At sunrise Corwin called the distributor directly and asked for duplicate delivery receipts for the past two months.

When he laid the vendor’s own copies beside the invoices Silas had turned in to accounting, the floor dropped out a second time.

The distributor’s carbon copies showed fewer sacks of flour, fewer drums of oil, less sugar than Silas had marked as received and stocked.

The gaps matched the inventory shortages almost to the pound.

Every night Espe’s bag had looked like the answer, and every night the answer had been sitting in a stack of receiving slips no one had thought to check against the source.

The simplicity of it was what stung.