Sinclaire told me, near the end, that in twenty years of practice she had rarely seen a case assemble itself so cleanly — that most fraud prosecutions are a slog of inference and circumstance, and this one was simply a matter of laying the man’s own manufactured documents on a table in the right order.

“He didn’t just break the law,” she said, closing the file.

“He wrote it down, signed other people’s names to it, and locked it in a box with the deed to everything he was trying to steal.

In thirty years I’ve never seen a man prosecute himself so thoroughly.

All you did was open the box.” That was true, and it was the part I savored most: not that I had destroyed him, but that he had done nearly all of it himself, and had needed me for only one thing — to be the person who finally looked.

Chapter 25 — The Paper on His Life