Chapter 3
We spent the following three weeks building the full picture together, along with her company's outside attorney, a sharp, unhurried woman named Patricia Voss who specialized in corporate fraud and, as it turned out, marital asset disputes — a combination of expertise that was about to become extremely relevant to both Lauren and Daniel.
The backyard party had been planned for two months, a standing tradition among our friend group every July. I had not engineered the timing. What I had done, once I understood what Daniel and Lauren's public confidence at recent gatherings suggested they were planning to do, was simply make sure the right people had an invitation and a reason to use it on this particular night.
Six people walked through my side gate. The first five — Patricia Voss with her sealed folder, two members of Halverson Price's board, and two younger associates from Patricia's firm carrying additional documentation — moved with the unhurried purpose of people executing a plan they'd rehearsed.
The sixth person stayed in the shadows a second longer.
When Claire Price stepped under the porch light, Daniel's smile disappeared entirely. The key slipped from his hand and hit the patio stone with that small, enormous sound.
"You're done," Claire said. Not loud. She didn't need volume; she had three weeks of documentation and a husband who had just been caught holding a stranger's house key in front of forty witnesses.
"I invited everyone who needed to hear the truth," I said.
Lauren's expression had gone through several stages in the space of ten seconds — confusion, then recognition, then the particular horror of someone realizing that the evening she had planned as her triumphant unveiling had been, the entire time, evidence collection for someone else's case.
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What happened over the following months resolved with the kind of completeness that six weeks of patient preparation tends to produce.
Patricia Voss's investigation, formalized through Halverson Price's board, confirmed nearly two hundred and thirty thousand dollars in misappropriated company funds tied directly to Daniel's relationship with Lauren — apartment leases, hotel stays, restaurant charges, even a leased Audi registered to a shell entity Daniel had set up using a cousin's name. The board removed him as co-owner within three weeks, citing breach of fiduciary duty, and Claire filed for divorce the same week, retaining full ownership of the company and pursuing him personally for the misappropriated funds beyond what the company itself recovered.
