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"The day before the sale closes," Tinley said. Tinley had spent years fixing the books of a one-percenter biker club and then was rescued by Eagle and the Steel Patriots. Since then, she’d helped manage all of the finances for the teams.

"It's a kickback. Vance pays eleven million for a firm worth twenty and slips her a million and a half on the side, where no court and no creditor will ever look."

AJ slid a cream-colored letter across the table.

"Ms. Babineaux has had her money with Langley Capital for forty years. This came to her house on Tuesday." It was written in a warm, folksy voice and signed Carter in blue ink. "Look at the date."

Tinley laid Dr. Pryce's certification of incapacity beside it.

"According to his doctor, Carter Langley lost the ability to manage his own affairs on the third. According to this letter, he signed three hundred and twelve of these on the ninth." A finger tapped the page. "Either the doctor is lying or the signature is. My money says both."

Jean stood at the window, arms folded, watching the bayou.

"And the Delaware trust buying your father's bank shares belongs to Lawrence Beauvois. The man they want on the board, Julian Theriot, is married to Lawrence's cousin. Your mother isn't just selling a business, Aurora. She's selling Lawrence a door into four banks."

Aurora looked at the papers spread across the table, everything her mother was, laid out in black and white. Then her phone rang. It was Margie, and Margie was crying.

Carter Langley had died early Sunday morning, with the curtains drawn and the Haviland cup on the nightstand. The notice ran in the Times-Picayune on Tuesday, four tidy inches beneath a photograph from better days.

Carter Langley, beloved husband and devoted father, after a brief illness. Services Friday at ten o'clock, St. Louis Cathedral.

Aurora read it three times. Devoted father. Then she folded the paper, and laid it face down.

"Call the FBI."

They spent the next three days collecting the truth, one frightened person at a time.

Jean and AJ found Neil Ashby in the parking garage on Poydras, gripping a bottle of antacid like a rosary. He handed over everything: the purchase agreement, the consulting contract, the compliance certification, the forged client letters.

"She told me they'd come for me first," he said. "I'd rather it was you."

Special Agent Renée Dupree of the FBI's New Orleans field office paid a call on Dr. Alden Pryce. He lasted four minutes before admitting that the certification had been dictated to him, backdated at Missy Langley's request, and written without a single test.

Whitney Boudreaux did not wait to be found. He walked into the field office in his seersucker suit and told Agent Dupree about Orange Beach himself, and about lunch at Galatoire's, because he was seventy-one years old and too tired to be owned by Missy Langley for whatever time he had left.

Margie came to Belle Fleur on Wednesday with a zippered plastic bag in her purse. Inside was a small amber bottle with its label scraped off, and a scrap of yellow legal paper with Carter's name written a dozen times in Missy's hand.

"I told him," Margie said. "Two nights before the end, I sat on the edge of his bed and said, Mr. Carter, she's putting something in your tea." Her voice broke.

"He took my hand, and he said, ‘I know, Margie. I've known since the start. It's all right. I'm okay with it.’ Then he told me to call Mr. Marchand if anything happened to him."

Hollis Marchand arrived that evening with an old leather briefcase and a sealed envelope.

"Your father called me the first night she brought him that tea," he told Aurora. "He asked me to come after Missy went to bed and to bring a notary. Margie let us in through the kitchen. He signed a new will that night, and he revoked the power of attorney your mother has been waving around this city. I recorded the revocation with the parish the next morning. He made me swear to keep it all sealed until he was gone."

Aurora stared at her father's signature. It was shaky, nothing like the confident blue forgeries. It was real.

St. Louis Cathedral rose white against a gray October sky. Inside, the old families of New Orleans filled the pews in black silk and dark suits, murmuring about poor Missy and how brave she was being.

Missy sat in the front pew beneath a black lace veil, a handkerchief she never used folded in her gloved hands. Lawrence Beauvois sat five rows behind her. Dustin Morgan leaned against a pillar near the back, checking his phone. The priest had just reached the altar when the great center doors opened. When he saw the doors open and the group of people, he nearly shit himself.

Aurora came down the aisle in a plain navy dress, her head high, her hand in Jethro's. Behind them came Jean, AJ, Hiro, and Tinley, Mike Bennett in his dress uniform, Kev and Gator and Ham and the rest of the Shadow Warriors, and Agent Dupree with four FBI agents in dark windbreakers, the yellow letters plain across their backs. A murmur rolled through the cathedral like wind through cane.

Missy rose and lifted her veil, her face perfectly composed and perfectly grieved.

"Aurora. Darling. You came." She held out her arms. "Your father would have been so..."

"Don't," Aurora said.