The instant Kayla saw those capsules, her crying stopped as though a switch had been thrown, and her whole body went stiff.

“Do you recognize these?” I asked.

“No,” she whispered.

“Look me in the eye and say that again.”

She looked at the floor.

The chief of the unit sent the capsules straight down to toxicology, and from the speed and violence of Roland’s collapse, I already had a grim guess at what they’d find — the kind of illicit weight-loss compound that gets sold underground, a hard stimulant paired with a powerful diuretic, the sort of thing that strips the water and the minerals out of a body fast enough to stop a heart.

Roland had been strange about his appearance for weeks: the gym twice a day, the mirror, the skipped dinners with our daughter.