It is worth noting what did not save Richard Cole, because he had prepared so carefully for the moment of discovery that never, in five years, he had believed would come.

He had the cash.

He had the passports.

He had, presumably, a destination in mind, a plan for vanishing, the whole apparatus of a man who had always known, in the back of his mind, that he might one day need to run.

What he did not have was time, because the evidence had surfaced not gradually, not through a slow reinvestigation that might have tipped him off and given him a head start, but all at once, in a single night, faster than the news could travel and faster than he could react to it.

He learned of his own undoing from a television ticker, in the same hour that the warrant for his arrest was being signed, with the state police already on the wet road to his door.