She seems to have a pretty figure, though it is hard to tell under a coat. I like the way it seems to flare out around her bust and hips. There’s something a little old-fashioned and classic about it. The coat looks expensive, too.
Either this young lady has impeccable fashion sense and a very generous clothing budget, or someone has dressed her. Strange thought to have about an adult, but there is something about the level of polish I’m seeing in her attire that makes me think she either is a designer, or has one.
It’s the bob, I decide. It’s too classic to be contemporary. Or maybe it’s the hat. A dark beret set at an angle far too jaunty for a funeral. The shirt beneath the coat has broad lapels. She could have stepped right out of a vintage era. She is wearing brown leather boots, also well shined, also vintage.
Interesting.
She walks far longer than I expect her to, several blocks through the city. At one point, she pulls out her phone and loses herself in it for a moment, but the streets are too busy to do that for long before she almost walks into someone and is cursed at roundly.
“Sorry,” she says, her head low. She holds herself much like the incarnation of an apology for a few steps before straightening again. An actress of sorts, then.
I do not really think she had anything to do with Teddy’s death. A girl like this is much more likely to have been a friend, perhaps a girlfriend, perhaps someone who wanted to be a girlfriend, but never caught his eye. Women are capable of all kinds of quiet madness when it comes to adoration denied.
I am beginning to doubt that following a pretty young woman is going to get us any closer to Teddy’s killer. To find him, we are going to have to look into any number of cartels, shadow governments, or general assholes. The police investigation has gone nowhere. Teddy was found dead in an alley, left like so much trash. I don’t like to think about it. None of us do. But thefact of the matter is our brother is dead and we do not know who did it. This woman is the first lead we have had since the terrible event happened a week ago.
I continue to follow her as she weaves between people. Sometimes I am ahead of her, other times I am inside a store, then behind, then across the street. I flow with the city, and she appears entirely ignorant of my presence. I have been trained by the best when it comes to surveillance. Each of us brothers has a role in the family business. Aiden is the brains, in the sense that he is a consummate negotiator and capable of synthesizing data from sources obvious and not so obvious. That second part is where I come in. I am the one who is known, inside our family at least, for ferreting out secrets.
My methods are sometimes surreptitious, but often rough. I employ very little in the way of ethics when it comes to discovering what I need to know. Aiden pretends not to know, though I think deep down he is more dangerous than I am.
And then, of course, there is Luke. Poor Luke. The lost boy. The middle child in a family of four, somehow.
It is time to use a few of the tools I am fortunate enough to have access to. The first of them looks like a phone, but is actually a different device. When I activate it, it scans the phones around me, cataloging their numbers. As I follow the girl, it continues to sort through the numbers around us, discarding the ones that drop out of range, and adding new ones. Because I am following her, and only her, her number is sorted to the top of the most frequently pinged list. And just like that, I have not only her number, but in effect, her location.
The concepts of privacy and freedom were lost longer ago than most people realize, but most would still be shocked if they knewjust how much each and every one of them had become part of a walking swarm of cloud data. The Matrix had it right, a stream of code corresponding to redheads, brunettes, and this mysterious blonde who is now getting into a ride-share car.
If I wanted to flex my digital muscle, now would be the opportunity to do something very, very funny. We have access to all manner of databases. In fact, we own significant shares in the company that car is working for. We also own significant shares in the manufacturer of the car.
I smirk to myself darkly, a real sense of pleasure running through my veins. My brother is dead, and frankly I did not anticipate smiling again so soon, but this sort of thing is my lifeblood.
I pull out another device that has been syncing with the first. This one performs a different set of actions. This one allows me to tap into the back end of the car by entering the license plate.
I could drive that car, now pulling away, like a toy vehicle if I wanted to. I could amuse myself as much as a boy with an RC car on a dirt track. The city would be my playground, and the driver and my quarry would be my playthings.
But that would ruin the game. It would certainly tip our hand. If she is connected to a crime family, organization, or just a company out for blood, doing that would certainly ruin the element of surprise, which I still have.
Instead, I content myself with tracking her as she moves, discovering her home address, perusing all her social media, most of her private messages, hacking near instantly into her email, and accessing every bit of data on her from her creditscore to her dental records. Best to be subtle about these sorts of things.
Ella
I shouldn’t have gone to the funeral. I should have stayed away, not drawn attention to myself. I’m sure they saw me. I shouldn’t have stared. I looked too hard. People have a sixth sense for when others are looking at them.
When they turned around I felt a bolt of energy going through me. I was almost physically jolted by it. The three of them had so much grief and menace in their gazes. I didn’t recognize any of them, but I felt as though they all stared right through me in that moment.
I left as quickly as I could, but the feeling of having brought some dark thing with me out of that grim cemetery has persisted even as I step into the shower.
Teddy deserved better, in every way. That was not a proper send-off for a man whose smile made my world brighter. Usually women are given credit for lighting up rooms and such things, but Teddy truly did that. Everywhere he went, his energy was effervescent. Now he is gone and the world is fifty shades of beige. The color seems to have gone out of everything.
I knew the interment was supposed to be private, and there was no official funeral. Teddy often told me that his older brothers were obsessive, and I guess he was right. It was no simple matter to find out when and where their little ceremony was going to take place, but I had to go. For him. For me. For my sins.
As hot water from the shower runs over my face and down my body, I feel oddly numb. This should be comforting. I should feel warm after being out in the chilly cold. But I don’t know if I will ever feel truly warm again. I don’t know that I deserve to, either.
The image of those three big men flashes back into my mind. They dominated the entire cemetery. They seemed almost as large as giants. The priest seemed almost incidental in his white robes turned greige with the rain and sort of blending in with the bad weather. It was as though he was more part of the tableau of grief than a real person.
None of it seemed real, actually. Nothing has seemed properly real since Teddy passed.
That’s part of why I had to go. I had to know that it was real. I had to confirm for my own mental health, or lack thereof, that I hadn’t imagined those horrors that took him. So I was drawn to that grave, and even though I kept my distance, I was also drawn to those three men who must be in even more pain than I am. They are the only ones who would understand me now, I think.
I almost went up to them and introduced myself, but then they turned around to look at me and I felt a chill go right through me. Something in my gut told me I needed to get away.
