He asked whether anything was still inside it.

She said she didn’t know; she had just seen her father use it, and she had taken it when he wasn’t looking, and she had hidden it.

He did not take it from her with his bare hands.

He had already understood, without letting himself fully think the thought yet, that this small plastic object was going to matter enormously, and that everything he did with it in the next sixty seconds might matter later in a room with a judge in it.

So he laid a clean evidence envelope flat on the counter, and he asked Junia to set the syringe inside it herself, and she did, her small fingers precise and careful.

He wrote the time on the flap.