They are the ones who have learned to keep thinking through it.

And the arrival of those partners, frightening as it was, told me something useful, something I filed away even in that tense moment: this was bigger than my sister, which meant it was more documented than my sister.

A lone thief leaves a small trail.

But a thief who has taken out a two-hundred-thousand-dollar loan against a stolen house, from a private lending firm, with a notary and a registered deed and a lien, has generated paper, a great deal of paper, at every step.

Every piece of that apparatus that made the theft look legal was also a piece of evidence, a thread that could be pulled.