It was a rush like no other. Okay, when I was seventeen I discovered a rush I liked just as well, but that’s altogether different. Or maybe not so different—the adrenaline rush, the descent into the absolutely physical, where nothing else mattered except what I felt. And what I felt was glorious. That evening, it knocked every vestige of hurt from my brain, and when I grinned over at Gabriel, he granted me a rare smile in return.

After about twenty minutes of roaring around, I slowed and said, “There’s a place up here where we can grab you a coffee.”

“Does it have your mochas?”

“Nope. Straight-up coffee, which is fine—”

“Go someplace else, then. Get your mocha. We have time.”

Another grin for him before I veered around the corner and sped off again.

After we got our coffees, Gabriel suggested we walk for a bit to stretch our legs. Stretch his legs, I’m guessing—my dad was six-two, and I remember him complaining about the Spyder’s lack of legroom.

“Can I ask what Pamela talked to you about?” I said as we set out. “She said some things that made me worry it might not be a business chat.”

“It was. She hired me back.”

I stopped short. “Really?”

“Moreover, she will complete payment of her past-due bill first thing tomorrow, along with a sizable retainer.”

I gaped at him. Pamela had money—a healthy inheritance—with nothing to spend it on. Yet she hadn’t paid her initial bill. She claimed Gabriel screwed her over, but I suspect after their falling-out over the failed appeal she’d known withholding payment was the best revenge. That was why Gabriel came to me in the first place, hoping to recoup his losses. She’d been slowly paying him back as he’d helped me. Now, minutes after claiming she was still lawyer-shopping, she’d not only hired him but repaid him?

“You know your mother and I don’t get along,” he said.

“To put it mildly.”

“But I do feel the need to give her some credit here, and say that I think this is her way of apologizing for lying about the omens. That does not excuse the lie but proves she isn’t actively trying to thwart you, Olivia. Pamela and I have our differences, but I don’t question her attachment to you. If she won’t speak of the omens, she has a reason. I agree, however, that despite her olive branch here, you are correct to refrain from visiting until she agrees to discuss it. But it is an olive branch. She knows you want me on this case.”

“But she also knows she’d be an idiot not to hire you back. She was just toying with you.”

“Yes, she would have eventually rehired me. Then we’d have spent a week dickering, as I insisted on repayment and a retainer. The fact she offered both willingly indicates it is an apology to you.”

“Okay.”

“It also means I can put you to work on her case. It will be part of your job with me. A large part once the police investigation slows and I begin the appeal in earnest. At that point, you may find it difficult to continue at the diner—”

I shot him a look.

“I said, ‘at that point.’” He slowed at the corner, hand going against my back as if to stop me from running into nonexistent traffic. “I even qualified it with ‘may.’”

I shook my head. He wanted me to quit the diner, namely so I’d be at his beck and call for research. I refused so I wouldn’t be beholden to him for my entire income.

As we walked, we discussed our next move on the Larsens’ case.

My birth parents had been convicted of killing four young couples in what was presumed to be some kind of ritual. The murders themselves had been swift strangulations. No sex. No torture. No sign that the victims even had time to realize what was going on. It was only after their deaths that those “ritualistic elements” took shape. Five things had been done to the corpses. A symbol had been carved into each thigh and another painted with woad on the stomachs. For the women, a twig of mistletoe pierced the symbol on their stomachs. They all had a stone in their mouths and a section of skin removed from their backs.

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 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.