Chapter 18 — What the Detective Uncovered

While my life was coming apart in that living room, Detective Hernandez had been quietly pulling threads, and the threads led somewhere none of us had imagined.

They led to money.

In the months before the crash, it emerged, Santiago had been taking money that was not his from the commercial electrical supply firm where he worked.

I will not pretend to lay out the mechanics of how he did it, partly because the details are not the kind of thing worth passing along, and partly because the point was never the cleverness of it but the desperation.

He had made ruinous losses gambling on the stock market, losses that ran into the hundreds of thousands, and rather than confess them he had begun to cover the hole with the company’s money, disguising the theft in the paperwork, telling himself he would put it all back before anyone noticed.