Inside the offices, it looked like someone had sprayed Martian blood on the walls. Beyond an open doorway were seven people at computers in a socially distant hive that could’ve easily seated twenty. Images of Osiris were stenciled on the wall. Somebody really liked that graphic.

Nobody looked up when I invaded the hive, probably because they all had headphones on. I scanned the worker bees carefully. No tech company worth a damn handed out client information without a subpoena. I was looking for an ally, someone who’d help me out because of sympathy or sadness. I picked a woman with candy-pink hair and an impressively large silver ring lodged in her nasal septum.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Deirdre Crawley. I got a message from my sister through Osiris’s Vault. Could you help me find out—”

“Noah!” the woman shouted, without even a glance at me. “We’ve got another one!”

A man’s head popped up over a cubicle at the far end of the room. “Can I help you?”

“I got a message from my sister, Caroline Crawley Thraxton,” I said, opting to use her maiden and married names, in case that might jog his memory. “She passed away last week.”

“Condolences.” He dispensed the word slowly, like it was honey in his mouth. “I’m Noah, manager for community relations.” He slunk out from behind the cubicle wall, a scrawny man with spiky ginger hair cut flat across the top. Thanks to his pointy goatee, his head was a perfect triangle. He sported Buddy Holly glasses, an eyebrow ring, and a tattoo of a mandala on his forearm. A perfect hipster trifecta.

“Deirdre Crawley.” I took a step closer.

“Whoa.” Noah put up his hands, as if I’d pulled a knife on him. “Step back. More.”

“Okay.” People had been jittery about their personal space since the pandemic. A couple of worker bees had pulled off their headphones and were watching me. “Like I said, I’m here because of my sister. Today, at her funeral, I got a message saying that if she died, it was because her husband was going to kill her.”

“Let me get you a form.”

“Maybe I wasn’t clear. My sister said her husband was going to kill her, and now she’s dead.” I gulped. I’d psyched myself up to tell the story in an unemotional way. I wasn’t ready to fill out paperwork.

“Hold on,” Noah said, ducking back toward his cubicle. He threw a bright-green sheet of paper at me. “This is what you need.”

I caught it in midair. “My sister might have been murdered. In her message, she said—”

“Fill out the form.” Noah’s face was impassive.

“Her message said her husband, Theo Thraxton, killed his first wife. Until I read that, I didn’t know he had a first wife. Nobody did. But it’s true.”

“Fill out the form.”