I knew that the moment he’d driven away from my father’s house, some part of his mind had already started working the problem — how to move the cars, how to hide the cash, how to get something to Efrain before the walls closed in, how to reframe himself as the victim of a vindictive wife.
He was, whatever else he was, genuinely fast; twelve years of staying one step ahead of everyone had made him fast.
The only way to beat a man like that is to be faster and to be right — to move before he does and to move within the law so cleanly that there’s no crack for him to pry at later.
That was the one arena where all my boring competence finally got to be a weapon instead of a shield.
He had spent twelve years counting on my skills being pointed at spreadsheets and never at him.
For forty-eight hours I pointed the entire apparatus of my training directly at him, and I did not miss, and by the time he’d finished being surprised, his lot was frozen and his accounts were flagged and there was nowhere left for the money to run.
Then Beatriz and I did the thing I actually knew how to do better than almost anyone.
We sat down with twelve years of tax filings and we took them apart.
Chapter 20 — The Network
What we found, over forty-eight sleepless hours, was not a man who had made some bad choices.
It was an ecosystem of fraud with my marriage at the center of it.
Unauthorized loans taken in my father’s name.
The illegal lien on our SUV.
A steady drip of small thefts engineered over years.