When I woke up she wasn't there in bed so I got up, grabbed a robe and dragged my feet into the bathroom, and she still was nowhere to be seen. After the bath and shaving, she arrived, with bags of groceries.
"Hello my love, I brought us breakfast. Come to the kitchen when you are dressed."
I did as ordered, and met her at the table. Our house is huge compared to the one I had before. Two bedrooms, a small library, a living and a dinning room, kitchen and bathrooms. It even had a small backyard, "for our kids to play" she had said when we chose this one.
After bringing down The Order of Horus we found ourselves very comfortable in finances from the rewards. Jewels, cars, weapons and criminals had gone to their rightful place.
It had been incredibly easy to bring down the cult with her help. She had infiltrated the cult to steal the Eye of Horus, and she knew who it was that I had to arrest to bring the cult down. It crumbled like a card castle that has had one of it's foundations removed.
I still found it hard to believe only five month had passed since that day I found her in my office. I still have the office, but now the rest of the floor is also mine. I don't work alone anymore, I'm the Chief Investigator of the Private Investigators Agency, and five other investigators work with me. Tommy and James are both ex-cops, that decided they wanted to make a bit more money. Frances is a lovely woman, getting close to old age. She was married to a police detective for years, until he was brutally killed three month ago. She alone unraveled the circumstances of his death, and succeeded in solving a case that was baffling the police. So I gave her a job. Marlon was a PI already, but when I opened the Agency he offered to join. And the last of them is Sam. Sam is a kid, early twenties, fresh out of one of the best colleges in the system, and a brilliant mind. I call her She-Lock, but she doesn't understand why, since for some reason, Arthur Conan Doyle's classics were never published in her link. I intend to give her a copy of the Complete Sherlock Holmes as soon as I find one.
Stella helps me out at the office, and it feels wonderful to work with the woman I love, to wake up next to her everyday, and to see her smile whenever I look to the side. I had forgotten what it meant to be in love ever since I came into the Secret System... I was married once, I'm not even sure if I still am married in the "real world". This world is more real than what ever world I was in before I came here. I used to miss them, my old family, but now I'm too happy to think about those things. Stella once asked me where was it that I came from, after reading my notebooks, but I never got around to answer. It still isn't easy to think back to that day, and for now I don't want to. But it is part of my story, part of who I am, and of why I am here, so eventually I shall write it down.
Where was I going? Oh, I know, the case of the wrong address. That one should give you, the silent reader that I still feel looking over my shoulder, a idea of the power of the PIA.
It was one of James informants that tipped us out to that one. A old man got a letter for some other person with the same name as him, but a different address. There had been some mistake at the post office and the letter ended in the sack of one mailman that happen to know the old man. So he saw the name and delivered it, not noticing the address was wrong. So far, nothing that would be of interest for the PIA, except that inside the envelope there was only one photograph. A picture of a dead body and a note on the back "You are next. Love, Mimmy". Now, the old man, Philip, knew no one that went by the name Mimmy, not did he recognize the dead body. His reaction was to go to the police, but they dismissed it as a bad joke. But one of them kept a copy of the picture and showed it to James that showed it to me, and we had a case. The old man wasn't very rich, but even so, when we contacted him he said that he would pay if we helped him out. He was freaked out by the picture and by the idea that someone else might die.
The first thing we did was check up on the real recipient. There was no Philip K. Grill in Allyson Street. Shelock checked the entering records of Dark City and there was only one person with such a name, the old man that received the letter in the first place. I had Tommy, James and Marlon search other links for the second Philip. It took us two weeks but we tracked him down, in a low-tech link, going by a different, although not very imaginative, name. Shelock made contact and after convincing him she knew him not to be John Doe but Philip Grill and explaining the situation, he agreed in helping us track down and arrest Milly.
Milly had been his high school sweetheart and the dead man was their partner in the business they opened after college. They kicked Milly out of it because they suspected her of stealing money. A few months later his partner appears dead in his house and Philip decides it's time to start a new life somewhere else. Knowing her real name and last known address it was easy to find and capture her. She confessed and both Philips now life in peace and without fear.
So if you ever have a nagging interrogation, no matter how irrelevant it might seem, come and question the Private Investigators Agency at the Dark City. We take and solve all cases for a affordable price.
