Page 8 of King’s Ransom

- Solved the ‘Southern Families’ case;

- Neurodivergent.

‘Hey, Juno Everhart’s on this list!’ Heidi said. ‘I’ve read about her. She is one bad-ass chick. You’re in good company.’

‘Neurodivergent?’ I said, frowning at my entry. That was a bit judgemental. ‘Whoever wrote this didn’t mention any unusual traits of the other detectives. Why only say that about me?’

‘Sam,’ Bill said, ‘a low-level FBI bureaucrat wrote this for high-level FBI bureaucrats to read, that’s all. Don’t let it bother you.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s still a dick move,’ Heidi said. ‘We love you just as you are, little man.’

An hour into our flight, I asked Bonnie if she was FBI.

‘No, I’m just a regular little ol’ flight attendant,’ she said. Her accent was pure Alabama. ‘Like the pilots, I come with the plane and serve whoever leases it.’

‘Which is the FBI for this jet?’

‘For the last year or so, yeah.’

The downward inflection of her tone caught my interest.

‘The FBI aren’t the nicest customers?’ I probed.

Bonnie glanced around. The two FBI agents travelling with us were at the other end of the cabin.

‘The directors and senior agents are okay,’ she said softly. ‘But the junior agents can be world-class assholes. Had one on board the other day, shuttling from D.C. to New York, a cocky special agent named Hooper who “accidentally” brushed his hand across my ass and then asked if I wanted to meet him at his hotel. I’ve seen plenty of sleazes in my time and he was a total douche. I declined.’

I told her I thought she’d fit in well at Southwest Airlines but she said the pay was better here.

I settled in for the rest of the flight, gazing out the porthole beside my enormous leather seat.

One thing stuck in my mind.

I’d been named by whoever had kidnapped Aristo King as one of America’s five best detectives.

I tried to rationalise how this could have happened.

I mean, it wasn’t like there were lists of these things.

Then I realised why.

It was probably because I’d become a little bit famous.

I gotta tell you, fame might look fun but after a while it wears pretty thin.

After I solved that case in the South and exposed all those rich families, a bunch of newspapers and websites did profiles on me (almost all of them were titled ‘The Detective’ because that had been the name of my one-man detective agency when that case had started; headline writers are very unoriginal).

All of the attention, of course, peaked with the feature about that case which appeared on 60 Minutes.

After that, my life changed.

I got famous.

It was very peculiar.

Some of it was nice: strangers would make eye contact as they passed me on the street and nod respectfully.

Some of it was amusing: drunk university students would call out my name and run over to high-five me.