Chapter 6 - The Unraveling of the "Alien Empire"
The arrest of Lauren Reynolds was only the preliminary detonation; the real structural collapse began forty-eight hours later when Arthur Sterling opened the digital vault on her business filings.
Because Lauren had been booked on felony child endangerment and fraud charges, the Glendale Police Department secured a secondary search warrant for her digital devices, seizing her desktop tower, two laptops, and the external hard drives she used to manage her online merchandise business.
On Monday morning, Arthur Sterling walked into my North Hollywood workshop carrying two hot coffees and a fresh, four-inch-thick binder bound in black vinyl.
He didn't say hello. He set the coffee on my fabrication bench, kicked an empty plaster bucket out of the way, and sat on a wooden stool beside my half-painted swamp-demon torso.
“Harriet,” Arthur said, his eyes glittering behind his thick spectacles with the dark, clinical satisfaction of a pathologist who had just identified a rare parasite. “Your sister is not just an entitled grifter. She is an exceptionally clumsy white-collar criminal.”
I set my detail brush down in a jar of lacquer thinner. “What did you find, Arthur?”
Arthur flipped the black binder open to the first tab: a series of scanned, notarized deeds from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office.
“Let’s start with your mother’s house in Glendale,” Arthur said. “You’ve been paying the property taxes and the HOA fees for ten years because Ruth told you her pension from the Glendale Unified School District barely covered her groceries and medical copays, correct?”
“Yes,” I replied, my stomach tightening into a hard, cold knot. “Ruth said she was living on fourteen hundred dollars a month.”
“Ruth’s pension is thirty-eight hundred dollars a month,” Arthur said flatly. “And she has an annuity from your father’s life insurance that pays an additional twelve hundred on the first of every quarter.”
I froze. “What?”
“Your mother wasn't broke, Harriet,” Arthur explained, turning the page. “Your mother was funneling sixty percent of her liquid income directly into Lauren’s bank accounts for five years. But that’s not the crime. Look at this indenture dated March 2023.”
I looked at the document.
It was a Home Equity Line of Credit—a HELOC—issued by Bank of America against the Glendale property for the sum of $210,000.00.
The signature on the borrower line read: RUTH M. REYNOLDS.
Beside it, on the co-signer and power-of-attorney disclosure line, was a signature that made the blood roar in my ears like an ocean tide:
HARRIET V. REYNOLDS — MANAGING PARTNER, GOREHOUND FX LLC.
My social security number was typed into the box below.
My corporate employer identification number was stamped across the municipal header.
And down at the bottom, bearing an official blue circular seal, was a notary acknowledgment from an independent mobile notary based in Van Nuys.
“I never signed this,” I whispered, my fingers trembling as I touched the high-resolution scan. “Arthur... I’ve never seen this document in my life. I was shooting a commercial in Vancouver throughout the entire month of March 2023.”
“I know,” Arthur said softly. “I pulled your passport records and your production invoices for that week. You were three thousand miles away when this document was executed inside a Starbucks on Sepulveda Boulevard.”
“Lauren forged my name?”
“Lauren forged your name, used a counterfeit California driver’s license with your personal identifying information and her photograph, and paid an unethical mobile notary two hundred dollars in cash to stamp the instrument,” Arthur stated, his voice completely level. “And where do you think the two hundred and ten thousand dollars went?”
He flipped to the third tab: a forensic bank flow chart showing the dispersal of the funds.
“Eighty thousand dollars went into purchasing professional multi-camera 4K broadcast rigs, night-vision telephoto lenses, and drone tracking equipment for Lauren’s UFO documentary, ‘Echoes from Orion,’” Arthur read. “Forty thousand went into paying off three defaulted personal credit cards in Lauren’s name. Twenty-five thousand went to an unaccredited private equestrian barn for Madison’s horse boarding. And the remaining sixty-five thousand was wired into a speculative cryptocurrency exchange based in the Cayman Islands that collapsed three months later.”
The air left my lungs in a slow, ragged whistle.
“And the monthly payments on the HELOC?” I asked.
“Two thousand four hundred dollars a month,” Arthur said. “Lauren paid it for six months using the remaining cash from the loan itself. But when the crypto exchange went under in August, the payments stopped. Bank of America sent a notice of default to the Glendale house forty-five days ago.”
“Ruth knows?”
“Ruth knows,” Arthur nodded. “The bank served a notice of trustee sale on the front door two weeks ago. That’s why Lauren was so desperate for the iPhone Pro, Harriet. That’s why Ruth was pushing you so hard to buy the expensive gifts, the vacations, the dinners. They were trying to keep the facade running long enough to manipulate you into executing a master corporate consolidation of the family assets, which would have legally absorbed the fraudulent debt into your studio’s balance sheet.”
I stood up from my stool.
I walked across the workshop, stopping in front of the full-length mirror near the dressing area.
The purple bruise on my cheek had faded into an ugly, yellowish-brown smear, but the crescent scar beneath it was clear, permanent, and white against my skin.
They hadn't just thrown a phone at me because they were spoiled.
They had thrown it because the clock was ticking, the banks were closing in, the auctioneer was standing at the edge of the lawn, and the golden goose had finally looked them in the eye and refused to lay another egg.
“Arthur,” I said, turning back to the room.
“Yeah, kid?”
“Call Thomas Caldwell. Tell him we aren't just filing for civil damages.”
My voice was terrifyingly calm. It was the same tone I used when instructing my crew to mix forty gallons of blood for a climactic massacre scene.
“Tell Caldwell to deliver this entire file to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s White Collar Crime Division,” I said. “Grand theft, identity fraud, forgery of a recorded instrument, and bank fraud against a federally insured institution.”
Arthur looked at me over his spectacles, his weathered face showing a flicker of genuine, paternal concern. “Harriet... if the DA takes this case, Lauren isn't looking at probation and community service anymore. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar forged deed on a primary residence carries a mandatory state prison sentence. She will do three to five years at the California Institution for Women in Corona.”
May you like
I looked down at the photograph of the cracked iPhone on my desk.
“Lauren made her choice in that living room, Arthur,” I replied, picking up my car keys from the steel bench. “She told her fourteen-year-old child to use violence to bleed me dry. Now she can explain her alien documentary to a sentencing judge.”
