She had considered calling her former colleagues, but she couldn’t bear the thought of explaining everything again.
Three months earlier, Clara had been a respected financial analyst at Harmon Financial Services, a subsidiary of a company owned by Mercer Capital.
She had earned a respectable salary, rented a modest but comfortable apartment, and believed that hard work would eventually give her daughter a secure future.
Then she discovered something strange in the company’s vendor accounts.
Payments were being sent to businesses that appeared to have no real offices, employees, or verifiable operations. Some invoices were duplicated. Others were approved by the same small group of executives, even when the amounts were far above the company’s normal spending limits.
At first, Clara assumed the errors were administrative.
Then she traced the transactions.
Millions of dollars had disappeared through a network of suspicious vendors.
She reported the discrepancies to her supervisor, Richard Cole.
