He came to the garage the next morning carrying a folder thick with permits and inspection sign-offs. When he saw Sarah's Ford pickup, he stopped to run a hand along the hood. "She would have hated that somebody took this," he said.
"I know."
"She would also have told you not to let the truck become the only reason you're fighting."
That surprised me because it was exactly what Sarah would have said. She had always recognized the point at which my pride made a job harder. I looked toward the garden where her tomato vines had begun to bend under the weight of late-season fruit.
"You're right," I said. "But I won't let anybody lie about the shed."
Miguel smiled without humor. "Neither will I. I built it straight, and I signed my name to the work. That's more than she can say about the complaint she wanted me to write."
Patricia added his evidence to the response in the restraining-order matter and separately forwarded the possible inducement to the appropriate investigators. She warned us again not to decide in advance which criminal charges would result. An offer to pay someone for a false statement could be serious, but the exact offense depended on the surrounding facts and what authorities could prove.
The distinction mattered. I was beginning to understand that wanting someone punished was not the same as being entitled to choose their punishment.
The preliminary accounting report arrived on a Thursday morning, delivered to Patricia by the independent forensic accountant retained after the board records dispute. I met her outside the courthouse, where we had planned to attend the hearing on Delilah's temporary restraining order. Patricia was holding a thick envelope and looked more worried than triumphant.
"Grayson, we have a bigger issue than the order," she said.
We walked to a bench beneath the courthouse trees. The morning traffic moved past as she opened the report to the schedule of disputed payments. Someone had marked several rows with yellow tabs, and I recognized the name of Thornwick Property Solutions before she pointed to it.
"The independent review identifies fifty-two thousand, three hundred forty-seven dollars and eighty-three cents in transactions that cannot currently be supported by valid services or board authorization," she explained. "That is not a conviction and not even a final finding of theft. It is a documented discrepancy large enough to require a formal investigation."
The amount sat on the page like an electrical load beyond the rating of the wire supplying it. I stared at the separate categories: consulting invoices, duplicate reimbursements, vendor charges that did not match delivered work, and transfers approved without the documented conflict disclosures required by the governing rules. The suspicious payments stretched over roughly twenty-four months.
"Fifty-two thousand dollars," I said.
"Fifty-two thousand three hundred forty-seven and eighty-three cents," Patricia corrected. "You spent thirty years checking numbers. Don't round the number that matters."