Chapter 39: The Vendor Who Never Delivered
Our purchasing assistant discovered that Marcus had created a vendor profile for a company called Clearpath Imaging.
The company billed Northline for software maintenance and digital storage services.
Our accountant found payments under that name for several months.
The amounts were small enough to escape immediate attention among ordinary software bills.
When we requested the invoices, the address led to a mailbox service.
The listed telephone number connected to a voicemail greeting without a company name.
We preserved every record and gave the information to the external accountant.
I was tempted to call the number repeatedly until somebody answered.
Miriam told me to let the investigators do their work.
She explained that informal pressure could complicate the evidence and create avoidable disputes.
Instead, I interviewed the people responsible for approving vendor payments.
Each had relied on a different part of our normal process.
The purchasing assistant believed Marcus had verified the supplier.
The accountant believed the department head had confirmed the service.
The department head thought the invoices came from our established software contractor.
Nobody had asked the one question that would have resolved the confusion.
We suspended payments to the vendor and reviewed every active account.
The process uncovered several legitimate subscriptions that nobody used anymore.
Cancelling them saved money, but that was not the important result.
We finally understood how an organization could be deceived without a single employee deliberately looking away.
People trusted the next signature in the chain.
Marcus had known exactly where those signatures would appear.
Chapter 40: The Real Investor
The regional franchise group that I had rejected contacted Miriam after seeing its name in a court filing.
Its representative, Barbara Chen, asked for a meeting with me.
She explained that Marcus had approached her firm months earlier and claimed to have authority to negotiate a minority investment in Northline.
He showed the firm financial projections that resembled our internal planning documents.
Barbara requested proof that I had authorized the discussion.
Marcus produced an email with my name typed beneath a short approval statement.
The email address was not one I had ever used.
Barbara’s team noticed the discrepancy and ended the discussion.
They retained the correspondence because their compliance policy required it.
I looked at the printed email and felt a familiar chill.
The language was ordinary enough that a less careful recipient might have believed it.
Barbara said the franchise group had never asked Denise or Tyler to approach me.
She offered to provide investigators with the correspondence and meeting notes.
I thanked her.
Then I asked why the firm had not notified me earlier.
Barbara considered the question.
“We thought we were dealing with an unauthorized broker trying to earn a commission,” she answered.
“We didn’t know it was connected to your customers.”
Her explanation made sense, but it also showed how separate warnings could remain separate until somebody connected them.
I asked whether she would support a standard notification practice when a broker claimed authority to negotiate for a business owner.
She said she would raise the idea within her firm.
We did not resume the investment conversation.
I had no desire to make a major business decision in the middle of a crisis.
But the meeting confirmed that Marcus’s ambitions had extended beyond opening a competing shop.
He had tried to position himself between Northline and anyone who might control its future.
