My plan is a long, drawn-out one, only held back by the fact that I still don’t know where my grandfather is. I’m not expecting the search to be easy; I’m not even sure if he’s alive or dead, but I know I won’t put the finishing touches on Ricci until I find out. I think Pop and I are both thinking that Ricci either has him stashed somewhere, or he finished him long ago.
According to Ma’s words, her dad had gone after Ricci after sending her away. Since Ricci was still alive and kicking, that meant the old man had failed. But where is he now? Pop had searched the whole of Sicily looking for him, that much I know, with no luck, and my search hadn’t produced anything, but I think I may have found someone with some answers.
I’ve spent most of my planning time trying to find the people who would’ve been at the party where Ma was violated on that horrible night. By process of elimination, I think I’d found most if not all of them. It had taken meticulous precision to comb through Ricci’s life going back decades to find those closest to him.
The fact that most of them were still friends, still did things together all these years later leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The man is scum, and so those he surrounds himself with can’t be much better is my thinking. I’d found the ones who’d been there, even got my hands on a picture from that night by hacking into his and others’ computers a while back.
But there was this one female that seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth. The others were pretty much still going about their lives as usual, but this one had been silent since around the time of the attack. There are no records of her weeks after that night, which leads me to think she’d either distanced herself from them because of it or had gone into hiding for whatever reason.
There’s no death on record, nothing, not even a rumor. She’d just up and disappeared one day. I’d found her family, her siblings, and a few cousins, but there was nothing there either. That’s where I’d needed help. I needed men or women on the ground where my computer couldn’t reach, and since my family is Italian, I’d shamelessly used their connections in the old country to get me what I was after. “So, I guess the boys came through.”
“They did.”
“Be careful, don’t do anything rash. I gather you’ll be going in alone?”
“It’s the best way for now.” A half-truth since I plan to go it all alone, but that admission would bring me more trouble than I want to deal with.
We went over my plans, some of them anyway, the parts I wanted to share. I know it was only to make sure I had all the bases covered, though we’d been through this a hundred times. I could see the questions starting to form with my every answer and made my excuses in haste. There was no point; I won’t turn back.
* * *
The girls were still playing dress-up when I got back, so I threw myself into something else I’d been neglecting these past few weeks. ANONYMOUS is my safe space. A group of men and women who don’t know each other beyond the keyboard but share basically the same drive to eliminate the dregs of society from whichever corner they’re hiding out in.
I came across the group by chance a long time ago and had been using it as a staging ground of sorts ever since. I’ve honed my hacking skills, among other things, through the work I do with the team. Even though we don’t know each other personally, there are a few that I’ve grown close to over the years. I don’t know their names, other than their handles, but I don’t fool myself, and neither do they I suppose that we couldn’t find each other if we wanted to.
Hacking came easy to me. Born of necessity, since my prey was halfway across the world, I’d perfected it in less than a year and was soon caught up in that world. That’s how I was approached, word got around in the underground that I was good at what I do, and the next thing I knew, I was part of this thing that was hated by many and not even heard of by most.
I learned a lot from the others, and there were times when we needed help from each other outside of whatever crime we were working to expose, so a bond was forged between some of us that have lasted years. Now it was going on two weeks since I’d interacted with them because I was too busy dealing with her mess.