I drove straight to the brick strip mall on the edge of town where David kept his office. The receptionist was gone for the day, but the main door was unlocked, and the smell of old paper and lukewarm coffee met me in the hallway.
David looked up from a stack of lease agreements when I tapped on his open glass door. He set his fountain pen across his legal pad and pointed to the leather chair opposite his desk.
“You look like you just drove through a hedge, Claire,” he said.
I sat down and pulled my coat tight around my shoulders to block the draft from the hallway. “I need you to run my credit report. Every line, every inquiry, right now.”
He did not ask why, which was the best part of David. He pulled his keyboard closer and logged into his subscriber portal, his fingers moving with a quiet, practiced rhythm.
“Everything looks standard on the primary lines,” he said, staring at the blue light of the screen. “Your mortgage with the local bank is current, and your credit card balances are zero.”
“Look at the soft inquiries,” I said. “The ones that do not show up on a standard consumer pull.”
He scrolled down, his eyes scanning the lines of tiny gray text. He stopped, his finger hovering just over the glass.
“There is a digital footprint here that does not make sense, Claire.”
“What is it?”
“An identity verification query from a company called DocuLock Notary,” he said. “It went through on Tuesday morning at ten past ten.”
“I was at the library archives all day Tuesday,” I said. “I did not authorize any digital notary.”
“Someone had your social security number and your date of birth to pass the initial firewall,” David said, turning the monitor so I could see the line.
