And your mother is all over it.”

Chapter 14 — Three Million

For three days the hospital became a fortress — officers at every door, news vans massing outside, the whole country transfixed by the family that had climbed up out of its own grave.

And inside my room, a piece at a time, Detective Vance showed me the shape of what had been done to us, and it was its own kind of burial.

“Kenneth didn’t have a gambling problem,” Vance said, laying out a row of wire transfers.