Two Sets of Books
Raymond did not come in. He knocked once, mouthed go home, Jo through the glass, and kept walking toward the elevators. She watched his reflection shrink in the dark window until it disappeared.
She did not go home.
At six the next morning she was back, and by seven she had Priya Deshmukh leaning over her shoulder with two coffees and the particular squint Priya wore when something did not smell right.
Show me again, Priya said.
Jo pulled up the eighteen-month-old audit, the last one done before Vantage came sniffing around, and set it beside the current disclosure schedule. Physical inventory count, verified by a third-party auditor: thirty-nine million. Current book value, the number going into Friday's filing: eighty-one point six million.
Companies don't double their inventory value in eighteen months without buying something, Priya said. Did they buy something?
No acquisitions on the books. No capital expenditure line that explains it either.
They kept going. A debt covenant, rewritten four weeks before the deal was signed, loosening a leverage ratio that would otherwise have tripped a default clause the moment Vantage's financing hit the balance sheet. A receivables schedule padded with accounts from a distributor that, per the state registry, had been dissolved for two years.
This isn't rounding, Priya said quietly. This is dressing a company up to sell it, and dressing it up enough that it can't survive being unwrapped.
Jo pulled the metadata on the debt covenant file. Last editor: G. Halloway, Grant Halloway, Kestrel's CFO. Edited 3:14 a.m., the same night as the inventory tab.
She almost closed the laptop there. Then she noticed the second entry in the revision history, an hour after Halloway's edit. Different account. Different name.
R. Sokolov, Assistant.
Priya saw her face change. What? she asked.
Jo turned the screen around.