Cordell had testified in a lot of trials, and he understood why this evidence chain had held where so many fell apart, and it was not really the serial numbers or the camera timestamps, clean as those were.

It was that every piece of it corroborated the child.

That was the thing the defense could never get around.

A little girl’s word, on its own, can be picked at — memory, suggestibility, the coached-witness insinuation that defense lawyers reach for reflexively in cases like this.

But Junia’s word did not stand on its own.

It stood inside a lattice of physical fact that a frightened officer had had the presence of mind to preserve in the first sixty minutes, before anyone knew how big the case would become — the sealed and timestamped syringe, the matched label, the recorded attempt to hide the second one, the search history in the father’s own hand.