Richard claimed it was a temporary investment in a friend’s company.
I believed him for exactly eleven minutes.
Then I called the attorney who had handled the sale of my software business.
Her name was Margaret Ellis, and she had the remarkable ability to make a frightened person feel foolish for being frightened.
“Don’t confront him yet,” she had told me after reviewing the first statements. “People who move money secretly tend to become very creative when they realize someone is looking.”
We hired a forensic accountant.
The results were worse than I expected.
Over nine months, Richard had moved $68,400 from our joint account into a company registered in Vesna’s name. The transfers were disguised as consulting fees, equipment purchases, and repayments of loans that had never existed.
The money wasn’t all he had been hiding.
The company had received funds from three other sources, including a private investment firm whose name I recognized from the documents I had found on our computer.
