"Not done yet," I said quietly to the empty driveway. "Not even close."
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On day twenty-three, I found a thick certified letter waiting in my mailbox, much heavier than the last one. It detailed an "Emergency Special Assessment" of $5,800 per household for immediate road repairs and executive legal consultation. The text stated payment was due within twenty-four hours, and non-compliant properties would be subject to an immediate administrative lien.
Twenty-four hours. Under Indiana property law, an HOA is strictly required to provide thirty days' notice for any special assessment exceeding five hundred dollars. This wasn't bending the rules—it was breaking them wide open.
I called the township public works office. A woman named Susan answered the line. She sounded genuinely confused when I inquired about the scheduled road repairs for Larkspur Lane.
"There are no permits filed for that quadrant, sir," she confirmed after checking the system. "Your HOA hasn't requested any municipal clearance or road maintenance orders in eighteen months. No road repairs are scheduled."
So where exactly was the capital going?
I spent two hours fighting through bureaucratic red tape to access the association's tax-exempt bank statements. Indiana statute dictates that tax-exempt HOAs must make their financial ledgers available to members upon request, but Deandra had made the process deliberately difficult. Three formal requests later, I was finally analyzing the digital records.
There was a series of transfers totaling $47,000 to an entity called *Callaway Consulting LLC* over the span of eighteen months. I ran a quick business registry search on the Secretary of State's website—an old habit from tracking cartel funds through shell operations back in Chicago.
Callaway Consulting LLC was registered directly to Deandra's residential address. The sole proprietor: Deandra Marie Calloway. She had been paying herself massive corporate fees for services that didn't exist.
I had seen this pattern in federal fraud investigations: someone secures a small amount of localized authority, realizes nobody is actively watching the ledger, and starts moving funds into their personal accounts. They always think they're too clever to get caught; they never are.
My phone rang, an unknown local number appearing on the screen. "Mr. Trudeau? My name is Sloan Beckett, I'm an investigative reporter with the *Indianapolis Star*. I cover suburban corruption tracks, and I heard you might have an HOA story worth looking into."
Word travels exceptionally fast in a small township. "Possibly," I said. "What are your metrics looking like? Coffee tomorrow morning?"