Chapter Five — What the Documents Revealed
The bank statements Malcolm handed me that morning detailed a pattern of financial activity that took my own forensic accounting background nearly an hour to fully untangle, sitting in that hospital’s small family waiting room while Malcolm explained what he’d already pieced together on his own.
Theodore had been diverting funds from Bellwood Developments into a separate account for just over two years — an account held not in his own name, which would have been immediately visible to me given my ongoing, if increasingly limited, access to the company’s primary financial records, but in a shell entity registered under Adrienne’s maiden name, an entity I’d never once encountered in any of the company documentation I still had access to review.
The amounts, individually, were modest enough to avoid triggering the kind of scrutiny larger transfers might have attracted — a few thousand dollars here, a slightly larger sum there, categorized in the company’s books, I’d eventually discover, under vague headings like “consulting services” and “market research” that Adrienne, in her role managing an increasing share of our financial reporting, had apparently been quietly falsifying for months. Cumulatively, over two years, the diverted funds totaled just over four hundred thousand dollars — a serious enough sum to represent clear embezzlement, but modest enough, relative to Bellwood Developments’ overall revenue, that it had evaded detection specifically because Theodore and Adrienne understood exactly how closely I was still monitoring the company’s finances, and had calibrated their theft accordingly.
