"Then he'll have pictures of whatever happens."
Patricia studied her old friend across the table. They had known one another since Loretta's first acquisition, and their arguments usually ended in better decisions because neither woman was afraid to say that the other had missed something. "Tell me what happened," Patricia said. Loretta handed over the notebook without embellishment and waited while Patricia read.
By the last entry, Patricia had stopped tapping her pencil. "Teresa Ortiz," she read. "The woman who brought you water."
"Yes. Remember her."
"And Bradley?"
"Remember the things he said. Whether he stays employed will depend on more than what he said to me."
Patricia turned a page in a second folder, the Lakeside Advisory exception from due diligence. "We flagged this before the closing committee," she said. "The sellers told us the payments were for strategic planning related to expanding the conference and property-management divisions. The invoices are beautifully written. That's almost the only thing I can say about them."
"Any meeting notes? Deliverables? Independent references?"
"Not enough. That's why our audit team retained the issue in the post-closing plan."
Loretta looked again at the number: $1,620,000. It was not abstract to her, though numbers that large were often spoken as if they existed only on spreadsheets. She knew how many entry-level salaries that money could support, how many building repairs could be made, and how many vendors waited thirty days or more for an invoice to be paid. She also knew that an unusual vendor was not automatically fraudulent, and she refused to begin with a conclusion the evidence had not yet earned.
"Keep the audit team independent of Bradley and his finance people," she said. "Preserve the original ledgers, not just summaries. If the work was real, I want to see it. If it wasn't, I want the people responsible for proving that to have every opportunity to prove it."
That same evening, Bradley Kincaid sat in a glass-walled conference room on the seventeenth floor with Dennis Vale, Belmont Row's finance director. Dennis was a thin man in his early forties who had developed the habit of saying yes before he finished understanding a request. His career had advanced quickly under Bradley, and he knew which invoices were supposed to receive questions and which were supposed to receive signatures. Most employees saw him as orderly and unremarkable, which made him useful to someone who wanted complicated decisions to look routine.
"The buyer's due diligence team flagged Lakeside," Dennis said, pushing a printed list across the table. "I told them strategic advisory. They closed anyway. I thought it was behind us."
"It is behind us," Bradley said.
"The auditors are on-site Monday. And since the deal closed Friday, anything over one hundred thousand dollars requires approval from the new owner."
Bradley reached for the document. "Then send the last invoice to the new owner. One hundred and eighty thousand."
Dennis did not move. "To the people who just bought us?"