The detective assigned to the case was a sergeant named Amy Holcomb from the county's economic crimes task force, a small, unhurried woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain who came to my kitchen the following Wednesday and spent four hours with the binders and a legal pad and never once seemed surprised by anything. When she left, she asked if she could borrow the green ledger.
"I'll give it back," she said. "I want to show it to the prosecutor. Juries like a pencil."
The search warrant was executed on Karen and Gary Whitcombe's house on a Thursday morning in early November, while I was at WH-4 photographing the black walnut, which had dropped its last leaves overnight. I didn't see it. Gus did — he'd gone the long way around to the greenway for exactly that reason — and he reported that they carried out two laptops, an external hard drive, four banker's boxes, and, in a clear evidence bag, a black Nikon D7500 with a long gray lens.
The serial number on the body was 3026718.
The hard drive, Holcomb told us later — as much as she could tell us, which was not everything — held about nineteen thousand photographs. Many of them were of houses in Wren Hollow, taken over six years, sorted into folders by street address. That was what Karen had been doing all those mornings at eleven miles an hour: building a library. A library of every house at its worst. A dormant February lawn. A garage door before it was painted. A shed in a season when the light made the siding look tired. When she needed a violation, she went to the library and checked one out, and changed the date.
Some of the folders weren't houses. Some of them were people.
I was in some of those folders. So was Ruth. So, Holcomb said, were several of the young mothers at the bus stop at Larkspur and Thrasher, and their children, which is a thing I still can't think about for very long.
Deb Sorensen, the secretary, hired her own lawyer the day after the warrant, and by the end of the week she was cooperating. It turned out that the separate account had a name: the Wren Hollow Compliance Fund, at a credit union in Delaware, with Karen and Deb as signers. Deb said she had signed the signature card in 2023 because Karen asked her to and had never once looked at a statement. Holcomb looked at all of them. Sixty-four thousand, two hundred dollars in fines and "administrative fees" had gone in over three years. About nine thousand had gone back out to the HOA's operating account, enough to make the annual statement look plausible. The rest had gone out in transfers to a personal account in Karen's name, and from there to a home-equity line of credit on the Colonial, and to a timeshare in Hilton Head, and to a company called Copperline Residential LLC as a "short-term loan" that was used, as far as anyone could tell, for the earnest-money deposit on Martin Ellery's house.
She had used the fines she had fabricated against Martin Ellery to help buy Martin Ellery's house.
The notices that were never received had never been sent. Deb said it plainly in her statement: Karen printed the violation letters, printed the certificates of mailing, and filed both copies in the violation binders without ever going to the post office. The hearing minutes for Ruth's June 30 hearing — where the board, according to those minutes, had "reviewed photographic evidence and voted unanimously to impose continuing fines" — described a meeting that had never been held. Lyle Pratt, the vice president, had been in Myrtle Beach that week. He had the receipts. He had, it turned out, a great many receipts.
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