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wheel the way she’d probably like to strangle my father. “How in the hell did I get here? This cannot be my life.” A sob chokes off her laughter, and then she’s crying in a way that’s both violent and ugly and so full of rage that it scares me. “How did I get here?” she asks again, softer. She’s not really talking to me or Quinn.
    “If you already know the accounts are frozen, then why are we going to the bank?” I ask, my voice harder than it probably should be. I guess I should feel sorry for her, but I don’t. I’m angry. She had to have known that he was doing something wrong, that this might be coming.
    “Because I have to try something. And I want those bloodsuckers to see us face to face and understand what they’ve done.”
    “I thought Dad was the criminal,” I say.
    She looks over at me like I’m crazy, and I shrink back against the seat. My mother has the coldest eyes sometimes.
    “Do you really think that
your
father could’ve pulled off a multimillion-dollar mortgage scam all on his own?” The way she says “
your
father” makes me think that she’s hinting that
I
might be just as stupid as she thinks
he
is.
    “How am I supposed to know? I only found out about this on Saturday. For all I know, you were in on it,” I fire back, stung.
    “At the very least there’s one other person involved. Possibly Colin Freed, but I’d bet anything that the real mastermind here is Mitch Harrison.”
    Mr. Harrison. Dad’s old college frat buddy. The guy who got him his job twenty years ago. I go to school with his daughter, Bianca, but we haven’t been friends since sixth grade, when she morphed into a mean girl and I decided I had better things to do than make fun of people. Quinn lost his mind and dated Bianca for half a second last year, so he knows the family a little better, but I’ve only seen Harrison on and off over the years, mostly at parties or school functions, from a distance. He’s a typical finance type, always in a suit, giving off an air of superiority. He doesn’t look like a criminal, but then again, neither does my dad.
    Within minutes we are out of the car and walking down Figueroa toward Dad’s building. I haven’t been here since I was ten and he brought me for some take-your-kid-to-work thing that I only wanted to do because it meant a whole day away from school. I passed the place last night, after I jumped, but I didn’t stop and reminisce. Last night was about forgetting.
    We walk through the glass doors that lead into the lobby. Mom’s heels tap on the marble floor, making each step sound like a gunshot. She heads straight for the security desk.
    “Hello, Luther,” she says to the guard behind the desk, an older black man with salt-and-pepper hair and a solemn face. “I’m going up to twelve to see Mr. Harrison.” She stares Luther down like she’s daring him to tell her no. It’s unnerving to watch her do it, even for me. I’d be intimidated for him except that I can see her hands trembling at her sides.
    Luther looks over his glasses at her. “He knows you’re coming?”
    She busies herself with signing in on the little clipboard on the counter. “No, but he’ll let me up,” she says. “Go ahead. Call and ask him.”
    Luther stares at her a moment and then picks up the phone. I can hear a man’s voice on the other end. Brisk and businesslike.
    “Mr. Harrison’s coming down to meet you,” Luther says. “He said to give him five minutes.”
    My mother taps the pen she signed in with against the clipboard and hesitates. “We can’t meet him upstairs? Where it’s more…private?”
    Luther shakes his head, and she purses her lips but doesn’t argue. Quinn and I follow her as she stalks away from the security desk without another word. She heads straight for the ATM in the vestibule that separates the outside world from the lobby. Quinn and I hang back as she goes to use it.
    When the machine spits her card out a moment later and there