The medical examiner stopped the cremation with a single phone call an hour after I made mine. Weston had rushed it precisely because a body tells the truth that paperwork hides, and the autopsy he never wanted found what the death certificate never mentioned. Marguerite’s heart had not simply failed. Her bloodwork showed a medication she had never been prescribed layered underneath the one she had, in a combination that stops a heart and reads, to a coroner who is not looking closely, like a natural event. Weston had counted on nobody looking closely. He had not counted on the recorder in her purse, and he had not counted on me.

Desmond Fowler did the rest before sunrise, exactly as promised. Weston had spent eighteen months moving Marguerite’s assets into instruments she did not understand and could not have consented to in the state he was deliberately keeping her in. The paperwork he wanted me to bring the next day was the last signature he needed. The estate folder I told him I had found did not exist. I brought a recorder of my own instead, and two detectives who were already familiar with my name, and we sat in Marguerite’s kitchen while I let him explain, on tape, in his own cheerful voice, exactly what he thought I was.