This was the irony she never grasped, and it was a large one.

The whole catastrophe had grown from a single routine audit — an unglamorous review of a redevelopment bid, the kind of thing my firm did dozens of times a year.

I had not been hunting the Ravenels.

I had flagged some irregular numbers in a contract bid, as I was paid to do, and the numbers had led to some accounts, and the accounts had a shape I recognized, because I had seen accounts shaped that way before, six years earlier, in the financial records of a trafficking network.

That was the thread.

Seraphina, in her panic, had assumed the audit was a personal attack and that I was a personal enemy, and she had decided the way to make it disappear was to make me disappear — to disgrace me so thoroughly that any finding I produced would be worthless.