Chapter 6 - Andrew’s Last Week Alive
The hardest part of the investigation was not learning that Andrew had been lied to.
It was learning how close he had come to figuring everything out on his own.
Through archived company records and one retired accountant who was finally willing to talk, my father reconstructed Andrew’s final week. Andrew had become concerned about a series of consulting expenses and cash movements that didn’t match the work supposedly being performed. The numbers were not huge enough to crash the business overnight, but they were large enough to matter. Repeated enough to signal intentional abuse. And obscure enough that someone unfamiliar with the books might have dismissed them as routine.
Andrew didn’t dismiss them.
He asked questions.
He requested backup invoices. He compared payment descriptions across months. He noticed that certain reimbursements authorized through Victor seemed to loop back to vendors with barely any deliverables attached. Then he discovered two transfers routed through a project reserve account in a way that violated the company’s internal controls.
He apparently confronted Victor once in private.
That part came from an email Andrew sent to himself from his office account, a habit he had when he didn’t want notes stored where staff could see them. The message was short and unfinished, but brutal in its clarity:
Victor lied about the invoices. If he can’t explain the reserve transfers tomorrow, he’s done. Need to call Tom.
Tom was my father.
My hands trembled when Dad first showed me that printout. Andrew had intended to call him. He never got the chance.
The next day, according to company calendar records, Andrew canceled a late-afternoon client meeting and left the office earlier than expected. Victor later told everyone he hadn’t seen Andrew that day.
Years passed before anyone challenged that statement.
Then my father’s investigator found a parking-garage access log showing Victor’s car exiting seven minutes behind Andrew’s that afternoon.
That alone didn’t prove he followed him. It didn’t prove violence. It didn’t prove murder.
But it did prove Victor lied.
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And once my father knew Victor had lied about the last day Andrew was alive, the accident that ended Andrew’s life no longer sat in the past as quietly as Victor needed it to.
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