But there is nothing in Richard Cole’s terror that night worth dwelling on, and the officers who arrested him did their work the way it is supposed to be done, cleanly and lawfully and without cruelty, because the point was never his suffering.

The point was that a monstrous thing done in the dark five years ago had finally been dragged into the light, and that the man who did it would now answer for it in the one place where he could not manufacture evidence or manipulate a proxy or hide behind a grieving performance.

He would answer for it in a court of law, in the daylight, with the truth on the record at last.

They took him out into the rain in handcuffs, and the duffel bag full of cash and passports stayed behind on the cabin floor, and the escape he had prepared for was, like everything else he had built, already over.