It had become a case that would prove itself.

Christopher was taken into custody that same afternoon, after a minor crash on a rain-slick highway that he walked away from with little more than a broken arm, having been driving far too fast in his panic to get away.

He was not badly hurt, and I was glad of that, not out of any tenderness toward him but because I did not want his story to end in a way that let anyone call him a victim of anything but his own choices.

By a strange turn, the ambulance first brought him to a hospital within the very medical network where Dr.