Figures that should have matched, by a few thousand dollars here and a few thousand there, did not.

I am patient, and I am thorough, and I did what I always do, which is to stop trusting the summary and go to the source.

What I found, when I followed it all the way down, was that nearly three point eight million dollars had been moved, over time, out of the company’s accounts and into businesses that were controlled, through a chain of paperwork designed to obscure it, by my father-in-law, Arthur.

It was not sloppiness.

It was a structure.

Someone had built a quiet machine for moving the company’s money into the family’s pockets, and had counted on no one who understood the machine ever looking closely.