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Chicken.”
    “No complaints,” I said, sitting down. This was clearly an ambush. In addition to Bob, there were at least four other lawyers in the room. “So I thought this was just going to be a friendly chat with your COO here. I didn’t realize the troops were marching.”
    “Oh, it is friendly,” Bob said with a grin. “I’m always friendly.”
    We stared at each other for a moment.
    “So,” Bob said, “what should we talk about?”
    “I’d like to talk about cyanide, Bob. Namely, how it got into your client’s cough medicine.”
    The room fell silent. A few of the lawyers exchanged glances. They were scared of something. They seemed to have been hoping I’d come about something else.
    “Tragedy,” Bob said. “Thank goodness nobody was killed.”
    “I got a visit from a little boy’s mother yesterday. She thinks he might not make it.”
    Bob shook his head. “Damn shame. What’s this world coming to when lunatics go around poisoning children’s medicine, for heaven’s sake? My clients just can’t believe it happened. They’re doing everything in their power to help the families of the victims and working with law enforcement to bring that sick bastard to justice.”
    “Seems weird, though, doesn’t it? I mean, if I were a sick maniac—and I’m not, but if I were—I’d want to poison different types of cough syrup. Not just one brand from one company, in one geographic location. That’s too easy to take off the shelf.”
    The lawyers glanced at each other again, but Darren Rucker just stared at me.
    “Listen,” Bob said, “you’ve been doing this, what? Ten years? I’ve been defending companies for thirty-six years, son. And I can tell you, this company has done everything in its power to help the victims of this tragic situation. We set up an emergency board that met every day until the emergency was taken care of. We donated money to the county so they could devote more police officers to finding the man who did this; we issued a recall on the product; we—”
    “Why a man?”
    “What?”
    “You said ‘finding the man who did this.’ Why a man? Why not a woman? What makes you think it’s a man?”
    “It’s just a figure of speech, son.” He grinned. “See,” he said to everyone in the room while still looking at me, “Noah here is a little insecure. When I was at Harvard, we got a lot of that. People who just didn’t make it and carry chips on their shoulders. I think you went to school somewhere in the Midwest, didn’t you?”
    “University of Kansas.”
    He nodded. “So you still have a little bit of that Ivy League chip on your shoulder, don’t you?”
    I had to swallow to keep my anger in check. “We both have the same law license, Bob. I paid twenty grand for mine. You paid ten times that for yours. Who’s the sucker?”
    Bob ran his tongue along his upper lip, like a predator that had just seen prey. “Someone decides to get medicine down off the shelf and poison it. That is not my client’s fault, and you’re wasting our time.”
    “Bullshit!” Olivia blurted.
    Everyone in the room, including me, stared at her. Instantly, her eyes went wide, and her cheeks flushed red.
    Bob said, “Looks like your associates still need to be housebroken.”
    “My associates can speak their minds. Go ahead, Olivia. What do you mean?”
    She swallowed, and her lower lip quivered. I thought she might pass out. “I was . . . I was watching Ellen and . . .”
    “Excuse me,” Bob said, “did you say Ellen ?”
    “Yeah. And they had a pharmacist on. One of the families bought the cough syrup from a pharmacy.”
    “So?” Bob said.
    “So the pharmacy buys it directly from the manufacturer, already sealed. Then they stock it near the front at that pharmacy. There’s cameras there. No one could’ve tampered with it without someone seeing them. It had to come from the manufacturer with the cyanide already in it.”
    I stared at Bob, who looked over at