“His search history is the whole case,” Ramsey said, and turned the monitor so Cordell could see it, and Cordell read it and felt his knuckles go pale on the edge of the desk.

I won’t reproduce what Fenwick had typed into that search bar in the days before, because even his searches were a map toward a method, and the method is exactly the thing that stays out of this account.

It is enough to say what the searches were for. They were the research of a man working out how to cause a frightening but survivable medical emergency in a small child — how much would land a child in a hospital without, he hoped, doing worse — and, alongside that, the research of a man working out the legal consequences he was really after: whether a medical crisis during the mother’s parenting time could be used to strip her of custody.

That was the tell.

He had not been researching how to hurt his daughter for its own sake.

He had been researching how to weaponize hurting his daughter.