Part 3 — Whose Name Was Listed
The detective cleared his throat. The new phone on my account was registered to a woman named Tiffany Dunn, age twenty-six, of Bradenton. On her application she had listed her mother as Arlene Whitcomb. That was me, my address, my maiden name, and my late husbands birthday for the security question.
I had never met Tiffany Dunn in my life. She had simply typed my information into a phone company form, because the driver had been copying it off my wallet and my paperwork while I slept in the back seat.
The driver was her boyfriend, Corey Vance. He had been signing up for the ride app under a fake name, picking up older women who rode alone on set days, and keeping notes on their routines. The detective told me I was one of four women in the county he had been tracking since June.
The sedating compound in the bottle was identified by Hectors friend at the lab. It was a common over-the-counter sleep aid, ground up and dissolved. It would have made me drowsy for an hour or so and nothing worse. Corey had chosen it because it would not look dangerous to anyone who asked.
That did not make it harmless, of course. It was still a crime to give it to me without my knowledge, and the detective treated it that way. The bottle cap with its tiny hole and its dot of glue became the center of the case.
They arrested Corey on a Friday, in his car, outside a salon on Bee Ridge Road, with another womans water bottle in the cup holder. He had two more phones in the glove box and a list of bank routing numbers. Tiffany was picked up the same afternoon at her apartment.
Both of them were charged with fraud, identity theft, and exploitation of an elderly person. Because the bank had kept the log of every login, there was not much to argue about. It was a tiny hole in a plastic cap that undid all of it, and I only found it because I refused to drink.
My daughter came to Sarasota the next morning. She cried in my kitchen for a long time, and said she was sorry for telling me I was paranoid. I told her I would have said the same thing about me. We had a hard conversation and a good one, and we are closer now.
The bank restored the full eleven thousand four hundred dollars, plus the fees, and removed the extra card and the P.O. box. The phone company flagged my name so that no one could open an account with it again.
The ride company apologized in writing, rebuilt its driver checks, and sent me a free year of rides with a driver of my choosing. I chose a retired schoolteacher named Mr. Bell, who brings a thermos of coffee for himself and never offers me anything.
Hector came by with a pie, and he and I sat on the dock behind my condo and watched the boats. I told him he had saved me with one look at a cap.
He laughed and said, No, Arlene. You saved yourself. I just read the plastic. Then I opened my own water bottle, filled from my own kitchen tap, and drank every drop.