Chapter 5
The joint account was frozen by court order, not drained — Diane was emphatic that an unauthorized transfer on my part could complicate the criminal case and expose me to liability of my own, advice I am grateful, in hindsight, that I followed instead of my first instinct. Federal investigators, alerted by Diane's office given the bigamy and wire fraud dimensions, opened a parallel inquiry. Lucas was detained at a Palm Springs hotel nine days after his fake departure for Zurich, having flown there directly from a layover, having never set foot in Switzerland at all.
The case took fourteen months to resolve. Lucas was charged with bigamy in two states, wire fraud, and identity-related document forgery connected to the false Social Security presentation he'd maintained with Carla. He pleaded guilty to a reduced set of federal charges to avoid a trial that would have required both Carla and me to testify in detail about the financial manipulation, and was sentenced to fifty-one months in federal prison along with a restitution order covering both of our financial losses.
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The seven hundred twenty thousand dollars was recovered in full, through the frozen account and the forfeiture proceedings against the funds Lucas had already moved to Palm Springs. Carla received a separate restitution award for the money drained from accounts under her marriage, which had been considerably less but still substantial.
Melanie's daughter was born six weeks later, healthy, after a difficult final stretch of the pregnancy that Melanie navigated without Lucas, who was by then in federal custody. I want to be honest that my relationship with Melanie has been the most complicated part of this entire story — she was, in the truest sense, also a victim of Lucas's deception, and yet she is also the mother of a child connected to the man who destroyed both my marriage and Carla's. We do not speak often. We exchanged a handful of careful messages in the year after everything resolved. She named her daughter after her own mother, not after anyone connected to Lucas, which I understood, when she mentioned it, as its own small act of reclaiming the situation for herself.
