Page 122 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

“Yes, and it overlaps with two consulting charges posted forty-eight hours apart.”

“Amounts?”

She gives them to me, and I already know the answer before I run the calculation.

Together, the charges fall just under the internal threshold that would’ve required deeper manual review at the time.

Individually, they’re forgettable. Buried beside legitimate labor fluctuations and equipment costs, they disappear.

I adjust my glasses once, then take them off and set them on the desk.

“They’re not just hiding inside busy periods,” I say. “They’re splitting movement across pressure points.”

Annie nods. “So no one sees the full amount in one place.”

“No one except someone tracking behavior across departments.”

“That’s us,” she says.

“Yes.” I pull another file and expand the vendor registry. “If these are duplicate fronts, there has to be a structural tell. Documentation language, tax identifiers, remittance overlap, something.”

Annie turns in her chair, reaching for the second stack of printouts. Her knee brushes the edge of my desk. Small contact. No relevance.

I notice it anyway and resent that I do.

“I already flagged the addresses,” she says. “Most are different enough to pass surface checks. Suite numbers, abbreviations, formatting changes. But the filing behavior is weird.”

“Weird how?”

She hands me a page.

I read it once, then again more slowly. Two vendors with different names. Different addresses and service descriptions. Similar tax structure… too similar.

Not identical enough to trigger an automatic duplicate alert, because the numeric strings are offset by one transposed pair and a state suffix variation.

“Well,” I say.

Annie watches my face. “You see it too.”

“Yes.”

She leans in further, eyes on the page. “Matching tax ID variants.”

“Not exact matches. Derivative matches.”

“Engineered for similarity without detection.”

I run the numbers manually, because I don’t trust conclusions I haven’t personally verified, even when I agree with them on sight.

Same EIN base.

Different formatting behavior.

One entity listed as agricultural compliance support. Another as logistics consulting. A third under a legal-services-adjacent descriptor vague enough to survive scrutiny from anyone uninterested in asking the right question.

The same structure repeating under different names.

That’s the trick.