On the evening of January 24, Glasgow asked Chandler to come to his house. He wanted his friend’s help writing a response to Dillard and Freeman. For nearly four hours, the two men sat under the carport and talked, over Scotch and Glasgow’s best Cuban cigars. The following morning, Glasgow emailed his friend the draft of what turned out to be a letter to William Clark, telling him what to say to Bill Dillard.

Emotional and blunt, the letter would also turn out to be—as some now suspect Glasgow intended—the only public record of Freeman’s allegations against him. “For Freeman to come down here and say we are dishonest, and for you to sit there and not say anything, hurt us to the core,” Glasgow wrote, in Clark’s voice. “Freeman’s accountants have been down here for the past two weeks looking through everything we have, and that’s fine because we have nothing to hide and never have. We have been following the agreements established between you and my dad. None of that was ever put in writing, but I can show you that it’s been the same since […]1996. If you didn’t know that it was working the way it did, you should have known, because that information has been available through audits done by outside CPAs and internal financials sent to your people every month.” Urging Clark to tell Dillard “to call off the dogs,” a reference to Freeman’s auditors, Glasgow went on to suggest that CDI would be willing to change “the agreement” with Dillard’s “going forward.” The part of the letter Chandler saw ended there, without specifying what the agreement was.

Glasgow gave his draft to Clark on Friday afternoon. Although he was still overwhelmed with work generated by the Dillard’s auditors, Glasgow took time to cut and paste a birthday email to Chandler—the words to “Auld Lang Syne,” the bittersweet ode to old friendships. That night, he called Chandler and invited him over for a drink. Chandler told him he couldn’t make it. “Okay, man,” Glasgow said, “I just want you to know I appreciate you.” “Yeah, man, me too,” Chandler said, recalling that there was something odd about the tone of Glasgow’s final words to him: “No, man, I really need you to hear this, okay? I really appreciate you.”

On Saturday, Glasgow went to work, as he’d been doing for weeks in order to prepare the stock-redistribution plan. There he ran into William Clark, who told him that he’d just personally delivered Glasgow’s letter to Bill Dillard at his home. That should have been good news—Glasgow’s views were going to be heard, Clark was supporting him—but he barely mentioned this when he got home that night.

According to Melinda, Glasgow seemed fine on Sunday morning. He went to work. No one else was in the office. Glasgow’s electronic-key-card record shows that he went in and out several times, by CDI’s side door, for what appear to have been cigarette breaks. Around noon, he went home for lunch. Shortly after 2 p.m., Melinda found Glasgow lying on the couch in the den “just kind of staring.” He seemed “distant” and “in deep thought,” but it didn’t strike her as unusual because, she says, “John lived in deep thought a lot.” But that moment is the one that bothers her. “I sensed that he was disturbed, you know,” she says, her voice wavering. “Clearly I didn’t think…”

Glasgow returned to CDI around 2:30 p.m. At 4:05, according to his key card, he left and was gone for exactly 30 minutes. Where he went, no one knows; but he was back home by 5 p.m., as promised.

Although she has gone over and over the details of the evening before her husband vanished, replaying every moment in her mind, Melinda says she cannot recall anything out of the ordinary about his behavior. Shortly after 9 p.m., as he often did, John settled into his favorite armchair, in front of the TV, with his cat, Simon, on his lap.

Melinda went to put on a bathrobe, and when she returned, John was fast asleep in the chair. “Snoring,” she says. At 10:30 p.m., ready to go to bed, Melinda shook John gently, but he didn’t wake up, so she let him sleep.

Sometime after that, Glasgow awoke, and, according to the evidence he left behind, did the following things: He wrote two checks from a family educational trust—one to a niece and the other to himself to cover his trustee’s fee, which, apparently on second thought, he redeposited back into the trust fund. The checks were dated that morning and were left out on the kitchen counter. Glasgow also wrote the only note that he would leave behind, three lines on a pad that Melinda used for her to-do lists—the Bank of America website, the number of their electronic account, and the password to their home safe, where Glasgow left $11,400 and his passport.

He took his cell phone from the kitchen counter, his corporate credit card from his briefcase, and went downstairs to the basement, where he picked up his company laptop. Leaving behind his wristwatch and his blood-pressure medication, he got into his Volvo and pulled out of the driveway. At 5:15 a.m., minutes after his neighbor saw the car drive away, Glasgow’s cell phone was turned on.