The lawyer’s name was Carol Whitmore.
She was a retired federal public defender. She’d spent twenty-eight years in the Southern District of Ohio defending people the government was sure were guilty. She’d gotten nine wrongful convictions overturned in her career.
She was sixty-four, with short gray hair, a navy pantsuit and the fastest reading speed I’d ever seen.
She sat in Russell’s office for three hours going through everything. The deed. The mortgage. Monica’s text to Opal. The photos from the yard. My notebook with the gray sedan. And the box of documents I’d hidden in Dad’s tackle box at my aunt’s house in Delaware County, which my Aunt Ruth had driven down that morning.
When she was done, she took off her reading glasses.
“Rebecca,” she said. “We’re going to do two things. Right away.”
“First, the house. Today, I’m filing a lawsuit in Franklin County Common Pleas Court to quiet title. That means we ask a judge to declare that the deed to Brand Road Holdings is void because it was forged. And at the same time, we’ll record a notice of pending lawsuit on the property. It’s called a lis pendens. It goes in the public records. Any title company that looks at that house will see it.”
“What does that do?”
“It means no title company in Ohio will insure that sale,” Carol said. “And without title insurance, no buyer’s bank will lend the money. The sale will stop dead.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
“And the second thing?”
Carol picked up a thick yellowed folder from my father’s tackle box.
“The second thing is your conviction,” she said.
Inside that folder was something I’d almost forgotten about.
Before I was arrested, in December of 2019, I’d been sitting in Loretta’s hospital room at Riverside Methodist one night when the hospital Wi-Fi went down. I needed to check the bank account. So I asked the night nurse, a woman named Janelle, if I could use the computer at the nurses’ station.
She told me no. Hospital policy.
So I didn’t check. For seven weeks, I barely logged into the company bank account at all. I was too busy with Loretta.
But Monica had my login. Monica had my security token. I’d given them both to her two years earlier so she could process payroll when I was traveling.
“Your trial lawyer argued that you were at the hospital,” Carol said. “But the government said you could have made the transfers from your phone. And nobody could prove you didn’t.”
“That’s right.”
“Did anybody ever subpoena the bank’s IP address records?”
I stared at her.
“The what?”
“Every time somebody logs into online banking, the bank records the internet address of the computer or phone they used,” Russell said. “It’s like a digital fingerprint. It shows roughly where the login came from.”
“My lawyer never asked for that,” I said.
Carol and Russell looked at each other.
“Then we’re going to,” Carol said.
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