The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic. – G.K. Chesterton

Anonymity crowned him as if t'were the halo of romantic glory. – Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

The morning light brought new levels of car and bus exhaust, surpassing the unpleasant mist of the previous night and sending a dense, hazy smog into the city air. With the smog, the team's visibility obscured, but they didn't need to see too far.

Returning two miles northeast, the team began a systematic sweep of the area where the local workers had described Jack Buckley the night before. Other than the two witnesses from the previous night's bar, no one appeared to have seen the man – apparently, Buckley had limited his excursions to the night. Fitting, thought Briel.

Though they had always proved competent, most of Briel's fellow team members followed a simplistic protocol of investigation: acquire target, analyze data, extract target. For Briel, such a narrow focus provided little satisfaction. Briel liked to understand things and people, not out of an emotional need, but from an intellectual one. If she could comprehend the motivations of people, she could more accurately predict their potential actions.

With full confidence in her team, Briel ignored her primary mission and began to investigate the workings of the nearby community. She let her team chase down the trails of Jack Buckley while she questioned the locals about the community power structure.

Oftentimes in an anarchic setting, some person or entity established a controlling presence in the local commerce and society, in this case, through his monetary influence. Such a person or group acted as a sort of local tribal chief.

Perez, she repeated to herself, stating the name that had come up regularly during her investigations. A Mr. Perez ran much of the business market in the neighborhood of about twenty thousand people, and Briel began to discern several strata that made up the various levels of local society.

Almost in the fashion of a monarch, Mr. Perez had established a “favored” segment of the population. Apparently, the members of the community knew how to serve Mr. Perez in some fashion, and he rewarded them accordingly.

Briel also had no trouble figuring out the outcasts and those who had offended the Perez crew because they lived in abject poverty and tended to look over their shoulders a lot. Really, Briel did not encounter many of the latter, and she wondered whether they had left of their own volition or had become victims of Mr. Perez's power mechanism. When she recognized the pattern that determined the two groups, Briel did not think highly of Mr. Perez. He seemed to reward the unscrupulous and punish the principled.

Still, others lived and functioned in the nearby neighborhood. The two groups combined totaled about sixty percent of the population, and a generic middle class - only middle in relative terms as no real middle class existed in Mexico City – comprised another thirty percent. A nebulous class, not an apparent part of any group, also existed, not acknowledge by the population at large, and untraceable as to how they subsisted, about 2,000 in number.

Briel knew that a large number of this class would work on the periphery of society, perhaps against Mr. Perez in an opportunistic fashion or perhaps on Mr. Perez's behalf to carry out tasks that not even Mr. Perez wanted to claim. Briel spent hours talking to these outcasts, especially the criminal ones.

They possessed a complex knowledge of the seedier aspects of the community but held no great loyalty to Perez. By the end of the second day, Briel and her crew had mined the depths of that subculture and had narrowed the possible hotspots to two bars on the west side of the neighborhood and one church right in the middle of the area.

“Let's start again in the morning,” Briel instructed as the team relaxed in various positions around a ramshackle collection of broken furniture. “Nessa and I will take the church, and you guys split up in the bars. If that doesn't work, Nessa and I will resort to the bars.” Briel didn't relish the idea of flirting out information. Though she found it the most degrading part of her job, she participated when necessary - just reluctantly.

“Hey, boss,” Liam called, his voice wearing a smirk as he spoke the title he had adopted for Briel on this mission. She winced but didn't respond. Instead, she wandered around a corner out of sight from the other members. What was that she had imagined about his maybe having a soul?

Liam followed her, but she did not turn toward him, instead turning her back to him and placing her phone on a ragged table in front of her. She began to pull up various bits of information about the mission, seemingly uninterested in Liam and his presence. Her pulse sped as he stepped up behind her.

“What do you want, Monroe?” she leveled.

Of course, her attempt at a dismissive posture became a disadvantage when he stepped close and leaned his mouth close to her ear. “You know what I want,” he purred, stroking his fingers down her arm. “I always did love that attitude.” The hot breath of his whisper brought chills to her skin.

As she processed his words, she froze. Where had she heard them before. Not Liam. No, it had been Ted, and he had said, “I miss that attitude.” It wasn’t the same – Liam wouldn’t be Ted. Would it make any sense for him to screw with her as Ted and then come torment her some more in person? Maybe. But Ted was so nice – like Liam used to be. No. She was making a huge leap. No way was Liam as clever, as funny, or as nerdy as Ted.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

His fingers that had slid down her arm twitched, and Briel realized he was reaching for the phone. What the hell? If he wanted it, she didn’t want to give it to him. She slid it over the tabletop toward her belly, determined to shield it with her body. “You want something you know you can't have.”

He stepped so close behind her that his shirt brushed against her back. “All the more reason to want it.”

Briel seriously thought about head-butting him right there. Had she really believed his overbearing tendencies to be sweet at one point? Irritated, she spun to face him, raising her hand to his chest to hold him back. In his typical fashion, Liam didn't seem to notice the impediment, pressing her back toward the table. Nervous despite her bravado, Briel glanced past his shoulder to make sure that no one paid them any attention, and her lapse in focus cost her. When she glanced back at Liam, he had leaned his face so close to hers that she had to stretch her neck to meet his eyes. Was he trying to kiss her?

“Cool it!” she hissed, pushing him away so hard that he stumbled back a step. Rather than bother Liam, the action seemed to amuse him, and he chuckled as he reached toward her. Dammit! He had done it. He had distracted her so much by imposing on her space that she had forgotten what she was doing. Before she could react, he had wrenched the phone from her hands and stepped far enough away that she couldn’t reach it. Taking in his expression, she paused. Did he look…angry?

“Oh, I'm cool, Briel.” His jaw clenched in obvious annoyance, and the irritation in his eyes temporarily silenced her. “You're the one who is in danger of losing it here.” He punctuated his words with the phone, waving it with judgmental emphasis. “You brought this on a mission. Something interesting on here that I should see?” He lifted the phone so that it lit his face, but he couldn’t open it.

Trying to grab at the phone, Briel lurched toward him, and he wrapped an arm around her, spinning her completely around until her back rested against the wall. He laughed as he held it out of her reach – as if she were a child! She would never have let another man disrespect her like that. With Liam, though, she had made excuses for his general sense of irreverence, as if she couldn’t expect him to be both as exciting as he was and as considerate as she believed he should be. Part of her wanted to punch him, but another part stood paralyzed as he brought his arms around her, seeming to examine her phone behind her back.

“You're falling to pieces without me,” he thrummed, a bitter smile accentuating the shadows that fell across his face.

“You wish.” Briel knew the ridiculousness of his assertion, but Liam held so much force in his words that they seemed to portend some reality that he could see and she could not. She suppressed a shudder, and Liam flashed his beautiful white teeth at her. Somehow, he knew how he had affected her, though she had worked her hardest to repress the physical evidence.

“There’s no one else?” he demanded, showing her the unopened phone.

“What are you talking about?” she hedged, sure that he couldn’t know about Ted.

“I always tell you to be smart, and instead you make the stupidest play possible? I know you ‘have no fear,’ but you used to listen to me about this stuff,. Then again, you always had such a thing for him…”

Ted?

“He shows up in town, after months of your denials, and you go out with him? Right when you decide to break up with me? No one else.”

“Wait…” Briel huffed in indignation. “Who are you talking about? Jase?”

“The famous Jase Hamilton, the man you were so concerned about a month ago that you warned me to watch out for him in the strongest terms. I stumble on you in one of my favorite restaurants – after you insist that there’s no one else – and who are you out with? The man of your obsessions. I was such an idiot.” He fixed her with his eyes. “I never knew you were a liar, Briel.”

Now she understood. He had seen her out with Jase? What were the chances? Not that small since he lives five minutes from me. Still, he had a lot of nerve. “I didn’t lie,” she hissed, keeping her tone low, “but I don’t owe you an explanation.”

Liam leaned even closer, both hands pressed into the wall behind her. “So, there’s no one else? Someone dangerous?” he whispered into her ear. The heat from his body filled the space around her, and she had to close her eyes to rein in her reaction to him. Unfortunately, Briel couldn’t suppress a shudder, and she didn't know if it sprang from fear or excitement. Perhaps a bit of both, she realized with disgust. Still, once she found her belligerence returned, she glared up at him with all the force of intimidation she could muster and ducked neatly out from between him and the wall.

“That’s none of your business,” she retorted at full volume, deftly snatching the phone and dancing away when he tried to recapture it. Without looking back, she stalked across the room to find Nessa. Briel could feel Liam's smile searing into her back, but she forced herself not to turn around. What was he trying to pull?

In typical fashion, Nessa seemed to sense that Briel had just endured some stress, but rather than say anything specific, Nessa just went about the business, asking impersonal questions about the mission and procedures. Within a few minutes, the memory of Liam faded behind a mountain of numbers and scenarios, punctuated by lighthearted humor and friendship.

Liam had apparently decided not to challenge her, because she neither saw nor heard him the rest of the night. Stupidly, the tiniest part of her felt bad for rejecting him – and another tiny part regretted pushing him away. You’ll get over it, she assured herself. By the time Briel lay down to sleep, Liam's games seemed more of a mild nuisance than anything else.

Usually, Briel spent the nights during a mission planning strategy for the next day's endeavors. As her eyes closed in slumber, however, her mind swirled with thoughts completely unconnected from her mission. A strange jumble of looks and words and sensations danced in her brain. The words of the mysterious Ted, the pointed looks from Jase, and the magnetic attraction to Liam. In the past, the lack of focus might have bothered her, but something seemed to shift inside of her as she lay in the dark, and she let her mind have its own way. Ironically, it was the first time in a while none of the usual visions kept her from slumber. Because I’m made for the mission, she told herself as she faded toward unawareness.

When sleep finally came, Briel's conundrum followed her, and she tossed and turned through the first several hours of the night. When she settled into deep rest, it weighed black and profound, and she would wonder later how she could have slept so soundly in such an uncomfortable environment.

The next thing Briel sensed was the faint city lights squeezing under her lids. Dimly, she sensed the gritty earth under her back, and the chill of the early morning seeped unpleasantly beneath her thin wool blanket. Still, until she felt the pinprick of a needle in her neck, Briel had never sensed an ounce of insecurity.