Page 121 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

By the fourth night of this, Annie stops asking before she sits in my office in the evening to work alongside me.

Tonight, the office is lit by the desk lamp, the overheads off. Cleaner that way. Less glare on the monitors.

The house has been sleepy for nearly an hour. Duke’s somewhere downstairs, probably making something unnecessarily elaborate in the kitchen because he treats stress as a challenge to improve other people’s blood sugar.

Silas is outside. I know that without checking. There’s a rhythm to his patrols when he’s carrying too much and refusing to admit it.

And Annie’s here.

Again.

Across from me, one leg folded under herself in the chair, blue hair dragged into a loose knot that’s trying to surrender.

She’s wearing one of those oversized cardigans that looks harmless until she opens her mouth and starts dismantling a fraud trail with the concentration of a forensic accountant and the temper of someone who’s tired of being underestimated.

I prefer the numbers.

The rest is increasingly difficult to categorize.

“Start with quarter three,” I say, pulling the latest vendor export onto the screen. “If the consulting fees are behaving the way we think they are, the spike won’t just align with high-volume periods, it’ll align with approval bottlenecks.”

Annie glances up from her notes. “You’re assuming they wanted procedural cover, not just visual noise.”

“I’m assuming whoever did this understands the difference.”

Her mouth shifts. “Fair.”

She leans forward, sliding a sheet toward me. “I rebuilt the timeline from the payment batch dates instead of the invoice issue dates.”

That gets my attention. “Why?”

“Because invoice dates can be manipulated without affecting posting rhythm. Batch dates are harder to fake consistently unless the person controlling them has broader access.”

I look at the sheet.

Then at her.

Then back at the sheet, because the first response is unhelpful.

The structure is sound. More than sound. Efficient, logical, annoyingly elegant in a way I would prefer to resent more than I do.

“You did this tonight?”

“Mostly.” She taps another column. “I had part of it from the weekend.”

Of course she did.

I swivel the monitor toward her and begin layering her timeline against the payment history. Consulting fees first. Then shipment approvals. Then overtime spikes.

Then legal document processing windows, because if the shell entities were built with any degree of sophistication, there will be supporting paperwork somewhere in that chain, even if it never appears directly in operations.

For the next twenty minutes, the room gets busy in the most functional way possible.

I isolate the payment clusters. Annie cross-references them against actual ranch events. Every time Ironwood’s systems are under enough pressure that routine review becomes triage, the consulting fees appear again.

“Here,” Annie says, tapping a line item with the capped end of her pen. “This week looks normal until you include staffing expansion for the south pasture repairs.”

I scan the date. “That was Jake’s request.”