Chapter Three #3
The door cracks open, tethered to the frame by a chain. A pair of the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen greets us, so vibrant and piercing that I feel like they’re accusing me of something. The woman’s eyes look at me and then at Elodie.
“Yes?” she says. Polite. British. “Can I help you?”
It’s dark now, the Connecticut autumn sky a particular type of black that only happens this time of year. The flickering streetlamp does little to illuminate us.
Elodie stiffens her shoulders, mustering up some renewed confidence. “We were sent to help you address a complaint,” she says. “I’m Elodie. This is Margaux. I believe you spoke with our supervisor earlier this week.”
We never use last names—only first. At the start, Mr. X tested the use of pseudonyms, but it went bad when one client did an extensive online search and started calling a woman with the same first name, convinced she was one of us.
Almost blew our entire cover when the woman threatened to call the police for harassment.
The door closes. Elodie gives me a quizzical look, but I grab her wrist when she tries to knock again. A moment later, there’s the clattering of a chain, and then the door opens fully, revealing the woman inside the house.
Erin Casimir, our new client, is tall and thin and elegant against the backdrop of her cheap rental condo. It’s evident that she was raised to carry herself with dignity and grace—it’s not her fault that things all went to shit when she got older.
In our briefing, Mr. X told me that she’s from an upper middle-class family in London.
Her older brother came to America to study at Yale while she was working toward a medical degree in St. George’s.
After her brother hit it big, something happened.
The specifics of that “something” are a question mark, but what we do know is that she dropped out of medical school, became estranged from her family, and ended up here.
“Come in,” she says, peering briefly outside as though to make sure nobody is watching us.
Erin is our client, but I already suspect that her tech billionaire brother is where the real story lies. Does she think he’s watching us? Is her condo being monitored?
Inside, it’s clear that Erin is working on a serious budget.
The couch is stained and secondhand, though she’s made an effort to shampoo and vacuum it.
The same can be said of the gray shag carpet.
Someone is shouting on the other side of the shared wall.
A door slams, and Elodie flinches. I wonder if she’s going to be able to handle this.
I gauge Erin as she pours three mugs of hot water from a kettle on her tiny outdated stove and then steeps three tea bags for us and brings them to the couch on a cheap silver platter.
“Right,” she says, sitting on the armchair across from us. “I trust you know the situation, then?”
Elodie leans forward. “Your brother invented a budgeting app, Budgie, a few years ago. It was featured on Good Morning America, and that’s when it took off. Through a string of investments, it’s made him very wealthy and he landed in Forbes for becoming a billionaire by age thirty-five.”
“I invented the app,” Erin says, and she appears startled by her own outburst. “And I did it all by myself, before this AI nonsense started to take over the tech world. Our parents wanted us both to be doctors—our father is a cardiologist. All our lives, he told us that the only way he’d support us is if we went into medicine. He has this perfect dream, I suppose.”
I watch her cradle her mug of tea. Her hands are shaking. Elodie has the sense not to speak; she sees that we’re already getting straight to the point.
“I was always more into engineering and programming, but given my father’s demands, I was forced to treat it like a hobby.
But I had fun playing around with app ideas, and I even made a little money.
” Her eyes light up as she speaks about it, the passion coming back to her as she relives it.
“A lot of big ideas start in a dorm room.”
“Even for a hobby, it would be a lot of work,” Elodie says, validating her feelings.
“It was.” Erin sips her tea. “And I didn’t expect it to be profitable.
Most apps weren’t back then. I never even tried to get Budgie in the app store.
After a few months—well, I got inundated with school and I didn’t have time to go back to it.
But Bertram”—now her expression turns sour—“that’s my brother.
He stole my work and passed it off as his own.
I had no idea he’d done it until suddenly it was everywhere.
Imagine my shock when a friend linked me to an American talk show I’d never heard of, and there was my brother on the stage, making up some phony story about how he’d come up with the idea. ”
Her hands are shaking again, the rage barely contained in her thin frame.
I had worried about Elodie’s ability to handle this, but now I see that she’s exactly in her element with the opportunity to gossip.
She effortlessly engages Erin by asking about her childhood—the overlooked younger sibling to a golden-child brother.
He’s a narcissist, Erin says—no, no, a sociopath.
But do her parents see it? Of course not.
They love him. The whole world loves him.
By the time Erin has finished her tale, she regards Elodie like they’re old friends. “Can you help me?” she asks.
“Of course we’re going to help you,” Elodie says, clasping a hand over Erin’s. “We’ll make him pay.”
“How?” Erin asks. The emotions are raw, and she’s shed the cautious numbness she greeted us with at the door.
Recalling all that she’s lost has been too much for her to contain.
It’s not just the billion dollars her brother made off her hard work, but the love of her family, the respect of her peers.
Even her own friends have distanced themselves, accusing her of being too angry, too obsessive, for not just letting it go.
“Hey, M,” Elodie says, acknowledging me for the first time since this impromptu therapy session began. “What time do you think it is in London right now?”
“They’re six hours ahead, at least until Daylight Savings,” I say. “But I think we’re better off keeping things local.” I look to Erin. “Your brother lives here in the States, yes?”
“In the Atlantic Bay Towers in Westport,” she says sourly. “He’s got a penthouse where he likes to spend his winters.”
I lay out my plan. It’s just a little something I came up with while Erin and Elodie were commiserating.
Bertram is private; all my Google searches this afternoon came up empty when I looked for personal details.
There are no hints at what his private life is like.
And I’ve never been to the Atlantic Bay Towers, but I have driven past the place, and I know that it’s a tacky modern skyrise with a waterfront view and guards at the door.
No worries. Mr. X will be able to get me in.
“We’ll show up as reporters writing a story,” I say. “Elodie will be my supervisor. I’m a new hire trying to prove my worth at the paper so I can get hired officially. While I’m interviewing him, Elodie will make some excuse to leave the room. She’ll look for anything usable in his computer.”
“How will you get into his computer?” Erin asks.
“We have our ways.”
“I’ll bring a dummy laptop to replace his, and we’ll steal the real one?
” Elodie guesses. It’s a genius idea, though I’m not sure if we’d be overpromising to agree to it.
We don’t even know the model he has, much less where to get another one.
But I like her confidence, and I’ve never been one to let semantics get in the way.
“We’ll adapt to what’s available and find a way,” I promise her.
Erin looks skeptical. “What if you don’t get what you need?”
“We will,” Elodie says. “We’ve never failed before.” She’s so good at acting confident, I would never believe this was her first job if I didn’t know better. On the drive here, she was nervously scrolling through notes she’d typed out on her phone to prepare.
“He will have an opportunity to redeem himself,” I say.
“I have to tell you that, in the name of full disclosure. That’s how we operate.
Once we have the proof that he stole your idea, we offer him a chance to come clean.
If he takes it, he can redeem himself by giving you back the credit for your idea and returning the money to his investors.
And if he doesn’t—he rots in a federal prison. ”
Even as I say this, I’m struck by what a simple job this will be.
Two spoiled rich kids duking it out over a family fortune.
It should be easy enough to solve in under a week.
I can’t imagine why Mr. X thought it was worth our time.
He always goes for the challenges—the true puzzles of the world that can’t be solved by a simple police investigation.
Mr. X doesn’t exactly advertise his services. He works purely by word of mouth on the dark web, and he only accepts payment when the work is completed, leaving us off the hook if we can’t complete a job—which has never happened to me.
Erin seems satisfied, though. To her, this will mean the world.
She’ll get her life back, or her reputation, at the very least. Maybe Mr. X has a particular soft spot for her, or maybe he’s getting soft as time goes on.
Although Mr. X stays objective in all his jobs, something feels personal about this one.
He has always loved technology, and while Budgie may not be of any special interest to him, he holds a special disdain for what billionaires are doing to the world.
Nailing Bertram Casimir can satisfy some of his repressed rage.
When we were kids, he was obsessed with electronics, especially computers. He wanted to do something to better the world, my brother. In his own way, he is. But I know that he’ll never think he’s doing enough. He scoops one bucket from the ocean, and it starts to rain.
“Oh, there’s one other thing,” Erin says, just as I’m reaching for the doorknob.
Elodie and I both turn, and I think Elodie feels the same shift in the air that I do.
Erin’s face has gone very sober. “When Bertram moved here, he wasn’t alone.
He was dating a dear friend of mine, Annie.
She disowned me during my spat with my brother, but we’d known each other and been close like sisters since primary school and I still love her anyway. ”
“You want revenge against her, too?” Elodie guesses. “She was part of this?”
“No.” Erin shakes her head earnestly. “It’s just that nobody’s heard from her in months.
I’ve checked with her family and it appears I’m not the only one she’s cut out of her life, but I think it’s more than that.
Nobody has heard from her at all, and nobody has seen her.
I think—” She hesitates. It takes effort for her to spit out the words, “I think something awful may have happened.”
“Awful?” I ask, although I’m beginning to understand. There it is. The real reason Mr. X sent us out here. It isn’t just some stolen app and a greedy billionaire. Still, I need her to say it. “What do you mean ‘awful’?”
“I think—” She’s wringing her hands, once again the nervous shut-in who first greeted us. “I can’t believe I’m saying this. I hate my brother, but I’d never think him capable…I just, I think he’s done something to her. I think she may be dead.”