The Princess and the P.I.

Do Crime

Fiona looked down at the convention program:

"Disrupting Orgasms: Leveraging Blockchain to Revolutionize the Female G-spot."

No.

"Post-Human Partnerships: How the Metaverse Will Save Love."

Definitely no.

"iVest: The Holy Grail of Health."

Fiona circled the last one.

This place was a kind of church, really. The Gaylord National Convention Center at National Harbor gleamed like a temple to excess. The reflective glass walls cut with multicolored lasers worked on the mind like stained glass. And inside, everybody used the same liturgical language of self-importance. Everyone's a disruptor, even the way all the Silicon Valley tech founders looked like Jesus. Fiona should have been at home here. Church was her first language. Her whole life had been pews and pulpits, worship, and waiting.

But she didn't come to praise today.

She looked around and allowed herself to feel the untethered contempt that had been roiling in her belly for years.

No, God wouldn't like the plans she'd made today. For nine months, her barely used agenda had exactly one date circled.

September 2nd. Do crime.

Fiona jumped at a sudden burst of applause to her right-an overly congratulatory standing ovation for hosting the event in Prince George's County. A largely Black, largely wealthy county in Maryland. If Atlanta was Black Mecca, Prince George's was Wakanda, where every high school was a mini HBCU and every modest home cost at least half a million dollars. Fiona couldn't cross the street without Black Excellence slapping her across the face.

She just kept telling herself to relax. Today was going to be just like any other day. The founders of iVest would preach about their invention like it was the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Except it wasn't their invention.

iVest initially sold tags to help pet owners identify their lost pets. In fact, their name wasn't even iVest. It was the appropriately bland Thorpe Solutions. Fiona's brother, Kwesi, had been their best developer, pouring himself into a project no one else thought worth their time. The idea had started simple: a vest that could deliver medication on schedule and monitor vital signs. Their mother's chemo treatments had been hell. Kwesi had dreamed up the vest as a way to retroactively save her, maybe even forgive himself for not being able to save her at all.

He'd trusted his company with the project, but more specifically, he'd trusted his boyfriend, Mark.

It'd been the worst mistake of his short life.

Now Mark's company would debut the vest as their own.

The thought of Mark's chin-implanted, Botoxed face holding that vest-her brother's legacy-while people fawned over his genius infuriated her. The vest had somehow become symbolic of Fiona's mother and her brother, both of them ripped away from her and both thinking the worst of her when they left.

Fiona wound her way through the throng, her senses overloaded by the clamor of everything. A robotic arm for feeding pets remotely, a refrigerator that tweets your grocery list. And sex. So much AI sex. Fiona wasn't sure people were interested in kissing real people anymore. She was suddenly embarrassingly aware of her father trailing behind her.

"Uh, Dad, you didn't have to come to this. I know you had a big appointment today."

Kofi Addai, senior pastor and self-proclaimed prophet, looked up to the heavens. Grim in his bespoke Ankara shirt, he followed her like a storm cloud. She could already hear his sermon, denouncing the sexbots and Wi-Fi fridges as the idols of a new Sodom. He said nothing, though, only cleared his throat in that way that meant judgment, the holiest kind of silence. Her ineptitude was legendary in the family. What weight she had gained and what colleges she had failed out of were the most common chatter in the aunties' WhatsApp.

It was Kwesi who shone. Her brother's vest was the crown jewel of the expo. CortiZone, his $56 million baby, was the only one of its kind. But Fiona had aggressively flunked out of engineering at Salisbury University, so she didn't know much about the tech specs. And honestly, in the grand scheme of things, her ignorance mattered little. Fiona had a plan nine months in the making.

Fiona Akua Addai, the youngest daughter of a doomsday pastor, American by way of Ghana, Black in the Prince George's County way, moderator of the third-largest amateur sleuth subreddit in the Maryland-District-Virginia tristate area, and twenty-eight-year-old virgin, was about to steal the crown jewel of the TechXpo.

Vengeance was supposed to be the Lord's. But this afternoon, it would be Fiona's.

Itinerary: Robert Thorpe Meeting

Get paid

Quit

This was Maurice's last job for Robert Thorpe. He agreed to meet him at the convention center, and maybe it would be better here than in his office. Maurice would have to let the old man go. His assignments had become difficult to stomach. They were slimy in a way he didn't want to be connected to. He would refer his oldest client to other agencies and part ways amicably.

But suspicious spouses kept the lights on at Knightwatch Private Investigations. Those were just about the only cases he allowed himself to take lately. Low stakes, so his mistakes couldn't cost lives.

Maurice pushed open a meeting room just off the conference room floor. When he closed the door, the muffled thump of techno music seeped through the walls, and Maurice could still see fog and lasers under the crack in the door. God, tech conventions are exhausting.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of a pink puffy jacket cutting through the dim hallway like a bad omen. He stiffened.

Not today. Please, not today.

Robert Thorpe sat across from him, beefy fingers pressed against the table like he might push himself up any minute. He was trimmed in gold like a tricked-out car: glasses, earrings, necklaces-even his thick championship ring-all gold.

"How's your mom?" Robert said, tapping at his hair self-consciously. His was thin and balding, a state he usually never allowed anyone to see. Maurice wondered why he was so lucky today. The former baller usually wore thousand-dollar hairpieces that knocked ten years off his face.

"She's married," Maurice said. Robert sometimes looked at him the way most men of a certain age who knew his mother looked at him. Looking for-maybe praying against-any ghosts of resemblance.

"You still not sleeping? You look like hell. I told you I got you if you need help."

Maurice had been plagued with insomnia for months after stopping the sleeping pills. The Tameka Bryant case was three years old and currently marked unsolved. Maurice had gone up against a three-thousand-member cult with seemingly endless resources.

They had lied, misdirected, and stonewalled him so much that for a few months, his name became synonymous with being toyed with.

He replayed the case in his mind until the errors felt like incantations, a tally of sins worthy of that damned OCD count from Sesame Street.

One piece of missed evidence.

Two pieces of missed evidence.

Three-ah, ah, ah!

Sleep was hard to come by. Maurice had tried pills, then Hennessy, then pills and Hennessy. But the bottles emptied faster than his guilt. He poured the last of his pills down the drain a few months ago, and sleep still eluded him.

"No thanks." The kind of help this man passed out was often in the form of unlabeled pills.

"Do you have it?" Robert was done with niceties.

He wanted out of his third marriage, but this time, he didn't want to be stuck paying alimony. So he hired Maurice to follow his wife and gather proof of her cheating. This way, he could leave her flat and move on with his new girlfriend, a sleek brunette forty years his junior of indeterminate race who also happened to be in his employ as the head of publicity.

Maurice nodded. He had something. His wife, Amelia Thorpe, was cozying up in a hot tub with a blurry-faced companion.

Robert sucked his teeth as he stood, unfolding to his full height. He was a big man, still thick with the bulk of a former football player, though the bent pinkie on his left hand and the slow stiffness of his movements betrayed the toll the game had taken on him. He squinted at the screen, then let out a low growl.

"This ain't shit, nephew. I can't prove anything with that. She'll just say it was her cousin visiting. I can't have her toying with my legacy."

When Robert said "legacy," Maurice knew he meant money. He had always been enterprising-having the vision to open up movie theaters in low-income neighborhoods all over the Northeast Corridor. Thorpe Theatres had a good run but were all eventually closed down. Announcing the movie business dead, Robert moved into technology with Pet Finders, a company that implanted chips in pets to prevent them from getting lost. Robert had played for the Bulldogs and was never seen without a dog, so the transition fit.

This latest hustle, though . . . a super-high-tech vest . . . raised eyebrows. Maurice didn't know which nerd's homework Robert had stolen to pass it off as his own, but Maurice wasn't buying this new direction.

"Robert, you've done so much for the community. No one could ever take your legacy." That much was true. Maurice's first meeting with Robert could have gone differently. He'd been fifteen, trying to lift the man's heavy wallet out of his pocket. He would have gotten away with it, but the damned dog growled at him. Instead of turning him in, Robert sent Maurice to a mentoring program. Though Maurice eventually dropped out and continued picking pockets, Robert had at least tried to help.

"Listen to me. Sit down. I'm about to give you a lesson for free."

Maurice eased into the velvet chair. It was pointless trying to resist an old uncle's lesson, so he surrendered.

"Once people see that you have something they want, especially money, there's a target on your back. You got them rich-ass sisters. You know, things start to get real ugly once money is involved. Your own family will turn on you for it. I have nameless investors eating up my company."

"I understand."

"No, you don't, youngblood. I threw off my old life in Southeast to embrace what I thought was better. I stopped talking to my friends. Got friends who could so-called"-he air quoted-"relate to my success. Now I'm sitting here at seventy-three years old, surrounded by people I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them."

This was . . . a lot coming from a man trying to trap his current wife so he didn't have to pay alimony. There was something else bothering him.

Scaring him even.

Maurice leaned over the desk. "Tell me a secret, Robert," Maurice said. He liked asking right out. A little surprise disclosure went a long way.

He liked to lock eyes when he asked. Most people were caught off guard, spilled something-an affair, a fear, a sin so trivial they laughed nervously as they said it. But the real shit, the part he cared about, wasn't the secret itself. It was how they reacted. The liars were his favorite. The flicker of their eyes to the door. The tremor in their voice or the tightening of their jaw. The truth wasn't in the confession; it was in the telling. Was he into some illegal shit that finally caught up with him?

But Robert's face was so grave when he turned to Maurice his Adam's apple bobbed, and Maurice registered for the first time fear on the old man's face.

"Someone's buying up my company stock, nephew. Everywhere. Quietly, but quickly. And then yesterday . . ."

He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a small, battered box. He didn't open it right away. He just held it for a beat too long, like he didn't want to see what was inside again. Finally, he lifted the lid.

Maurice felt his stomach turn. A string of pearls, crusted in what looked like blood, coiled inside like something alive. It stank like rotting flesh.

"Last week," Robert said grimly, "it was pearls in shit. The week before that, pearls in piss."

"Threats?" Maurice asked. "Were there notes?"

Robert didn't answer at first. He only reached into the other pocket of the briefcase and handed over folded scraps of paper. Maurice fished out a pair of latex gloves from his back pocket-an old habit that felt suddenly very necessary-and unfolded the notes.

The words, scrawled in uneven, jagged handwriting, were chilling in their simplicity. All of them said the same thing.

Over Your Dead Body.

"What does it mean?" Maurice asked.

Robert's gaze didn't waver. "They're my words," he said flatly. "Something I said to my staff during an argument. I told them I'd sell the company over my dead body."

Four Minutes

Princess_PI: RE: disappearance at National Harbor 3 years ago

Does anyone still have that schema for the camera locations at the Expo Center? I'll trade you some police docs of the Rebecca F case.

The plan was simple, in theory. Nine months of meticulous preparation-distilled into five precise minutes. That was all Fiona needed.

Fiona had started as a lowly customer service agent at iVest, an intentional move that let her inch closer to the vest. She volunteered for the tedious tasks no one else wanted, sucked up to the supervisor, and eventually maneuvered her way onto the expo planning committee. From there, it had been easy to piece together the schedule. She knew exactly when the CortiZone vest-the culmination of her brother's life's work-would be unsupervised: five fleeting minutes, from 1:00 p.m. to 1:05 p.m., in the greenroom.

She'd even accounted for the moment at 1:01 when the CCTV cameras would be strategically disabled to allow Robert Thorpe to slip into the greenroom without his wig or makeup. His vanity was predictable. It created openings.

Four minutes.

She had four minutes to avenge her brother.

The thought burned like coal in her chest. Kwesi had been taken from her in pieces-first, his invention, stolen by the man he loved; and then his life, snuffed out in a cold Walmart parking lot by a stranger's random cruelty. In the end, her brother died believing no one loved him enough to fight for him. To be Asante and die without a funeral . . . Fiona shuddered.

Fiona had been too cowardly to stand up to her father's prejudices, too selfish to think beyond her own comfort. She wasn't that woman anymore.

Fiona had been hollowed out by grief. But as the months turned into years, her sadness had curdled. Fury had taken root. Now, as the third anniversary of his death loomed, Fiona had a new hardness behind her ribs and a singular purpose.