Cash is only the exhaust.

What matters is the paper that explains where the cash came from and where it was going, and beneath the money, that paper was all there.

There were three ledgers, leather-bound, filled in a small careful hand I did not recognize.

There was a second phone, cheap and anonymous.

There were documents I recognized at once from my own years reviewing corporate books — shipping manifests and customs paperwork, the bills of lading that move cargo through a port — and these bore the official stamp of the freight terminal where my brother worked, and they were signed, again and again, page after page, in Jim’s own handwriting.

I made myself read the ledgers the way I would read any book I’d been hired to examine: slowly, from the top, letting the pattern reveal itself rather than reaching for the conclusion I already feared.