He had forgotten that his mother had once, in her professional life, uncovered a multimillion-dollar pension fraud that a dozen auditors had missed, and had uncovered it because three small numbers on a routine quarterly report did not reconcile with one another, and I could not let three numbers lie to me.

That case, the pension fraud, had made a certain reputation for me, but the truth of how I cracked it was almost embarrassingly simple, and it explains everything about how I later approached my own son.

I did not out-think an army of clever criminals.

I refused to accept an explanation that did not account for all of the evidence.

Everyone else had looked at those three unreconciled numbers and found a reason to set them aside, a rounding difference, a timing issue, a clerical slip, because the alternative, that a respected institution was quietly stealing from its own retirees, was too large and too ugly to want to be true.