As the day wore on, Paul’s proprietary auditing screens had come up negative in his searches. For the most part, Dalfan appeared to be a well-run and highly profitable company. Yong and his team had done an excellent job organizing and maintaining their general ledger over the last five years.

Bai’s eyes continued to flit between his own screen and Paul. Paul hid his disappointment behind his poker face. The joy of the job of a fraud examiner was the discovery of actual fraud. The hunter who came home from the field without the kill, or the lothario who didn’t have a woman to bring home to his bed, hadn’t the faintest glimmer of the kind of disappointment Paul felt when he couldn’t find the clues he needed to uncover the criminal act. But Paul felt it was generally bad form for a CFE to show that kind of disappointment when no fraud was found at a reputable firm, just as it was bad manners to gloat excessively when a crime was finally discovered.

It had taken him years to realize that he loved the job because it was exactly like a game of poker, only harder, playing against a brilliant but unseen opponent holding a million invisible cards. Paul’s job was to play the man—or woman—but first he had to find out what the cards even were and to see what kind of hand his opponent was playing.

After he and Bai went to lunch in the Dalfan cafeteria and devoured steaming bowls of dumpling soup and heaping plates of chicken and rice, Bai returned to one of his video games and Paul resumed his game of blind poker.

An hour later, Bai glanced up from his screen. “Everything okay, Mr. Brown?”

Paul Brown the poker player shrugged, fighting the joy welling up inside of him. One of Paul’s more mundane search screens had just signaled a hit.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Find anything yet?”

“No. So far, everything looks fine.”

“Good.” Bai returned to his game.

So did Paul.

The search screen had pulled up the letter combination QC enough times to meet the screen’s frequency parameters. Paul naturally assumed it was an abbreviation for “quality control,” and Dalfan, apparently, was concerned with it. But what caught his attention were the document references pertaining to the QC hits. They didn’t square up with his idea of quality control, and he couldn’t reconcile their connection to particular budget documents.

He dug a little more and discovered that much of Dalfan’s QC concerns were connected to certain items that it produced and sold to an importer in Shanghai that seemed equally concerned about quality control—in fact, no other company Dalfan did business with made any reference to Dalfan’s quality-control issues.

Strange.