I didn’t play it for the crowd.

I handed everything — the audio, the photographs, the video, the sealed evidence, the location of a certain poisoned poinsettia — directly to the lead state investigator.

I wanted this built on an unbreakable chain of custody, not a viral moment. Cruelty had run this house for a long time on spectacle and lies. I was going to end it with paperwork.

At the medical center, surgeons worked on Levi’s knee for hours. Early on New Year’s Day, before treatment could clear his system, a forensic toxicologist drew his blood.

The report ruled out street drugs entirely. What it found instead was a mix of prescription sedatives and a veterinary tranquilizer — the kind of thing no addict stumbles into, the kind of thing that is administered to a person on purpose to make them helpless. It wasn’t an addiction they’d been hiding. It was a method.

The rest came apart quickly, the way these things do once the first thread is pulled.