“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 becauseno onetalked 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 naïve 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.
“I know she has a sister,” he said slowly.“Maya.Lives in the city somewhere.Pediatrician.We’ve met a couple of times, at events.She’s… quieter than Sarah.Lovely.I’ve got her number in our contacts.”
“And parents?”Marcus watched the hesitation tighten.
Torres rubbed his thumb along the condensation on his glass.“That’s… complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
“She… didn’t talk about them much,” he said.“I mean, they’re dead, so there’s that.”
“How long ago?”
“She was eighteen when it happened.So… twenty-two years?Plane crash.Private flight, somewhere out of Boise.”He frowned, doing the arithmetic.“She’d just started college.One minute they’re on a trip, the next—” He lifted a hand, letting it fall.“It messed her up.Obviously.She nearly dropped out.But by the time I met her, she’d already done the whole therapy-and-resilience arc.On the surface, anyway.”
“On the surface?She ever say what her relationship with them was like before they died?”Marcus asked.
“No.I mean… she said she’d loved them.That they were supportive, the whole ‘you can be anything you want’ parents.They had the means to be, I gather.“
“You mean they were wealthy?”
He looked awkward.“Yeah, but… with strings.There was a lot of, I don’t know how to put it.She spent her holidays volunteering, that sort of thing.And there was a… some kind of a family foundation.That was where the money went after the folks died, I gather.Sarah and Maya didn’t walk into a fortune, though they both got some kind of inheritance.I gather it was something of a… a mixed blessing.”
“How so?”
He held his hands out.“I really don’t know, Agent Reid.I was curious, at first, but any time I tried to go deeper, she’d deflect.The way she does… did… when you ask about the early days of the company and she doesn’t want to tell you how close we came to bankruptcy.”
“So the parents were a no-go zone,” Marcus summarized.
“Pretty much.The only time I saw her properly emotional about them was when Maya called last year to say she’d found a box of their things in storage.Old letters, that kind of thing.Sarah freaked out about where to put it.Not because she didn’t want it, but because—” He searched for the word.“Because it felt like opening a vault she’d welded shut.She took the box and then… I never saw it again.”
