Knight’s fondest memories from his youth were his days off from school, when he got to work with his father, a trainer at the stables. It was his only time with the old man when he wasn’t marinating himself in Wild Turkey. His father spent most of the year ankle-deep in mud and manure as he cared for the possessions of the international elites who stabled their horses in Saratoga. But on race days, little Randy Knight and his father got to be the ultimate insiders in a rich man’s game. His annual brush with wealth had given him a glimpse into a world he desperately longed to be a part of. And now he was.

Knight moved toward the lower-level betting booth, looking slightly out of place in his blue Armani suit among the hoi polloi double-fisting Budweisers in their jeans and T-shirts.

Withdrawing $10,000 in cash from a bank envelope, he approached the betting window. As he placed all the money on a single horse, Knight recalled his favorite teaching from Sun Tzu: All battles are won before either side sets foot on the field.

Moments later, Knight entered a clubhouse suite, where the blue bloods gobbled up shrimp cocktail and clinked champagne flutes in their garish pastel attire and costumey hats. He glanced up at the television to see the thoroughbreds approaching the starting gates. He had been down with the horses in that moment many times in his youth. Even now he could feel their huffing and pulsing, and he could picture their veiny masses of muscle bunching and releasing in anticipation.

Harlen Richards approached, giddy with excitement. His horse, Gladiator, had already won the Kentucky Derby and was the odds-on favorite to take home the $5 million prize at the Breeders Cup today.

Richards shouted to a server, “Get this man a drink!” Then he paused, second-guessing Knight’s inscrutable expression. “Or are you on the clock?”

Knight ordered a mint julep. “Old Forester,” he instructed the waiter. “Easy on the sugar.”

With so much riding on the race, Richards was desperate to know whether the expert in front of him had personally placed a bet. Knight replied that he had put ten grand on a single horse. “I like to bet on a sure thing,” he added, forcing a smile.

Assuming that Knight was talking about Gladiator, Richards slapped him on the shoulder. “Good man!”

As Richards and Knight clinked glasses, Knight let go of his smile. “We need to talk about the eight-million-dollar claim you filed on Midway.” Midway was Gladiator’s only son and Richards’s future hope, and he had died spontaneously of kidney failure in practice earlier in the month.

Richards’s elevated blood alcohol enhanced his irritation at the comment. “For Christ’s sake, Knight! You insurance people are insufferable. Can’t this wait until Monday? The race is starting in less than a minute!”

Indignant, Richards turned his attention to the track.

“I dropped by your stable this morning,” Knight announced.

Earlier in the day, knowing that all hands would be on deck preparing Gladiator, Knight had gone to Richards’s luxury compound in the Pacific Palisades to follow up on a theory he had developed about the colt’s demise. His intuition rarely steered him in the wrong direction, nor had it that morning when he opened the trainer’s freezer to find a Tupperware container filled with small toothy blobs of pink flesh.