Chapter 7 β Where Did the Signature Come From?
Reed slipped the evidence sleeve into his pocket, but the question hanging over the driveway did not go away with the paper. If I had not signed that bill of sale, where had my signature come from? Forgers rarely invent a signature from nothing. They borrow one.
Torres was the one who said it first. She had been flipping back through her notebook, and she stopped on a page near the front.
"Mr. Anderson," she said, "have you signed anything for the HOA recently? Anything Victoria would have had access to?"
I thought about it. I had signed the usual things over the years. Dues notices. A fence repair approval. A form about the gate code. Then I remembered the park-lights petition.
"Back in the spring," I said, "there was a petition about the park lights. The ones along the walking path behind our street. Half of them were out, and people were worried about walking there after dark. Victoria came around with a clipboard, collecting signatures to send to the board."
Reed looked up. "You signed it?"
"I did," I said. "So did a lot of people. Hal Bennett signed it. Priya Sharma signed it. I think half the street signed it. Victoria said she needed as many names as she could get to show the board it mattered."
Torres wrote that down. "Do you remember what the petition looked like?"
"It was a single sheet," I said. "Printed at the top, with lines below for name, address, and signature. Victoria carried it on a clipboard. She said she would make copies and send the original to the county."
"And did you ever see it again?" Reed asked.
"No," I said. "I signed it on my porch, handed the clipboard back, and never thought about it again. I assumed it had been sent in."
Victoria had been quiet while we talked. Too quiet. When I looked at her, she was staring at the Mustang, her arms still folded, her shoulders up a little, the way they do when someone feels cornered.
"Ma'am," Reed said, "do you still have that petition?"
"I sent it in," she said quickly. Too quickly. "That was months ago. I do not keep every piece of paper."
"Did you make a copy?" Torres asked.
"I do not remember," Victoria said. "I might have. I make copies of a lot of things."
"Frank," Reed said, "think back. When you signed that petition, did you sign it the same way you sign everything else?"
I nodded. "I have one signature. I have used it for forty years. It is the one on my driver's license, on my house papers, on everything. It is not fancy. It is just my name, written fast."
"And the signature on the bill of sale," Torres said, "did it look like your signature?"
That was the part that had been bothering me since I first saw the paper. It had looked like my signature. The loop on the F was right. The slant was right. If someone had shown it to me without the context, I might have wondered if I had signed it and forgotten. But I knew I had not signed it.
"It looked like mine," I said honestly. "That is what worried me. It was not a bad copy. It was too good to be a guess."
"That is consistent with a lifted signature," Reed said. "If someone takes a signature from one document and moves it to another, it will look right, because it is your handwriting. The trick is in the transfer."
"Can you tell that from the copy we have?" I asked.
"Not from a copy," Reed said. "We would need the original, and we would need something to compare it to. A forensic examiner can look at it. But right now, we have a theory that fits."
Victoria shook her head hard. "That is a terrible accusation. I would never do something like that. I collected that petition in good faith. I sent it in. I do not even know where it is now."
"Then you will not mind if we ask for it," Torres said. "If it was sent to the county, there should be a record. If you made a copy, we would like to see the copy. If you still have the original, we would like to see that too."
Victoria did not answer. She looked down at her shoes, then back at the street, as if she was looking for a way out that was not there.
Reed turned to me. "Frank, do you still have anything with your signature on it from around that same time? Something we can use for comparison?"
"I have the house papers," I said. "I have my will. I have letters I wrote to the insurance company. I can find something."
"Good," Reed said. "We will need that. And we will need to find that petition."
Torres looked at Victoria. "We are not saying you did this. We are saying we have a question that needs an answer. Where did this signature come from? If you can show us the petition, or show us where it went, that helps you."
Victoria pressed her lips together. "I will look for it," she said, but her voice had lost the certainty it had when she first arrived.
Reed nodded. "Please do. And do not get rid of anything. Not the petition, not any copies, not any files about the Mustang. If something turns up missing later, that will be a problem on its own."
We stood there with the Mustang between us like a witness that could not speak. I kept thinking about that clipboard, about how easy it had been to sign. A signature takes two seconds. But once it is on a piece of paper, it can travel. I had learned that lesson in police work, from other people's cases. I had never expected to learn it from my own driveway.