I wrote a book. The publication date is May 29, 2024 (if you’d rather not deal with Amazon, your bookstore can also order it from the distributor Ingram Spark, or print-on-demand if they have the equipment). You can read it for free here, although it’ll be in serial form. My fond hope is that you’ll find it so compelling that you just buy the book instead of waiting 8 months to see what happens. There will be a chapter each week, 33 in all.
In Chapter 19 (notes), the whole gang gathered for Thanksgiving and football. In this chapter, the real mystery kicks off: who is embezzling the money, or is that even happening? Len pursues his true calling, which he submerged while he was working at Chrysler and raising Janet, which is: catching the bad guys. But he’s not living in Hawaii 5-0
or carrying a gun: he’s up in the Sierras and not even in law enforcement. He does have a sidekick, though: Dan (who is me, although this whole episode is pure fiction)/
Reading in serial form has a long and honorable history. My cover artist sent me this “Read Like a Victorian” website. Enjoy.
================ Detective Work, For Real =================
Len couldn’t wait to get home after Thanksgiving and solve the mystery that Rev. Collins had brought him: his nonprofit’s money had been flowing out faster than he expected, and they sure didn’t have any money to waste! If someone really needed help, of course, the charity, the churches, and their parishioners would step up, because that’s what Christians do. But just taking it — that’s cheating someone who needs it.
Len dug and dug into the books for Sierra Helpers, and it was tedious work. They had a surprisingly large number of transactions for such a small organization. Harold, who had been doing the bookkeeping up until 1991 or so, apparently had never heard of computers, so it was all on paper. Since then, the two ladies Helen and Dorothy, who did the books, had used two different accounting programs, which of course didn’t talk to each other. The Reverend never thought about money, except to raise more, and just trusted Harold, Helen, and Dorothy to handle it. So at first he wasn’t even sure how much was missing, or how long this had been going on. They’d never had an audit.
Len got a warm feeling of deja vu from all this: it reminded him of the fraud audits he used to do back in the early 50’s. Nobody has any clue what’s going wrong, but Len Saunders is on the job now, so the bad guys better lawyer up! He knew that embezzlers often find some way of generating fake invoices and paying themselves, and then try to cover it up with some scheme they think is clever. Len had seen it all, but he was afraid maybe the bad guys had upped their game in the 40 years since he’d done this stuff.
Usually the jobs he used to do were for a medium-sized company at least, not a small nonprofit like Sierra Helpers, and then he could demand all their original paperwork. For this one, if they even had paperwork, it was in boxes in their storage locker. So off to the storage place he went. He brought home the boxes for 1990, 1991, and 1992, and started entering the invoices and checks by hand. Nowadays at least he had a computer to help with the job, whereas back in the 50’s it was all on paper.
After he had all the original invoices and checks for the last five years in Lotus 1-2-3, he started comparing the expense totals to the tax returns they’d filed. Things matched up, more or less. Then he sent postcards to everyone who’d received money from Sierra Helpers and asked them to verify it. Most of the cards got ignored, which he expected, so he had to call the people, and sometimes even that didn’t work, so he visited in person. Day after day, driving to some business that Sierra Helpers had supposedly paid, and asking if they really did.
While all this was going on, Dan Markunas came up to visit, as he’d been doing regularly since the last boat trip. Dan had had a summer job in college at a stock brokerage, and doing the “audits” had been the task they saved up for him, so he got a bang out of hearing about this. Stock brokerages all get audited once a year, and the auditors would send out a postcard to every correspondent of the brokerage with a statement of each stock’s “position” (long or short), and they’d be asked to check it and verify it. Naturally, no one wanted to spend time answering these, so they left them for the summer guy: Dan.
Dan wasn’t an accountant, of course, but he still didn’t think Len’s work was boring, unlike Janet and almost everyone Len knew. He asked a lot of questions about the detective work and Len showed him what was going on. Len was thrilled to have anyone taking an interest.
“Dan, if I had a son, I’m sure he’d be just like you!” Len used to say. Dan would roll his eyes and say “Aw, shucks, Dad!”
Dan looked at the bank statements for the last few years. There seemed to be cash withdrawals or transfers almost every week and some weeks there were several, and he asked Len what those were. They were usually $250 or $500, and Len had noticed them, of course.
“Yeah, I already asked the Reverend what those were, and he said he does use cash for a lot of stuff, including slipping a $20 to a needy person now and then. Once in a while, he’ll just have the bank transfer money to someone’s account.”
“So, every week?”
Len looked helpless. “He’s not sure.”
“Great. This adds up to a lot of money, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does. I don’t know how we’re going to track this down.”
Dan thought for a bit. “Maybe the bank has records? Photos of who’s using the ATM?”
“Yeah, I thought of that. I’m not the cops, so they’re not going to show that stuff to me, if they even have it.”
“Does anyone besides the Reverend have an ATM card?”
“I asked him that, too. He’s pretty sure no one does.”
“Maybe he lends the card to his bookkeepers?”
“No, he doesn’t. Way ahead of you, here, Dan!”
Len thought again that Dan was the son he never had. A guy who actually thought chasing down fraud was fun.
They turned off the computer and went out for a walk with the dogs. Besides Mickey, the Labrador, Len had adopted a retired K-9 dog, Gretchen, from the local police. Gretchen was getting old, so her days of running down bad guys were in the distant past. Now she slept on the floor next to Mickey, who spent a lot of time licking her ears. Gretchen walked stiffly, but she still loved to go with them. The two of them ran ahead and sniffed everything, even if they’d just been there yesterday.
They were silent as they walked. Dan couldn’t stop thinking about the money withdrawals.
“So, Len, does the Reverend use the computer to access the bank?”
“The computer? I don’t think he even knows how.”
“Is his bank on the Internet?”
“The Internet? Good God, I hope not. Why?”
“I don’t know. Just wondering. It’s a new thing, so there’s bound to be criminals trying to exploit it, sooner or later.”
Len just laughed. “People up here can barely use a calculator, Dan! That’s why they moved here — to get away from that stuff.”
Dan didn’t have anywhere to go with this topic. They changed the subject. After another mile or so they turned around and headed back home. Dan said,
“You know, my Dad can never give up on the newspaper crossword puzzle. He’ll get disgusted and put it down, and then a half hour later he’ll pick it up again and work on it some more. This can go on all day sometimes. I think I take after him: I’m stubborn.”
“Your Dad and I would get along, I think. You’re still thinking about the money, aren’t you?”
Instead of answering directly, Dan said, “I bet if you and the Reverend went to the bank and talked to a VP, they’d help us out. Maybe not give us all their data, but anything would help. It is an important nonprofit up here, isn’t it?”
Len pondered that. Getting the Rev to go to the bank with him — ok, he could probably do that.
The next Friday, Len called Dan.
“Well, Dan, I think you had a good idea there. The Rev and I went to the bank and talked to a nice young lady named Heather with “VP” in her title.”
“They’re all VP’s at the bank. Anyhow, what did they say?”
“Well, she gave us some printouts of all the cash withdrawals and transfers.”
“And?”
“The Rev got confused and didn’t recognize some of them. But he really wasn’t sure about them.”
Dan thought, “Another obstacle! It’s just another day for the crime-fighting team of Len and Dan!”
“Great. Now what do we do?”
“Good question. I’m looking at the questionable ones now.”
“OK. Anything stand out?”
“Yeah, not sure. They’re all over the place. Different days and times, different amounts…”
Dan was getting more interested. Detective work!
“Well, I can’t come up this weekend. Maybe next, if you haven’t found it by then!”
“You don’t need to go to any trouble for me, Dan. I took this one on, so it’s my burden. And what else do I have to do with my time?”
“It’s no trouble, Len. I told you I’m stubborn.”
“Yeah, you sure did. It’s a curse, isn’t it? Well, maybe I’ll see you next weekend, then.”
Len stared at the stack of paper and cursed. He paged through it, looking again for some kind of pattern, in vain. He decided to enter the data into Lotus 1-2-3 so he could send it to Dan, at least. That took most of the weekend. He attached it to an email and sent it to Dan’s work address on Sunday night.
Monday morning at Oracle, Dan looked at the data and loaded it into a database. He knew this was overkill for just a few hundred records, but hey, this was Oracle, and Len and the Reverend would be impressed, anyway. He had to restrain himself from working on it all day, but after 6:00 pm he figured he was off the clock, so what the hell.
After messing around with that, he realized there were PC programs that were a hell of a lot easier than Oracle, and he switched to Excel on his PC. He sorted the expenses by time, by amount, and by which ATM machine was used, to see if any patterns turned up. While he was doing this, his buddy Matt dropped by on his way out the door. Matt was living by himself just a few miles away, now that he was getting a divorce, so he didn’t need to hurry home to a wife. Dan explained the problem to him.
“Anything jumping out at you?” Matt asked.
“Well… there seem to be a lot on Thursdays,” Dan said, pointing at the screen. “Different amounts, though, and different ATM’s.”
Matt stared. “Is there anything special about Thursdays?”
“Don’t know. I’ve never met the Reverend. Maybe Len can ask him.”
“Let’s see…a lot of $250 withdrawals on Thursday.” Matt said.
“I wonder what’s special about $250,” Dan mused.
“Is that the daily limit for that bank?”
“Good question. I don’t know that, either.”
Matt had an idea. “So if they took out $250, it can’t be all in $20’s, right?”
“Yeah, probably $50’s. So?”
“So $50 bills aren’t all that common, right? Maybe they’re taking them somewhere and changing them into smaller bills!”
“Great, so we just have to go to every establishment in the Sierras and ask them if anyone comes in with $50’s a lot! That should be easy.”
Matt wasn’t willing to abandon this idea quite yet.
“Maybe not every establishment!”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it would probably be some place near the ATM, right?”
“Maybe. Not necessarily, though.”
Matt had to admit Dan was right.
“Maybe it’s someone with a gambling problem, and they go straight to a casino?”
Dan liked that idea.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. I don’t know where you’d go to gamble up there. And Reno’s not that far, so there’s still a lot of possibilities.”
Matt said, “OK, I’ll have to think about this. See you tomorrow.” and headed out the door. Dan called Len with their ideas.
Len was impressed that the big brains of Silicon Valley were on the case. He knew the Reverend would be thrilled, too. He decided to go to his office and ask him about the Thursday thing, and also the $250.
The Reverend wasn’t much help. He thought he sometimes took out $250, and it might be on a Thursday sometimes, but he really had no clue. Helen was in the office when he came by, and he took the opportunity to chat and ask her what she knew about the money. She knew a lot, of course, since she and Dorothy handled it for the Reverend. Dorothy was out that day.
Helen was a slightly overweight lady in her 50’s, Len guessed, who’d lived here in the mountains all her life. She had photos of her husband and family on her desk, and she belonged to the Seventh Day Adventists. She had some odd-looking objects on the chair behind her, and Len made the mistake of asking her what they were. Helen launched into a lengthy lecture on the healing power of magnets, and how these were helping her with her back pain. The Church didn’t approve of drugs, so painkillers were out. She offered to sell him a magnet, which he politely declined.
Helen was concerned about the money, and listened closely as Len and the Reverend talked. When she excused herself for a few minutes, Len looked over her desk again, and noticed a yellow Sticky note stuck to her monitor. “Ah-hah!” he thought. “Someone can’t remember their password, so they put it on a Sticky note! Case closed.”
His time on embezzlement cases had taught him something, though: don’t tell anyone what you’re thinking. Everyone’s a suspect until proven innocent. He didn’t say anything about it, and couldn’t wait to call Dan that night and tell him.
Dan was disappointed. He’d hoped it would be some sophisticated theft involving the Internet, but no, it was just a stupid password thing. Len said,
“Hang on there, cowboy. We don’t know who’s using that password, do we? We can’t just change it and close the case!”
“No? The Rev just wants the problem to go away, doesn’t he?”
Len thought, “Who cares what he wants? We’re on the case now!”
“Aw, Dan, that’s not what we want, though! We want to catch the bad guy. Or girl.”
Dan thought this sounded like real detective work, not computer stuff.
“I guess. How are we going to do that?”
“I’m not sure. Let me work on that.”
Len liked to watch detective shows on TV. They were always way more glamorous than real life, he figured, and now he was sure of it. Someone was probably using the bank account password, since it was right out there on Helen’s monitor. But it might not be Helen!
While he was thinking, Dan called.
“Hey, Len, I thought of something!”
“You’re letting this get to you, Dan. Anyhow, shoot.”
“Let’s get the bank to disable the account temporarily, with some kind of bullshit excuse.”
“OK. Why?”
“The bad guy might call their Customer Support number to see what’s wrong!”
Len said, “Oh, come on. Why would they be that stupid?”
Dan laughed. “Weren’t you the one who said people up there can barely use a calculator?”
“Yeah, but… OK, we can try that. What happens if they do call?”
Dan asked if the bank had Caller ID on their phone. Len didn’t know, of course, but he understood the point immediately, and he said he’d check on that, too, when he talked to Heather at the bank again. Honestly, would anyone be dumb enough to call Customer Support on their home phone? Well, no harm in trying.
He went to the bank on Thursday and talked to Heather again. She said she didn’t have the authority to do that, and he almost asked, “Wait, aren’t you a Vice President?” but he remembered what Dan had said about banks. He waited while Heather went to talk to her boss.
Her boss was a middle-aged man, Mr. Ambrose, who Len thought just looked like a bank vice president. Mr. Ambrose said that he was sorry but he’d need a signature from an officer of Sierra Helpers or an order from law enforcement to do something like that. Len thanked him and drove down to the police station.