As we’d discovered, the last victims—Jan Gunderson and Peter Evans—definitely hadn’t been killed by the Larsens. Peter had learned that his father was involved in MKULTRA—mind control experiments for the CIA—in the fifties and sixties. Now, MKULTRA was a matter of public record, and while Will Evans would have hated for Peter to find out, it wasn’t exactly a state secret. What was a secret was the fact that Evans had continued the work with his old mentor, Edgar Chandler. Chandler had left the CIA but was still working on creating a mind control drug for his pharmaceutical firm, by means that I suspect were less than legal and certainly less than ethical.

According to Chandler, Peter had threatened to expose their experiments, and his father killed him. Then Peter’s girlfriend, Jan, showed up and Evans killed her, too. Being an expert in serial killers and having full knowledge of the recent crimes from a police friend, Evans had staged the bodies to match my parents’ other alleged victims.

Is that what really happened? I’m not sure. There’s a reason I did my master’s thesis on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’m drawn to his greatest creation because I understand how Sherlock Holmes thinks—logic over emotion. But there’s a place for intuition there, too—not surprising given Conan Doyle’s own interest in the supernatural. I’d spent enough time with both Will Evans and Edgar Chandler to know that Evans was, basically, a good man. Chandler was not.

When Gabriel and I started investigating, Chandler had taken control of the situation. In the twenty years since Peter Evans’s murder, he’d actually found a way to do what the CIA could not—formulate some kind of drug that controlled the actions of others. He’d used it to kill two potential witnesses. Except Jan’s senile father and Peter’s drugged-out old friend weren’t really witnesses at all. Murdering them had just been an excuse to test his product. Then he used it to kill Evans himself, robbing Evans of the opportunity to tell his side of the story.

I suspect Evans had made the mistake of calling Chandler when Peter found out. I suspect Chandler was responsible for Peter’s and Jan’s deaths. Will Evans may have played a role, but I would like to believe he did not murder his own son. Maybe, then, I’m a little bit sentimental after all. Whatever the exact answer, there is no doubt that one of them—Chandler or Evans—murdered the two, and my parents did not. Chandler had provided enough evidence for that.

Our investigation would slow while the police investigated Chandler’s claims. As a defense lawyer, Gabriel acted as if he had nothing but disdain for the police, but as a shrewd investigator himself he did respect their abilities and the tools they had at their disposal. He’d let the police investigate, assimilate what they learned into our research, and then jump back in.

As Gabriel mentioned talking to the police, I thought of something else he needed to speak to them about. Just before Will Evans died, he’d shown me old photos of Gabriel’s mother. Dead on a coroner’s table. Gabriel was supposed to go to the station and identify the pictures. Confirm Seanna was dead—that she had been dead since she’d left him, since he’d presumed she abandoned him. I thought of asking if he’d done that and, if not, reminding him of my offer to go along. I didn’t. Couldn’t. The night was going well, and that was sure to ruin it. So we continued talking about the case.

Though we’d wait for details from the police investigation, we wouldn’t stop work entirely. We’d solved Peter’s and Jan’s murders by focusing on them. Now I’d do the same with the other six victims, researching them as people, not numbers in a serial killer’s tally.

Did I expect to find my parents innocent of all crimes? No. But did I hope I would? Of course. So I would investigate to set my mind at ease, and whatever I found, Gabriel could use in his appeal.

When Gabriel’s phone buzzed, he took it out and glanced in annoyance at the screen before pocketing it. Three more steps and he yanked it out again, hammered in a quick text, and hit Send hard enough to launch the message into space.

“Client being a pain?” I said. “As a new employee, I can pry now without seeming like I’m prying.”

“It simply wasn’t the person I’m waiting to hear from. I’m having . . .” He stuffed the phone back into his pocket. “I’m trying to resolve a matter, and the other party won’t return my calls.” He adjusted his suit coat. “I’ll deal with it in the morning.”

We crossed the road. A calico cat leapt onto a newspaper box and began washing its ears.

“Storm’s coming.” I looked up into the clear evening sky, so cloudless I could see the faint twinkle of distant stars through the dusk. “Or not.”

“Hmm.”

“Either way, we’d better head back to the car.”

I started in that direction. Gabriel took a few steps beside me, then glanced back at the cat, still cleaning its ears. He took out his phone again and punched in another text, and we carried on in silence.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wednesday morning, I drove my newly acquired VW into Chicago for my first day working with Gabriel. His office is a greystone near Garfield Park. A beautiful old building in a respectable but not exactly prestigious neighborhood. I’d expected something flashier—the Jag version of a lawyer’s office. He could afford that. So why the greystone? It meant something. With Gabriel, everything means something.

The problem with old Chicago neighborhoods is a distinct lack of parking. Gabriel gets the spot in the narrow lane between his building and the next. I was supposed to park on the street, but I got a call from Gabriel five minutes before I arrived. Apparently, the media had staked out his office hoping for a sound bite on my birth parents’ case. I parked a few blocks away, and he picked me up.

There was indeed a news van in front of his building. Gabriel roared past and veered into the parking spot sharply enough to knock me against the door. He paused before pulling up, and glanced off to the left, down the road, as if he’d spotted something.

“There’s something I need to do first,” he said.

“Okay, let me out here. I’m sure Lydia—”

“You should come with me. We need to talk.”

I sighed as the Jag roared back onto the road.

I twisted to face him. “Are you trying to give me whiplash my first day—?”