We sat in the parking lot for a while, so I could rest. Gabriel checked his messages and so did I. The curse of modern communications—spend a couple of hours separated from your cell and you’ll spend another twenty minutes catching up.

I went to my texts first. Gabriel said, “Ricky?”

My smile must have given it away. “He’s coming home early. Which means you won’t have to babysit me tonight.”

Gabriel gave a grunt that I interpreted as “Good.”

“I’ll surprise him at the airport,” I said. “He can drop me at the office in the morning.”

Another grunt. I looked up to see him engrossed in his e-mail. I stopped talking and texted with Ricky. When I finished, Gabriel was sitting with his phone on his leg, his hand engulfing it.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Edgar Chandler is dead.”

“What?”

“He killed himself shortly after returning to his cell. Cyanide, it seems.”

“Ransom must have slipped it to him. He warned Chandler that the hounds were coming and gave him a way out. That’s why I heard them. They were coming for Chandler.” I exhaled. “Shit.”

“There will be an investigation,” Gabriel said. “As his final visitors, we’ll be questioned. We may also be suspected.”

“Of giving him the pill? But we never touched him and the guard can confirm . . . Except the guard wasn’t a guard at all.”

“There were security cameras. As well as the second guard. I doubt we’d be seriously considered as suspects.”

“Okay, so what about Jon Childs? The guy Chandler wanted you to kill.”

“I had no intention of actually—”

I cut him off with a look. “I know that. You just wanted to get his name and find out why Chandler wants him dead.”

He nodded, pleased that I’d figured it out and relieved that I’d known he wouldn’t kill a man—at least, not one who didn’t present an immediate lethal threat.

“So let’s find Jon Childs,” I said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

While neither Jon nor Childs is a particularly uncommon name, when you put the two together you get fewer than twenty adult males in the country. And exactly one in the Greater Chicago area.

The Chicago Jon Childs was a thirty-six-year-old self-employed equities trader. Successful, according to his tax records. Yes, we had access to his tax records. Or Lydia did. Not necessarily legally. She’d spent most of her working life as the executive assistant to Chicago’s Field Office Special Agent in Charge. That would be the CIA field office.