This is a principle I carried out of my whole profession, and out of this entire ordeal: that you rarely need to make guilty people incriminate themselves, because guilty people, given enough rope and enough confidence that no one is watching, will do it on their own.

Julian did not need to be tricked into revealing his guilt.

He needed only to believe he was safe, that he was dealing with the weak, defeated woman of his imagination, that no one was recording, that the evidence lived in a laptop he could smash.

Grant an arrogant criminal those beliefs, and he will hand you everything: the confession, the motive, the crime itself, performed with gusto, for the camera he is too contemptuous to suspect.

My job was never to entrap Julian Vance.