It was slow, unglamorous work, and I came to be grateful for how slow it was.

Two deaths that had been signed off as natural or accidental had to be re-examined without any shortcut, because the whole point was to build something a court could not doubt.

Forensic accountants traced where each woman’s money had gone and how quickly Dario had moved it.

The reopened autopsies, done with methods and questions that had not been applied the first time, told a story the original certificates had missed entirely.

Piece by careful piece, over months, the state assembled from the outside what Dario’s own tidy folders had recorded on the inside: that Alyssa’s sudden death and Ines’s accidental one were neither sudden nor accidental.