CHAPTER TEN E: THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW
A financial investigator named Nora Field joined the case to examine how reimbursement money moved between companies.
She began with a narrow set of transactions tied to patients who had denied receiving transportation.
The payments passed through the transport contractor and into accounts described as maintenance and storage expenses.
Nora compared the amounts with actual vehicle service records.
Several invoices charged for repairs to vans that had already been sold.
Others billed for replacement parts that the supplier had never shipped.
The discrepancies gave investigators grounds to request additional banking records.
Nora explained the findings to Keene and Ruiz in a conference room filled with printed statements.
“The amounts are small enough to look routine individually,” she said.
“The pattern becomes visible when we compare the same vehicle across multiple accounts.”
Keene asked whether Simon’s warehouse received all the money.
“No,” Nora replied.
“Some went to the vehicle auction company, and some returned to accounts controlled by the transport executives.”
Ruiz asked whether the transactions established who had ordered the false forwarding requests.
Nora said they did not.
“They show who benefited from the payments and how the money moved,” she explained.
“We need other evidence to connect the mail changes to particular decisions.”
The team agreed to keep the financial and postal evidence separate until the connections were supported.
Nora returned to her desk and spent the afternoon checking a single line item that had been entered twice under different descriptions.
It was tedious work, but it prevented an error from becoming an accusation.
CHAPTER TEN F: THE MAP ON THE WALL
Denise had once believed the dispatch map represented the company’s entire service area.
After the investigation began, she learned that several vehicles traveled beyond the marked boundaries.
The billing system described those trips as equipment transfers rather than patient routes.
A transportation analyst compared the vehicle mileage with fuel purchases and maintenance appointments.
The analysis showed that some vans had traveled hundreds of miles farther than the recorded schedules allowed.
Denise helped identify which vehicles were usually assigned to which drivers.
She also explained that dispatchers could not see every maintenance transfer on their screens.
“We were looking at different pieces of the same day,” she said.
The analyst asked whether anyone had ever questioned the unexplained mileage.
Denise remembered a meeting where Cole Mercer complained that his van was due for service too soon.
Graham Pike had blamed the problem on a faulty odometer.
The maintenance department had later confirmed that the odometer worked correctly.
Denise realized the explanation had ended the discussion without resolving it.
She told the analyst where to find the maintenance report.
The report showed that the vehicle’s mileage had been accurate when Cole raised the concern.
That fact helped investigators test whether the unexplained trips were connected to the warehouse and the motel.
