My father had spent thirty years running Mercer Freight out of a decaying brick terminal near the Scioto River. He had always managed his books with three-ring binders and a stubborn refusal to let anyone look at his accounts. Now, the new acquisition of the bank consortium by our client meant every single subsidiary account was being pulled into our automated compliance system.
“How long has the credit line been active?” I asked.
“Four years,” Nadia said.
She turned the page over, showing a column of numbers that ended in a red box.
“They are currently eighty-two days delinquent on their interest payments,” she said. “The bank was going to let it slide until the merger was announced.”
I set the coffee cup down on the table, the paper sleeve slipping slightly.
“Let us get David,” I said.
David, our junior analyst, had three monitors running on the long walnut table in the boardroom.
He was twenty-four, my age, but he kept his hair cropped close like a soldier and never looked up from his screens when he spoke. The only sound in the room was the hum of the server racks behind the glass wall.
“The flags are concentrated in the vendor payment ledger,” David said, pointing to a series of vertical yellow bars on the center screen.
“Show me the historical data,” I said.
I stood behind his chair, my hands resting on the back of the leather seat.
“The anomalies began in November five years ago,” David said.
The date sat on the screen in cold white pixels: November twelfth.
That was exactly sixty days after my father had carried my three plastic garbage bags of clothes to the curb and told me to find another place to sleep. I had spent that night in a basement apartment that smelled of damp carpet, counting the sixty-two dollars I had left after paying the security deposit. I had spent my first week there eating nothing but generic white rice and canned beans.
“What kind of anomalies?” I asked.
“Duplicate invoices for fuel delivery,” David said. “The quantities do not match the fleet capacity.”
He clicked a mouse, and a printed audit trail appeared on the left screen.
“Every third transaction goes through a regional clearinghouse in Indiana,” he said. “The total volume of fuel they are claiming to purchase exceeds their physical storage by three hundred percent.”
