The truth had not been hidden in any clever place; it had been sitting in his own accounting files the entire time, one cross-reference away, waiting for anyone to lay the two sets of numbers side by side and notice they didn’t match.

He had spent two months watching a suitcase, reviewing camera footage, reading the way Espe walked and the tone of her phone calls — building an elaborate case out of circumstance and suspicion — and the actual evidence, the plain documentary proof, had been a five-minute comparison he never made.

Why hadn’t he made it?

Because the suitcase was a person he could suspect, and a stack of receiving slips was not.

Suspicion wants a face.

It is easier, and somehow more satisfying, to fix on a human being — to watch them, to read meaning into their bag and their voice and their tiredness — than to do the dull unglamorous work of comparing two columns of figures.