What he did not understand was that I had spent decades teaching investigators to preserve their evidence before ever confronting a thief.

I had let them believe the hearing was their ambush, because frightened people become careless when they think the victim has nowhere left to run.

“Yes,” I said.

“Competent people often do.”

It was, I suppose, the closest thing to a confession the room got from me — that I had known, and waited, and let them proceed.

There were those, afterward, who found that troubling.