Devil in details

Elliot Graves was a perfectionist.

Every morning, his tie had to be knotted precisely, his shoes shined to a mirror finish, and his coffee brewed at exactly 190 degrees Fahrenheit. His entire world ran on details—tiny, inconsequential to most, but vital to him. It was no surprise, then, that he became a forensic accountant. Numbers didn’t lie. People did.

So when the Ricci case landed on his desk, Elliot knew something was off before he even turned the first page.

The Ricci family was a well-known name in the art world, their gallery boasting priceless collections spanning centuries. But beneath the shimmering facade, Elliot smelled something rotten. Tax evasions, missing assets, unreported earnings—it was all there, buried in the numbers. Someone had been very careful, but not careful enough.

He started digging. Every transaction, every invoice, every signature had to be scrutinized. It was in the smallest of details that he found his first crack—an inconsistency in a shipping manifest for a seventeenth-century painting. The painting had supposedly arrived from Paris, but the transport logs indicated it had never left Florence. A discrepancy, a smudge of ink, a single missing signature—trivial to anyone else, but to Elliot, it was a whisper in the darkness.

He kept pulling at the thread, and the picture began to unravel. More discrepancies surfaced, each more damning than the last. The Riccis were laundering money through their gallery, using forgeries and black-market deals to siphon millions. It was a masterpiece of deception, yet even the grandest illusions had weak spots.

Then the warnings started. An unmarked envelope arrived at his office, containing nothing but a photograph of his apartment. A text message: Let it go. A black sedan idling outside his building too many times to be a coincidence.

Elliot should have walked away. But he couldn’t. The devil was in the details, and he had already sold his soul to them.

He pieced together the final proof—a trail of illicit transactions leading straight to the Ricci patriarch himself. The evidence was irrefutable. He sent it to the authorities, knowing it would only be a matter of time before the empire crumbled.

The night before the indictments were set to go public, Elliot heard a knock at his door. Slow. Deliberate. When he opened it, a man stood there, dressed impeccably in a tailored suit, his expression one of cold amusement.

"Mr. Graves," the man said, stepping inside uninvited. "You’ve been very thorough. I respect that. But thoroughness can be… dangerous."

Elliot felt his blood turn to ice.

"You should have overlooked the details," the man continued, voice smooth as silk. "Now, they will be your undoing."

Elliot never heard the gunshot. Only the silence that followed.