Chapter 6 - The Accomplices Fall
With Derek and Lydia behind bars awaiting arraignment, the web of accomplices who had helped facilitate the fraud began to unravel with breathtaking speed.
The disgraced notary public—a man named Henderson who had traded his professional ethics for pocket cash from Lydia—was picked up by state investigators late Tuesday night. Facing twenty years in federal prison for multiple counts of notary fraud and conspiracy, Henderson didn't even wait for a lawyer to be appointed. He sang like a canary.
He confessed that Lydia had approached him two weeks before Sarah’s due date, offering five thousand dollars if he backdated a quitclaim deed and notarized it using a forged signature. He even admitted that Lydia had brought a woman matching her own physical build to sign the document in a dimly lit parking lot while Sarah was confined to her hospital bed.
The hospital administration was brought into the crosshairs as well.
Garrison’s legal team discovered that one of the administrative assistants processing Sarah’s intake paperwork was Derek’s cousin. She had discreetly slipped the fraudulent quitclaim deed into Sarah’s stack of admission documents, banking on the fact that a woman in active labor would sign whatever was placed in front of her without reading every line of the fine print.
By Wednesday morning, the hospital had terminated the employee with cause and issued a public statement condemning the breach of patient privacy and administrative trust.
The local news coverage was unrelenting. Headlines blared across the front page of The Oak Haven Chronicle: REAL ESTATE FRAUD SCANDAL ROCKS LOCAL ELITE; PROMINENT DEVELOPER ARRESTED.
For years, Derek and Lydia had cultivated an image of untouchable success in Oak Haven, looking down on working-class families and treating everyone around them as stepping stones for their own social climbing. Now, their names were synonymous with criminality, cowardice, and public disgrace.
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When Derek’s remaining business partners realized the extent of the financial embezzlement and fraudulent collateralization, they descended upon his corporate accounts like starving wolves, seizing every remaining vehicle, piece of office equipment, and luxury asset to recover their losses.
By Thursday afternoon, the Bennett name in Oak Haven wasn't just ruined; it was entirely extinct.
