Three other clients, unprompted, wrote to the board after seeing the news segment, and each letter described the same thing: filings made late, penalties blamed on someone else, and a preparer who laughed off questions.
The investigator read those letters on a Saturday, at her kitchen table, with her reading glasses sliding down her nose.
On Sunday, she drafted the formal inquiry notice, which is the board’s way of saying this is no longer a complaint, it is a case.
On Monday morning, she picked up her office phone and dialed a number she had pulled from the club treasurer’s records.
My phone rang at half past nine, while I was sorting seed packets for my garden.
“This is the board investigator’s office,” the voice said, “and I need to speak with Carrie Shockey about an incident at a Los Angeles country club.”
I set down the seed packets.
She asked if I would give a sworn statement, and I said I would, and she said she would be at my door on Wednesday with a recorder.
She also said the words I had been waiting to hear since the state board was first mentioned.
“Ms. Shockey,” she said, “we are opening a formal ethics inquiry into Kristin Mathis, and your testimony is the foundation of it.”
She arrived on Wednesday with a leather satchel and a small digital recorder, and we sat at my dining table while the morning light crossed the wood.
She played the video on a tablet and asked me to narrate what the camera could not show, and I described the hip against my ribs and the deliberate way she had planted her feet.
I described the smirk and the exact mocking line, and the investigator wrote it down word for word, and asked me to repeat it so the recorder caught it cleanly.
She asked how badly I was hurt, and I showed her the pale scrapes still visible on my palms and the faint green shadow the grass had left on the lace.
She asked whether Kristin had offered help, and I told her no, and she underlined something twice.
She asked about the slap and the torn gown, and I answered plainly, because I have never hidden a number on a ledger and I would not start now.
She nodded and said self-defense was not the board’s concern, and conduct reflecting on fitness to practice was.
We finished in two hours, and she thanked me, and she said my statement was the clearest she had taken in months.
I thanked the investigator, ended the call, and stood in my kitchen for a long time, the seed packets forgotten on the counter.
The formal inquiry had a file number now.
It was printed at the top of her letter, and it would follow Kristin Mathis for the rest of her professional life.
CHAPTER 4 — THE NOTICE SERVED AT HER OFFICE
The board investigator did not waste the momentum of my sworn statement, and within a week the inquiry had grown teeth.
She subpoenaed Kristin’s client list for the past three years, and the courier delivered the demand to the little stucco office on a Tuesday while two clients sat in the waiting area.
Kristin signed for it with a hand that shook badly enough that the courier asked if she was unwell.
The subpoena asked for every engagement letter, every filed return copy, and every record of penalties assessed against her clients, and it gave her fourteen days.
She called a lawyer who advertised on bus benches, and the lawyer charged her a retainer that emptied her business savings.
The lawyer told her to comply fully and say nothing publicly, and she complied with the first half of that advice.
She missed the fourteen-day deadline by six days, and the investigator noted the delay in the file with the kind of precision that frightens judges.
When the records finally arrived, they told a story worse than the video.
Eleven clients had been assessed late-filing penalties in two years, and in nine of those cases Kristin had told the client the IRS made an error.
The engagement letters, where they existed at all, were photocopies with the fee line filled in by hand, and some were missing signatures entirely.
One client’s file contained a return for the wrong tax year, filed twice, with the duplicate payment never recovered.
The investigator flagged every page with a colored tab, and the file needed a rubber band to stay closed.
She interviewed six former clients in person, and each one described a young woman who was charming at the first meeting and unreachable by April.
