CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They put Torres in the dining room because it was the only space Sullivan could guarantee was free of blood and cameras.
The dining room sat at the back of the house, separated from the home office by a short corridor and a corner of kitchen; close enough that the thrum of activity from the crime scene bled through in muffled bursts.
Voices, the scrape of equipment cases, Sullivan’s graveled orders, the occasional clack of a camera shutter.
Every now and then a faint drift of chemical smell reached them as someone sprayed more luminol.
It made the room feel like a waiting room on the edge of something surgical.
Marcus took the chair opposite Torres. Kate stood for a moment by the sideboard, as if she hadn’t quite decided whether she was joining this conversation or just haunting it.
The overhead light cast her reflection in the glass of the framed art above the table — a faint, dark double superimposed over an abstract seascape.
Torres had a wool blanket around his shoulders, courtesy of EMTs who’d hovered over him until Sullivan shooed them away.
His dark hair stuck up in the back where he’d shoved his hands through it.
A half-drunk glass of water sweated on the table in front of him; his fingers were locked around it as if it were the only solid object in the room.
He looked younger than the file photo. The file had presented him as mid-thirties, neatly bearded, polished startup co-founder in a navy blazer and sneakers that cost more than Marcus’s last suit.
The man in front of him looked older and much more breakable: eyes shot with red, jaw clenched against the repetition of the image he’d just described to every other official in the house.
Marcus had been there when Torres made the 911 call replay, and again when the EMT had asked him to go over his steps.
Now it was their turn. Kate had argued that they could bring him to the field office for a more formal interview once he’d had a chance to stop shaking.
Sullivan, ever the pragmatist, had pointed out that shock had a way of scrubbing away self-editing; people told the truth before they remembered to curate.
They’d compromised: initial, informal here, full statement tomorrow.
"Okay, Mr. Torres," Marcus said, keeping his voice as even as possible. "I know you've gone through this a few times already. I'm sorry. I'm going to ask mostly about Sarah, not about what you saw in the other room. All right?"
Torres nodded, the movement slight and jerky. The blanket slipped; he didn’t seem to notice.
“Can I call you Michael?” Marcus tried.
Another nod. “Sure.”
“And I’m Marcus. This is Agent Valentine. Kate.”
Kate gave the tiniest tilt of acknowledgement, already sliding her phone out of her pocket.
Sullivan had had the painting removed from the office and bagged within the first twenty minutes; chain-of-custody paperwork was practically an extra limb for him.
But before the techs had zipped it up, Kate had stepped in, leaned over the table, and taken three quick, precise photographs.
Now the first of those filled her screen: the black bird, almost life-sized, beak tilted, sprig of something pale green against the dark. It sat there on the glass like a secret she should already know.
Marcus heard the faint scrape of her chair as she moved to sit at the end of the table, slightly angled away. She tapped once to zoom in on the bird’s eye, then again to pull back. Her notepad lay open beside the phone, a pen hovering over a blank page.
She wasn’t drawing yet.
She realized that there were berries on the sprig in the crow's beak. Purple, segmented fruits made up of tiny sacs of juice, like blackberries or raspberries. She counted four separate berries. Why four? She thought back to her last conversation with Dr. Lasker. It would help if we could identify what’s in the bird’s beak.
The sprig looked like the others: thin, greenish-brown, or brownish-green.
So what was the significance of the plant or the bush or the tree bearing fruit?
She made a note to send the new painting to Dr. Lasker.
Marcus forced his focus back to Torres. “You and Sarah were business partners?”
“Yeah.” Torres cleared his throat. “Co-founders.”
“How long have you known her?”
“Little over twelve years. We met at a conference in Seattle, one of those ‘change-the-world-with-your-macbook’ things.” A ghost of a smile tried and failed to form.
“We were both on a panel about ethical tech. She disagreed with almost everything I said. We spent the next three hours arguing in the hotel bar. Next day she sent me an email with a pitch deck attached.”
“And that pitch became… Stiklr,” Marcus said, glancing down at his notes. “Am I saying it right?”
Torres blinked as though the word had transported him somewhere more solid. “Yeah. Stiklr.”
“I’m going to have to ask, because I’m not your demographic,” Marcus said. “What exactly does it do?”
“Okay.” Torres drew a breath, shoulders shifting back a fraction. “So you’ve got a phone—”
“Several.”
“You see a product you’re thinking of buying.
Sneaker, shampoo, cereal, whatever. You open the app, point your camera, take a picture of the label or the barcode.
Stiklr cross-references that image against our database.
It pulls in environmental certifications, supply chain audits, NGO reports, user feedback.
Then it gives you a traffic-light score on key issues: carbon footprint, labour standards, plastic content, animal testing, community impact.
If it’s clean, you get green. If there’s a problem, you get amber or red, plus links to the supporting data. ”
Marcus raised his eyebrows. “So it tells you whether your shampoo is saving the planet or destroying it.”
“In layman’s terms, yes.” Despite the situation, the faintest hint of pride crept into Torres’s voice.
“It’s designed to make ethical choice the default, not a research project.
We’ve got partnerships with three supermarket chains now; they’re piloting automated shelf tags that change color when you scan them. ”
“And Sarah built this,” Marcus said.
“We built it,” Torres corrected reflexively, then seemed to hear himself and winced. “Sorry. Yeah. She was the brains. The vision. I’m… I’m more operations. Fundraising. Translation between idealism and investors.”
“How’s the app doing?” Marcus asked. “Users, money, general happiness of the market?”
Torres looked down at his hands. “We passed ten million downloads last quarter. Retention’s high. Investors are… were… excited. We had a B round closing planned for next month.”
“So professionally, she was doing well.”
“She was killing it,” Torres said. “She had critics, sure — anyone who threatens profit margins makes enemies — but she was respected. Even the people who hated the app respected her.”
Marcus made a note. “Tell me about those critics.”
Torres licked his lips, searching his memory.
“Some companies tried to sue us early on. Claimed we were defaming their brands. But we only use publicly available information; the lawyers chewed on that for a bit and then got bored. There were a few online campaigns. Trolls accusing us of being Communists, globalists, climate cultists… pick your poison. Death threats, here and there. But half of those were bots and the other half were guys with twelve followers and an avatar of an eagle.”
“No one who escalated into offline harassment? Showing up at talks, that kind of thing?”
“Nothing that stuck.” Torres frowned. “A couple of weirdos. One guy at a conference in Austin who tried to corner her in the bathroom to tell her she was ‘emasculating the market.’ Security threw him out. She laughed it off. Said if men’s masculinity was that fragile, the market could do with a chop. ”
Kate’s pen moved, finally. Not on the topic at hand; she was sketching the curve of the bird’s wing from the photo, quick, small strokes, more annotation than art.
Marcus watched her out of the corner of his eye.
Her focus locked on the page in that way he recognized — the tunnelled look she got when following a thread in a maze only she could see.
“Online trolls aside,” Marcus said to Torres. “Anyone in her personal life who might have wished her harm? Ex-partners? Former employees?”
Torres shook his head, a sharp, impatient movement.
“Sarah wasn’t… she didn’t leave a trail like that.
There were a couple of relationships before we started the company, but nothing messy.
Since Stiklr, she barely had time to date.
And she treated her staff better than anyone I’ve ever seen.
She paid above market, gave equity, actually listened when they flagged burnout.
She fired one guy for bullying a junior engineer—not because she had to, but because no one talked to her team like that. ”
“So your instinct is she had no enemies.”
“My instinct is if you’d asked anyone in our community, they’d have said she was one of the good ones.” His voice roughened. “There aren’t that many.”
Marcus let the statement hang for a beat.
“Sometimes,” he said gently, “the people we’d least expect to have enemies turn out to have the worst kind.”
Torres looked up, eyes suddenly fierce. “Then whoever it is, it’s not because she deserved it.
You need to understand that. She was… annoyingly decent.
Obsessive about not cutting corners. We lost deals because she wouldn’t take money from funds invested in fossil fuels.
But that’s… they are the kind of enemies she had.
Old men in boardrooms calling her a na?ve little girl.
Not—” His hand jerked vaguely towards the ceiling. “Not the animal that did that.”
“Fair enough,” Marcus said. “Let’s talk about her family. Parents, siblings. Anyone we should notify.”
The change in Torres’s expression was subtle but unmistakable. The anger drained; something more tentative took its place.