The shell companies he thought were clever were transparent.

Everything that made him a kingpin in Harrington County made him an easy case to a man who dismantled far more careful criminals for a living.

That is the fatal blindness of the big fish in a small pond: they mistake dominance over amateurs for real skill, and they never find out the difference until they are pulled, at last, into a larger body of water, where the thing they thought made them powerful is revealed as the ordinary, well-documented pattern it always was.

Roy Prescott spent twenty-two years never meeting a bigger fish.