I never got a chance to talk to Grandfather. Only a week later, he was dead. Murdered in broad daylight.

I hardly imagined another way for him to go.

Changed nothing, in the end.

They said the name was Athena Cykes. The most incorruptible woman in L. A. That’s the kind of reputation that gets you killed in this town. And I’m sure it’ll catch up to her someday.

But it wasn’t going to be before I she found the truth.

The first step was to set her on the trail. I’d learned a lot from the family business. Few things you’d be proud of to put on your resume, even fewer that I’d ever had the guts to do. But the one thing I was prepared to do was strike a need for a vendetta. When you attack a person’s home, you attack them. And nobody – nobody incorruptible, nobody without a flame of life burning in them – would take it laying down.

I would strike at her home. I would create a phantom for her to chase. It wasn’t going to be difficult. I was already a ghost of the past, crying out to be found. Now I was just going to show how far my reach from the beyond was.

I dug up Victor Kudo. From everything I managed to gather, he was definitely the least culpable in the whole chain of events. Even if he had been alive then, I doubted he’d be able to tell me anything. He was more useful as a corpse.

I followed Cykes. I knew she visited the detention center relatively frequently. Part of the duties and all.

One of the things I also knew was that, whenever entering, you’re supposed to leave your belongings at the security checkpoint.

Yesterday, I paid the woman who was supposed to be manning it to switch places with me. Just for half an hour. Money really does talk in this city. 

Right before Cykes was about to pick her things back up, I swiped the key to her apartment from the keychain. She had no real need for anything besides her bike, so she wouldn’t have noticed it missing, then.

“Something wrong, Chief Prosecutor?” I asked her.

“Nothing more than usual.” she murmured.

The next part was easy. Disguising as a delivery girl and dragging the corpse as a package. The whole thing took less than fifteen minutes. Go in, leave the body, go out.

The last part was putting the key back. It’d be the trickiest. Possibly because there was a non-zero chance of killing either of us.

I drove into her, causing a crash. She skidded way more than I expected her to, landing herself on the floor. The bike was on the floor. I was going to help her. I did. But before that, before she could gather her bearings, I slipped the key back on the keychain. The key was, after all, still in the bike’s ignition.

Home stretch.

“Hey, you can have a normal day and jumble them for a minute – still doesn’t leave you accident-proof.” I remember pointing out to her.

She shrugged. “Helps with the guilt.”

“Get too caught up in guilt, and that’s the thing to jumble your mind for the next time. So don’t worry about it, alright?”

After all, I needed her mind to be clear.