Page 1 of The Librarians

The man captured by the library’s surveillance camera does not appear to be in desperate straits.

CCTV footage in real life is not always black-and-white or grainy—this one has medium resolution and somewhat desaturated colors. Viewing the footage, it’s easy enough to make out that the man sports a light blue Oxford shirt, open at the collar, sleeves rolled up.

With his slightly long hair held back from the forehead by a pair of bronze-tinted sunglasses, he looks like a young Hugh Grant, someone who has enough charm, talent, and privilege to survive a hooker scandal with his career intact.

He strolls along the stacks, occasionally crouching down to examine a row of books on the bottom. Several times he pulls out a volume, flips through it, then opens it until the front and back covers almost touch—as if to test the binding.

The next day’s footage is even longer, fifteen uninterrupted minutes of Kit Asquith wandering about the library.

What was he doing? And did he know then that in less than three weeks he would be dead?

In the final recording, Kit Asquith enters the library with a cardboard box.

It looks heavy. He disappears from frame for a few minutes.

When he reappears, he is still holding the same box.

Again he strolls the stacks, sometimes taking down a book to drop into the box, sometimes putting one from the box up onto the shelves.

After ten minutes of this, he leaves—never to be seen on these premises again.

Maybe it’s for the best that no one can figure out what Kit Asquith did in the suburbs of Austin, Texas—or where he hid the twenty-five million dollars he stole.

Late-stage capitalism is the golden age of fraud, and financial crimes are thick on the ground.

In a year Kit Asquith will become a footnote.

In five years he won’t even merit an ancillary remark.

Provided, that is, his widow stays far, far away from this insignificant little library.