A seven-year-old should not know the difference between a place that gets searched and a place that doesn’t.

Junia knew it precisely.

She had known exactly where her father’s attention stopped, and she had put the one piece of evidence that could save her sister in the blind spot she had mapped through hard experience, and she had walked it out of the house under his nose, in her shoe, and through the rain to a police station.

It was, Cordell thought, the single most competent act he had witnessed all year, and it had been performed by a child who could not yet spell evidence.

He asked her, quietly, whether there was a needle on it.

She said no.