Attempted murder.

Extortion. Kidnapping. Aggravated assault. Conspiracy. Preston tried to talk his way out. Men like him always do.

He told the agents there’d been a misunderstanding, that his bride was emotionally unstable, that she’d injured herself.

Then they played him ninety seconds of his own voice, captured through the ventilation shaft, calmly discussing how to stage a grieving-widower narrative “by Christmas.”

He stopped talking after that. They weren’t dragged to a warehouse. There was no hood, no van, no violence. There didn’t need to be.

Dominic had a far more poetic sense of justice than any of that. Once they were arraigned and out on the eye-watering bail that Beatrice scraped together against the last unencumbered thing she owned, my lawyers requested a single meeting.

A settlement conference, ostensibly. Beatrice and Preston came because their attorney told them it was their only chance to stay out of prison for the rest of their lives.