Lydia and I hung out at the coffee shop for almost a half hour. We didn’t talk about work, which was a first. It was easier outside the office for conversation to turn to the personal, and I discovered that Lydia was a widowed mother of two, with three grandkids, and was long-distance dating a record label exec from Sacramento who planned to retire to Chicago because, apparently, Lydia herself had no plans to stop working anytime soon.

When Ricky texted me an all-clear, we returned to find him waiting on his bike to say goodbye. I didn’t ask him what they’d decided to do about James. Nor did I ask Gabriel when I went inside. I had to trust them.

As Gabriel had warned, the police did want to talk to us about our prison visit to Chandler. We also had to answer more questions about the death of Macy Shaw.

I’m sure someone had connected us to both incidents, but the detective didn’t seem particularly suspicious. I was the daughter of convicted serial killers. It was almost as if no one was surprised that I’d morphed into the angel of death. As long as there were no indications that I’d killed anyone myself—and there weren’t—well, I was bound to attract some serious crazy.

We visited the station. We gave our statements. That was it.

—

Next we went to see Jon Childs, who hadn’t replied to my initial message, or to the two calls I’d made since.

Childs lived in a corner-unit town house in University Village. Older building. Quiet, tree-lined street. No sign to show that he ran a business out of his place. In this neighborhood they’d frown on that, and given his income, I doubted he needed to advertise for clients.

His condo was dark and the mailbox overflowed with flyers. Gabriel and I were sitting in the car discussing our next move when an older woman marched over from next door and emptied Childs’s mailbox.

I arrived at his front step just as the neighbor was coming down.

“Sorry to bother you. My husband”—I waved at the rental Jag—“and I were trying to figure out if Mr. Childs was home. I guess that”—I nodded at her armload of mail and flyers—“answers our question. When do you expect him back?”

“I didn’t expect him to be gone,” she said. “I always tell him, I’m home all day, just let me know when you’ll be away and I’ll collect the mail. It doesn’t look good when it piles up. Attracts the wrong kind of attention.” She gestured at a couple of kids across the road—clean-shaven college boys wearing two-hundred-dollar sneakers.