“Tell me.”
“By Shelley Loveday Adams, acting with Roger’s power of attorney!”
I was beyond stunned. “Good work, Todd,” I said. “I’ll get right on these.”
Clambering out of bed, I made straight for my iPad. It was almost out of juice, so I had to sit at the desk to keep it on the charger. During that morning’s interviews, I’d kept both my phone and iPad on silent, so I hadn’t heard the arriving pings of Todd’s barrage of e-mails.
I started with the ones labeled “Real Estate Transactions.” When you’re reading through page after page of legalese, it doesn’t take much for your eyes to blur over and your mind to go numb. In each instance the closing had been finalized by an employee at the same office of Alaskan Title in Anchorage. The sales agreements had all been signed by Shelley, and a copy of the notarized power-of-attorney document accompanied each bill of sale, verifying her ability to sign in Roger’s stead.
Prior to this I had never seen a power-of-attorney form before. It appeared to be a readily available template that had to be filled out, signed, witnessed, and notarized. The notary turned out to be someone named Tracy Hamilton, whose place of employment was listed as an Anchorage branch of the First Alaska National Bank. The names of the two people who had signed the form as witnesses weren’t familiar to me, but I suspected they were most likely some of Tracy’s fellow bank employees who’d been drafted to guarantee the authenticity of the signatures on the documents. I was about to move on when I noticed the date on the document in my hand—November 6, 2018. That made my weary eyes pop wide open.
November 6? That was only a little over a month ago. The last time Helen Sinclair saw Roger Adams in the flesh had been at the end of September. If he’d become ill at some point after that, his decline had to have been incredibly rapid. When I saw him yesterday, Roger had appeared to be at death’s door. So how had he been a little over a month ago? What had been his physical condition then? Would he have been well enough at that point to travel back and forth between Homer and Anchorage and to show up in person at a bank branch? And why go that far? I wondered. If someone living in Homer needed a notary public, wouldn’t they go looking for one that was less than a four-hour drive away?
I made a note of Tracy Hamilton’s name and the bank-branch location on my Reminders app so I’d be able to call her first thing on Monday morning to ask about all this. Then I returned to analyzing the sales agreements. They were full of the usual gobbledygook, boilerplate legalese that in my opinion is usually designed to cover the behinds of the real-estate agents involved rather than to offer any genuine protection for either buyer or seller. It wasn’t until the very last page of the first one that I hit the bombshell—and that came in the final section, the one outlining the disbursal of funds.
Proceeds of all three sales were to be wired to a numbered joint account belonging to Roger D. Adams and Shelley Lorraine Adams. So far so good, but the kicker came in the address details. It turns out that the joint account was held in trust by the First Commercial Bank of Sri Lanka, with headquarters in Colombo!
Sri Lanka? I’d heard the name, of course, but I had to check on my iPad to come up with the country’s exact location on the planet—just north of a group of islands called the Maldives where the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean meet up. Once I knew that much, it didn’t take long to sort out that in terms of offshore banking, institutions located in the Maldives are considered to be among the top ten of preferred options for one simple reason: Funds deposited there are well out of reach of scrutiny and oversight from the IRS!
Bingo. Who do you suppose had opened that account? Todd had yet to provide an answer to that question, but I for one was reasonably sure that Roger Adams himself had absolutely no idea that his name was attached to a numbered account in the wilds of Sri Lanka. And right now I was willing to bet good money that he hadn’t been physically present at that notary’s office in Anchorage either.
And suddenly I had a clearer view of what Shelley’s game plan was. She didn’t need Roger dead. She was keeping him alive and under wraps while she systematically liquidated his assets and looted his estate. Once the funds landed in Sri Lanka, she’d be able to transfer them to an account listed in her name only. Ultimately, when Roger died, it wouldn’t matter in the least if he’d rewritten his will, because what had once been a multimillion-dollar estate would have been drained dry.