He’s a doctor.

He’s a children’s doctor,” and the floor seemed to tilt a few degrees under Cordell’s feet, because the two facts sat side by side and would not be made to fit: a doctor for children, and two children who had walked through the rain to a police station to get away from him.

He pulled up the afternoon’s call log.

Seven minutes before the girls came through his door, a missing-child report had reached dispatch — a father, frantic, saying both his daughters had wandered off after refusing their medicine. Cordell read it twice.

Because Junia had just told him, in her own careful words, that Livia had never been told what she was swallowing at all.

Refused it, the father said.