Nate reluctantly lowered his phone. "I figured you were upstairs with Marisa and Ana."

"I needed some fresh air after being cooped up in the room all day."

She had a little color back in her cheeks, so in that respect she looked better. The humid air had done a number on her already frizzy hair, though. "Feeling better?"

"Much. Thanks. What are you doing?"

"Trying to see if I missed anything, trying to figure out who threatened you the other day."

She leaned forward. "Any luck?"

"Not yet, but hope springs eternal."

"In my experience, it's trouble that's eternal. Hope is fleeting."

No good answer to that.

"I've never really understood what it was all about," Leslie said. "Charles and those guys were doing something, and Vinnie was involved somehow. He was no Boy Scout. So why did he get murdered? I mean, I sort of understand, but what did they do that was so bad that it was worth killing over? Charles went to prison for the murder, not the rest of it."

"He was convicted of mortgage fraud, too. He'd have gone to prison for that, but the state's murder charges trumped the others. The stuff he and his cronies did led to a lot of people losing a lot of money, and not just when the housing bubble burst."

"I remember that. My house lost like a quarter of its value."

"Charles and his friends capitalized on the hopes and dreams of thousands of America's working class, sucking them into mortgages they couldn't afford, then turning around and tricking them out of the little equity they had in their homes when the people couldn't pay their mortgages."

"That's just cruel."

"It was more than that. When people were turned down for mortgages, G&K found a fresh way to pad their pocketbooks. They colluded with loan processors who were willing to overlook forged payment stubs and tax returns. They bribed property assessors to inflate the property values of homes. In doing so, they were able to secure inflated mortgages for borrowers—who had no idea what was going on, by the way—to put money in their own pockets. Over the course of about a decade, they took in hundreds of millions of dollars."

Leslie shook her head slowly. "And you're saying Vinnie was involved in that?"

"He was a small cog in a very big machine. He found and befriended a lot of the buyers. He earned their trust, then worked with the assessors and processors to get the deals done. From my research, it seemed that Jeremy Kinnison was the mastermind."

"He wasn't even there, though. I remember cleaning the office after his going-away party."