PART 3 — SIX MONTHS
Here is the frame, in the order it was built. I know all of it now because Wendell Achterberg spent nine weeks taking it apart.
The vendors were registered in the March. Four of them, in three counties, with real registered agents and real bank accounts and no employees.
The approvals came through the workflow with my credentials, in a window between two and four in the afternoon, on eleven separate days.
My e-signature was applied through the platform we used for everything, which authenticates by a link to a phone number.
Brett had been on my phone plan since 2018 and had been an authorised user on the account since 2019 because he had set it up.
He did not need to steal a password. He needed to receive a code, eleven times, over five months, at the times of day when I was in the building and my machine was unlocked at my desk, and he had a badge to that building because I had put him on the visitor register as a spouse in 2022 so he could bring me a laptop charger.
I made every single one of those things easy. That is the thing I have had to sit with.
The audit flagged it in the September. The company did what a company does, which is call an outside firm, and the outside firm produced a forensic report that was competent, thorough, and wrong.
It was wrong for one reason, and it is the reason I am not in a cell.
The firm’s examiner accepted a device image supplied by the company’s own IT contractor rather than taking the machine himself, and that contractor was a two-man shop, and one of those two men had done a home network job for Brett and Brynn in the July and had been paid four thousand dollars for a day’s work.
That is it. That is the whole thread. A four-thousand-dollar invoice for a job that should have cost eleven hundred.
Nobody found that during my trial because nobody looked, because there was no reason to look, because a chief financial officer with her signature on eleven transfers is not a mystery, she is a Tuesday.
Now the part that explains why it happened when it happened.
In the March of that year — the same month those vendors were registered — a statement came to my house by mistake.
Not to me. Addressed to my mother, at my address, which she has used for post since 2019 because of a dispute with her building’s mail room.
I opened it because it had my street on it and I was not paying attention.
It was a distribution statement from a trustee company. Beneficiary line: THORA RENQUIST. Distributions listed for the preceding twelve months, paid to a nominee account, forty-nine thousand dollars.
I rang my mother about it that evening.
She said it was a legacy from my grandmother’s side that she administered for me, that she had been putting it aside, and that she would explain properly when she was back from her trip.
I let it go for about six weeks. Then I asked again. Then, in the May, I rang the trustee company myself and asked what my own beneficiary file said, and they told me they could not discuss it and that the file was flagged.
I told Brett about it in the June, in our kitchen, and I told him I was going to get a lawyer to look at it.
He said that sounded sensible.
He was, at that point, four months into building the thing that put me in that corridor.
