83. Milo
83
Milo
T he coffee machine burbled, breaking the silence in our apartment while outside, rain fell in gray sheets as students scurried across the lawn.
The guys were down in London. When I got back last night, Dario wasn’t around either, which was a relief. I had no clue what he got up to when he wasn’t in class. He rarely said two words to any of us, unless Thea’s name came up. Then he had plenty to say. Mostly vile shit I refused to listen to.
When he first arrived, Cassian tried being nice to him. Offered to show him around - the usual crap. But he wasn’t interested. And once he found out we knew Thea, he decided we were all his enemy.
What he thought of us meant nothing to me, but I didn’t like how antagonistic he was about Thea. Whatever beef he had with her was more than a minor disagreement. His hatred ran way deeper than her spurning his advances or some other stupid shit could explain.
If I could figure out who she was, it would help. But so far, all my programs had come up with zilch. Whoever erased her identity did a good job.
But I’d keep trying.
Eventually, something would ping and I’d finally get a potential lead. I was nothing if not patient.
I took my espresso and placed it on the coffee table, intending to catch up on work for a program I was writing. Dad had given me a project to work on, a new AI he was developing. He hadn’t given me any details, but I’d seen enough of the source code to figure out it was for tracking anomalies in financial transactions.
I opened up my laptop and checked to see if any notifications had appeared from the programs running in the background. To my surprise, there was a hit relating to an old medical file on a child admitted to a small regional hospital in Calabria
The child had a very similar name: Theadora. She’d been admitted with a serious infection. The record mentioned a gunshot wound, which was unusual for a 12-year-old. But the odd thing was, when I cross-referenced the file, there was no corroborating information; no record of Theadora di Luca whatsoever.
My program found the file stored on an archived server instead of the main database, which was probably why it had been overlooked.
I opened the digital photos attached to the file and squinted hard. The quality wasn’t amazing, but the girl on my screen was the spitting image of Thea, albeit much younger.
The images bore enough of a resemblance to Thea to flag in my AI image detector. And when I read deeper, there was mention of a sister who’d also been admitted with suspicious fractures as a baby. According to the notes, the sister’s name was Verity di Luca. A note from a pediatrician recommended further investigation by the Department for Family Policies.
The file notes were in Italian, but my AI translator was usually accurate, so I trusted what it told me.
Di Luca was the family name of a prominent mafia family in that part of the world, and I didn’t believe in coincidences. My research on Dario Peretti had revealed his father, Fausto Peretti, worked for Francesco di Luca.
Dario knew Thea, which meant there was a link between Francesco di Luca and Thea di Luca, and also a sister. I’d overheard Thea talking to someone called Verity. It had to be the same Verity mentioned in the hospital report.
Whether Thea was Francesco’s daughter or some other female relative remained unclear. Nothing I’d seen suggested there was a wife.
I added a new search parameter to include deceased members of the di Luca family and waited.