I am going to be deliberately vague about the search itself, not because it was improper, but because the mechanics of how money is hidden are not something worth laying out for anyone who might be looking for a method rather than a warning.

What matters is what the search revealed, and anyone can understand that part.

Behind the Duncan Apex umbrella sat a string of shell companies, one nested inside the next, and at the end of the chain the recipient of the nine thousand dollars a month was registered as Tagus Clinic Private Limited, with a filing address in the old quarter of Lisbon.

The registration documents had been signed by a local attorney, but the true beneficiary of the trust behind the clinic was buried under three layers of offshore holding companies, which is the kind of structure a person builds for exactly one reason: so that no one standing where I was standing will ever reach the bottom of it.