Twenty-six years earlier, I had been the forensic accountant whose testimony sent three executives and a state treasurer to prison.

Afterward, I had built the Pendleton Fiduciary Group, a private firm that investigated stolen inheritances, fraudulent guardianships, and elder exploitation.

Sheldon had told his wife I was “just a bookkeeper.”

The Kettering case had made my name, though I had never wanted a name.

It began the way these things always begin — a retired schoolteacher who noticed her pension check was thirty dollars short, and could not get anyone to take her seriously, and finally found her way to a young accountant who was willing to look.

Thirty dollars became three hundred, and three hundred became a pattern across four thousand pensioners, and the pattern led up through a chain of shell accounts to three executives and a man who was, at the time, the state treasurer.