kingdom.
Freddie closed the door, and they both sat in the visitor chairs while Haverson settled behind his desk.
Sam glanced at Freddie and lifted her chin to tell him to get things started.
“How do you know Ginny McLeod?” Freddie took the baton and ran with it the way she’d taught him.
Haverson grimaced ever so slightly at the mention of Ginny’s name. “She was my wife’s high school classmate. They were close all through school and after. She and her husband were our friends.”
“Were. Past tense.”
“Hell yes, past tense. She ruined my life.”
“How so?” Sam asked, wanting to hear the story in his words.
He stared at Sam as if he couldn’t believe she was actually asking that question. “She stole more than two hundred thousand dollars from us.”
“How did she do that?” Sam asked.
Continuing with the stare, he said, “Surely you’ve taken the time to review the details of her scam before you came to my place of business to interrogate me. It’s all in the FBI reports.”
“Mr. Haverson, I’m not appreciating your tone. We have a murder victim, which gives us the right to ask any questions we see fit.”
“Good luck finding anyone who cares that she’s dead. You’ll have a long line of people celebrating her demise.”
“Including you?”
“Fuck, yes. I’m glad she’s dead. Did I kill her? No, but I’m glad someone else did. She had it coming.”
“No one has murder coming,” Sam said.
“They do when they steal someone’s life savings so they’ll never be able to retire or help their kids through college. People like her deserve anything and everything they get.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree on whether anyone deserves to be murdered. Tell me how the money was transferred. I can read the reports, but I’d prefer to hear it from you.”
Seeming to realize he was going to have to tell her what she wanted to know, he began to speak in a tightly controlled tone that seemed almost practiced, as if it was something he’d taught himself to get through the retelling of this story.
“She came to my wife, Clarissa, with an ‘opportunity’ that she felt we’d be interested in. She was putting together a group of investors to purchase an abandoned building in Gaithersburg and turn it into high-end condos, shops and restaurants. She had prospectuses, charts, graphs, everything you’d need to believe it was legit. We toured the building with a Realtor, who gave us even more information about how the place would be a gold mine once the renovation was finished. They were looking for two hundred highly motivated investors who would each own a piece of the pie and reap the benefits, which were touted to be sizable.”
He took a deep breath and released it, sagging a bit as his tale unfolded. “My wife and I were intrigued. Ginny and Ken had done well. Really well. They had the fancy house and the fancy cars and the fancy vacations, while we were slogging away at well-paying jobs without really getting ahead. We wanted what they had, and we felt like she was showing us how to make that happen. So I cashed in a chunk of my 401(k), took a huge hit on taxes and early-withdrawal penalties and sent her a check.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing for a while. We kept hearing she was still working out the purchase details. These things are highly complex, she’d say when Clarissa asked for updates. I tried to stay chill about it, because investing is always about patience. When six months went by without anything happening, I started getting worried, especially when I saw on Facebook that Ginny and Ken were on a trip to Greece while I was waiting to hear that our investment was moving forward.”
Sam took notes as he talked, processing the details and turning them over in her mind. “When did you start to fear you’d been scammed?”
“When the building we were supposedly buying sold to someone other than Ginny.”
“How did you find that out?”
“I keep an eye on real estate transactions in our area, just out of curiosity about what’s selling and for how much. The building we were supposedly investing in sold for two point two million about eight months after we gave Ginny the money.”
“What did you do when you saw that?”
“At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I went online to confirm the building was actually the same one. After I confirmed that it was, Clarissa and I went to their house. Their cars were in the