The signatures freed Patricia.

The rest, I left to the law, which is where it belonged, and which did its slow, thorough, unstoppable work.

Because I did just what I told them I would: the forensic audit went to the underwriting bank.

Their risk committee reviewed it, and within days they pulled the entire two-hundred-million-dollar loan, because no bank on earth lends against forged collateral and fabricated leases once it knows they are forged.

Deprived of that liquidity, the whole house of cards came down at last, and the board of directors — now aware of what their chairman had done — launched an independent investigation of their own.