Part Seven: What Came After
The case lasted fourteen months from the night of the arrest to the final plea.
Owen Price pleaded guilty to all counts. He gave a statement at sentencing that I read once, in the document Mara sent me, and never read again. It was neither apologetic nor cold — it was precise, the way he had always been precise, an accurate account of what he had done and why, delivered with the specific self-awareness of a man who understood himself clearly and had simply made a different set of choices than other people.
The part I returned to, despite myself, was near the end. He said he had not intended the identity he built with me to become what it did. He said he had not planned to stay as long as he did. He said something had made it difficult to maintain the necessary distance.
He didn’t name what that something was.
The judge sentenced him to nineteen years. Victor Hale, the man in the raincoat, received twenty-three.
The Morrisons — the people I had called Caleb’s parents, who had spent four years being grandparents to my son — received reduced sentences in exchange for cooperation. I learned more about them than I wanted to know, and less than I had hoped, in the way of all information about people who turned out to be entirely other than you believed.
My financial records were cleared of any connection to Owen’s activities, which was a process that took eight months and involved more paperwork than I would have thought possible. During those eight months, I also changed every password I had ever created, closed accounts I’d held for a decade, and developed a relationship with a cybersecurity consultant that felt, at times, like the most trusting relationship I was capable of having.
The freelance bookkeeping clients who had been part of the laundering infrastructure received notices from investigators. Some of them I’d worked with for years — small business owners who had nothing to do with Owen’s operation and had themselves been unwitting. I sent personal emails to each of them. Some wrote back. Most did not, which I understood.
