I only had to document them accurately while they trapped themselves, and hand the record, when it was complete, to people whose job it is to act on such records.

My grandfather had taught me that, in a way, over all those patient months. Don’t confront them, his whole strategy said. Just keep the books honest, and let the honest books do the rest.

There is a thing about greed that I have come to understand through my work, and my family demonstrated it for me in miniature that month.

Greed cannot wait.

It is, at its core, a failure of patience — an inability to tolerate the gap between wanting a thing and having it — and that failure is the crack through which almost every scheme eventually drains.

A patient thief is a hard thief to catch.