and produced the image.
And, yeah, that checked.
The guy looked exactly like the kind of man Lula could have seen a future with. Tall, handsome, well-groomed, that confident air of a man who had done well in life.
Mix that with the on-paper qualifications that must have been impressive enough for her to believe he was someone safe and successful enough to put her trust in. To invest her savings in.
“So, I’m guessing he has no social media.”
“Never, from what I can tell. Though, there are a lot more holes in the internet than there used to be. That whole ‘the internet is forever’ thing isn’t as true as they try to make us believe.”
“How far back were you able to track him?”
“That’s what took so long. He has moved around… hundreds of times. All through his life. Back to elementary school.”
“Army brat?”
“Son of a conman,” Arty told me. He flipped the screen. “Meet Declan Martin.”
“Did he run real estate cons?”
“No. He liked the classics. He ran Casanova cons.”
“Sweetheart cons? He made rich women fall in love with him.”
“Then drained them dry and left them penniless. One after another after another. All across the United States. Even a few abroad.”
“And he dragged his son along with him.”
“A good way to disarm women who might otherwise be suspicious of strange, charming, handsome men.”
“Good point. So Drake watched his old man con women his whole life. No mom?”
