Gavin’s industrial supply company, we learned, had been quietly failing for some time.

He was buried in corporate debt.

Two major contracts had recently fallen through.

A large business loan was sliding toward default, with no rescue in sight.

The picture that assembled itself, as the investigators worked, was almost pitiable, or would have been if it had belonged to a better man: a business built on appearances, propped up longer than it should have been, sinking quietly while its owner drove a gleaming SUV and sent weekly flowers he could not really afford, until the only way left to save it was to marry into someone else’s savings.

And so his sudden, intense interest in my mother’s storefronts and savings finally made complete and ugly sense.