She took Otha’s key card on Tuesday afternoon. She took it for 40 minutes, enough to have it copied at a hardware store two blocks from the estate, where she paid in cash and said it was for her mother’s house.
And the man behind the counter made her a copy in 4 minutes and charged her $12.
She put the original back on the hook before Otha returned from his afternoon grounds walk.
She had the copy in her apron pocket on Wednesday morning. When Celestine was confirmed off property until evening, the East Wing door opened on the first try.
The room behind it was not what she’d expected, and what she’d expected was already significant.
It was large, the full depth of the East Wing, maybe 40 ft by 20.
And it had clearly been repurposed recently. The original estate furniture was pushed to the walls.
Two leather armchairs, a writing desk, a bookcase. In the center of the room, taking up most of the floor space, were folding work tables, the kind that pop up in conference rooms and campaign offices, functional and temporary.
On those tables, documents. Not a few documents. Not a folder or a binder. Documents in the plural, stacked and organized and cross-referenced with the systematic attention of someone who had been building something methodically over months.
She moved to the nearest table and started reading. Most of it she could only partially parse.
She was not a financial attorney, and this was the language of financial instruments, the dense legalese of account transfers and equity designations and corporate restructuring filings.
But she could read enough. She could identify signatures. She could identify account numbers. She could identify dates.
The dates went back seven months, one month before Celestine’s engagement to Callaway. There were transfer authorizations, 12 of them, sequential, each bearing a version of Callaway Briggs’s signature.
She laid them out and looked at them side by side. The signatures were good.
They were very good, but they were not identical. And human signatures are always identical within a narrow range of variation.
And these, spread across seven months, presumably produced by someone working from the same source document, deviated from each other in the specific way that forgeries deviate, consistently in some strokes, inconsistently in others.
She photographed everything. Every document, every page, every signature block, every account number. She was methodical, and she was fast, and she was doing this with the particular focused calm that comes from having made your decision and committed to it.
She found the original near the back of the second table, the acquisition document that Callaway had asked Celestine to review six months ago that bore his real signature at the bottom.
She could see when she held it up the faint impression where something had been placed over it, a template or a tracing pressing lightly against the signature line.
