I felt no satisfaction watching it, only a kind of grim tiredness.

Miller was a small man who had made a frightened, corrupt choice, and he would answer for it in his own proportion.

He was never the real target.

He was just the first place the light happened to fall on its way to the people who had bought him.

Chapter 17 — The Arrests

That morning, federal agents, with local police in support, surrounded the off-campus house where the three of them had believed themselves so perfectly safe.

They were brought out onto the lawn, and it was not the dramatic spectacle some part of me had imagined; it was only three frightened young men in handcuffs, discovering all at once that the invisible wall they had lived their whole lives behind had never actually existed.