They never once considered what a fraud attorney might do with a perfectly engineered fear, if you gave her enough time and enough reason to point it back at you.

Chapter 11 — Natalie and Logan

Natalie brought in the one honest official she trusted, a Chicago detective named Logan Pierce who worked financial crimes and had, she said, never once been impressed by an expensive suit.

I met with Logan Pierce quietly, three times, in three unremarkable places, and I laid it out for him the way I would have laid out a case to a jury — the forged trust papers, the decoy accounts, the offshore transfers, the twenty-year architecture of Charles Mercer’s theft, and the smaller uglier scheme of my husband riding along on top of it.

Logan was a careful man, and a skeptical one, which was exactly what I needed; he did not want my story, he wanted my documents, and I had spent a year making sure the documents were flawless.