It caught them all, not just the one who came that night.

It documented everything, beyond appeal.

It ended the threat permanently, rather than temporarily.

And it left me, when the sun rose, a man who had been the victim of a crime rather than the author of one.

My enemies had built their whole plan on the assumption that a cornered, dying, ruthless Julian Vance would react with force.

They had not imagined that the most dangerous thing I could do was to react, instead, with perfect, patient, lawful restraint, and to let the truth, once captured, do to them what they had tried to do to me.

It ended in evidence, not blood.