When friends and family talk about John Glasgow, they describe a man who was, at least on the surface, the perfect accountant. He was “meticulous,” “steady,” and “predictable”; he followed a routine that rarely varied. He went to CDI each morning, around 8, and came home around 5:30 p.m. If he left the office at all, it was to go home for lunch. Because of this precision, his best friend, Mitch Chandler, knew immediately that something was wrong on the afternoon of January 28 when, after learning that Glasgow had not shown up at work, he went to Glasgow’s house and saw that his friend had not taken a shower or made coffee that morning. “His life was arranged—everything from his tackle box to his briefcase,” says Chandler. “He wasn’t obsessive-compulsive, just a quietly organized person.”

Always “easy,” Glasgow was the one who, on camping and fishing trips, would listen for hours as his friends talked about their jobs and their marriages. Today, they struggle to recall a moment when they ever saw Glasgow angry. He loved to laugh and could be very witty, but it was also hard to know what he was thinking. “John could get this look on his face like he’d want to tell you something, but he wouldn’t,” says Rodger Guinee, a friend of 20 years and CDI’s former comptroller. As introspective as Glasgow often was, however, he also had a daring side. He liked exotic travel, to places like the Galápagos Islands. And he loved to ski. At his brother Roger’s place in Crested Butte, Colorado, he preferred black-diamond trails—the toughest runs. “He loved to ski fast,” says Roger, a prominent Little Rock attorney. “He was a very aggressive skier. John had another side of his personality that most people didn’t see.”

Responsible, discreet, and rigorously honest—he once returned a $500 bonus CDI gave him for stopping smoking because he’d started again—Glasgow, says Chandler, was “the Rock of Gibraltar,” the man everyone relied on. Raised on a farm outside Nashville, Arkansas, the youngest of eight children, Glasgow graduated in 1980 from the University of Central Arkansas and immediately went to work at a major regional accounting firm, where he handled CDI’s business. He so impressed CDI’s chairman, Bill Clark, that in 1990, he was hired full-time at CDI. Two years later, he married Melinda Franklin, a childhood friend. They bought a house and paid off the mortgage. Looking back, Roger says, “John hadn’t failed. He had not failed at anything.”

CDI was still a young company when Glasgow started working there. Formed in 1987 by Bill Dillard II—the son of Dillard’s founder—and Clark, his closest friend and a prominent local businessman, CDI was very small, very private, and controlled by two men who could hardly have been more different. While Dillard inspired more fear than affection, “in Little Rock,” says one businessman, “you won’t find a single person with a bad thing to say about Bill Clark.” The two friends had formed Clark-Dillard Inc., as it was then known, to build stores for Dillard’s. In return for the steady business it gave CDI, Dillard’s got a discounted rate on its jobs—cost plus 2 percent, about half the fee usually paid to general contractors. It was an arrangement that worked well. As Clark added new clients, transforming CDI into one of the region’s top contractors, the partnership would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for both companies.

Glasgow was CDI’s comptroller when, in the fall of 1995, he discovered that its CFO was embezzling money. Convicted of stealing $1.3 million, the executive was sent to prison, and Glasgow replaced him as CFO. Because money had been taken from Dillard’s accounts, the theft triggered major changes at CDI. Divisions were restructured, legal covenants were altered, and Dillard’s control over CDI was tightened. In spring 1996, a meeting was held that would prove to be pivotal. Bill Dillard and his brother, Alex, were present, along with Clark, Glasgow, and Dillard’s CFO, James Freeman. Together they made a series of decisions that became the bedrock of the financial relationship between CDI and Dillard’s for the next 12 years. One of the agreements made that day, according to Guinee, who had replaced Glasgow as comptroller, concerned the profit that each division of CDI could charge Dillard’s. Remarkably, the arrangements weren’t recorded. “They didn’t put them in the minutes,” says Guinee. “That’s where they went wrong.” Glasgow had no way of knowing how much trouble that lapse, intentional or not, would cause him one day.

In his new post, Glasgow instituted rigorous controls. “John ran a tight ship,” says Guinee. For Glasgow, doing things the right way was of paramount importance. Chandler recalls an evening in 1997 when Glasgow came to see him, white-faced with fear. He told his friend that he’d made a mistake on Bill Clark’s personal tax return, and he didn’t know what to tell his boss. Chandler asked how much it was going to cost Clark. Glasgow said that, actually, Bill Clark was going to get an additional $100,000 back from the Internal Revenue Service. Chandler looked at Glasgow, stunned, and said, “Hell, man, all you have to do is say, ‘Don’t you feel lucky, Mr. Clark?’ ” Glasgow was “so relieved,” Chandler recalls. “In John’s eyes, he’d failed because he’d made a mistake.”

in early 2007, Clark was diagnosed with cancer. His death that May was a huge blow to Glasgow, who, according to his brother, Roger, “looked on Bill Clark almost like a second father.” Determined to protect CDI’s independence, Clark had named his son, William, as his successor and asked Glasgow to help train him for the job. William, then 38, was well liked, but had little managerial experience. Furthermore, his control over CDI was tenuous, because a long-standing agreement between Bill Clark and Bill Dillard gave Dillard’s the right to acquire all of Clark’s shares upon his death. From the first, his friends and family say, Glasgow feared that Dillard’s would try to take control of CDI. What concerned him most, they say, is that he felt that Dillard’s was poorly managed and would destroy the company that Bill Clark built.