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The other one is a federal attorney called Weiss—fifties, shirtsleeves, a legal pad of his own and a laptop he doesn’t open.

Yeardley looks at my face for about two seconds when I come in. A legal pad and pen are in front of her. The pad is still blank.

“Sit down, Mr. Brandt. Is anybody expecting you anywhere?”

“No.”

“Do you want a lawyer here?”

“Not for this part.”

“Say it out loud for me, please.”

“I’m declining counsel for today’s interview. I understand I can stop at any time,” I say, and it costs me almost all the breath I have.

Weiss turns his pad over.

“Before you give us anything,” he says, “I’m going to tell you where we are. I don’t want you sitting there under a misapprehension. I also don’t want this thrown out in a year. We’re eleven weeks into an investigation of betting activity on first-period scoring in eight games involving this club. Two are being looked at as possible spot-fixes. As of this week, we’re considering charges against Kieran Doyle.” He says it the way you’d read out a bus schedule. “Conspiracy and wire fraud on the payment mechanism,” Weiss says. “He hasn’t been notified. He’s been asked for an interview through the club. The club has retained counsel for him, which tells us they think it’s serious, too.”

“Yes.”

“So.” He puts both hands flat. “What are you prepared to give us?”

I’ve known the problem since the seventh of March. I knew it at a kitchen table in the port district at four in the morning, copying files off a laptop while a man slept in my bed forty feet away.

The evidence that convicts Vera Lindqvist also records exactly what a goaltender was asked to do and when he did it. The instruction and the goal live in the same document. Timed. Dated. I built that record on purpose over four months because I wanted evidence that could hurt her. The price is that it points at him, too. There’s no clean version where I hurt Vera and leave him untouched. I’ve spent eleven weeks looking for one. It doesn’t exist.

I could put half of it on the table. I’ve thought about that for eleven weeks. Half of it is nothing. Half of it is a man with a grudge and a hard drive he might have written himself.

I put the envelope on the table. Sliding it across requires my right arm, which means hurting the ribs. I do it in one motion anyway.

“Everything,” I say.

It takes six hours and forty minutes.

We stop twice. Somebody brings sandwiches at half past seven, and I eat a quarter of one. Yeardley writes the entire time. She doesn’t ask me to repeat myself once.

I give them the account.

Vera Lindqvist. The shipping-services office on the waterfront. The real staff, real invoices, and twelve real container contracts that keep the operation looking legitimate. Nineteen years of my own employment, which I set out first in full because a witness who buries his own part is a witness a jury dislikes. The Doyle account from the first of November. The terms. The reports at eleven minutes past midnight every Sunday into Monday, all thirty of them.

The instructions. The eleventh of March, Pittsburgh, first period, level score, three hundred thousand against the balance. The third of April, Buffalo, the same. The twenty-fourth of April, Toronto.

The bets. This is the part Weiss sits up for. Twenty-two separate accounts across four books and two jurisdictions, staked in the ninety minutes before puck drop on a first-period total that moves for no reason anybody in the market can name. Every one of those stakes is traceable to a corporate structure with a container lease at the bottom of it.

Next is the forty thousand dollars of my own money that entered a client’s accounts as licensing income from a coffee roaster with eleven employees.

The licensing agreement. Nine documents. A real signature from a woman called Deirdre who thought she was signing four documents: a marketing consent, a marketing services agreement, a consultancy retainer, and a holding company. I built all of it in one night on my own laptop. Then I sent it to a registered player agent through a system with a timestamp on it.

“That’s a forged instrument,” Weiss says.

“Yes.”

“You built it.”

“I built it in one night. It’s the best work I’ve ever done.” I have to stop and get my breath back. “You’ll want to charge me with that one. It’s the cleanest charge on the table. Nobody’s name is on it but mine.”

Yeardley stops writing. “Mr. Brandt,” she says. “You understand that what you’ve given us puts Kieran Doyle in the second paragraph of the indictment.”