The color went out of the doctor’s face.

His hand shook so violently that the syringe slipped from it and shattered on the linoleum.

Vance kicked the glass aside without looking away from him and drew a pair of handcuffs from his belt.

“Dr.

Sterling here is the official who signed your death certificates yesterday afternoon,” Vance told me as he brought the man’s arms behind his back.

“He skipped the county morgue entirely and wrote down a simultaneous hereditary heart failure — for a mother and both her twin sons, on the same afternoon, which is roughly as believable as it sounds.