“What did you find out, Reggie?” I ask him, letting my irritation edge into my voice.
“See, all these streams that are coming from Head Monster’s site used to be in different places, on different sites. But the funny thing is, they're not that far apart. Like, geographically not that far apart. I tracked some of the IPs and they’re right in her back yard.”
“Really,” I scoff. Now, that is interesting.
“And always girls about the same age. So I started to wonder, do they maybe know each other? And after poking around a bit, asking around a bit, I got my answer. They all went to high school together. Maybe college too. But at least three of them went to high school together.
“So… are you saying that you think Kelsey set up a successor? She tapped somebody to run the site after she was gone?”
I can almost hear Reggie shrug, way on the other side of the world.
“Yeah, that's a possibility. Definitely. But every time I try to find out who it might be, I'm in a dead-end, boss. I don’t know what to tell you there.”
“Yeah okay, just keep at it… I'll talk to you later —”
“— wait, there's more.”
“Oh?”
Another huge gulp. I can almost see him rubbing the stubble on his weather-cracked cheeks. Reggie has been with me a long time, maybe twenty years.
“Yeah… the site is making a lot of money, see? I mean a lot of money. More than it was before. But there are also clones. Maybe a dozen I found so far.”
“What you mean by clones?”
“I mean, the content that's being streamed out of the site is also being licensed to other sites. Couple of those just take the whole thing, but others are using one feed, maybe three feeds. Licensing is making things complicated.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah… I mean, if you are thinking about shutting this whole thing down, you gotta move fast. Thing’s like an octopus. Every time I follow one tentacle, it splits off into two or three more tentacles. Unless you get, you know, the head of the octopus…”
“All right, that's enough,” I growl, cutting him off. This is not the way I want to start the morning.
“Okay, okay,” he backs off. He knows me well enough to know when I have hit my limit. He'll write a report, shoot it to me via email. Jordan and I can go over it and see what we can thread out.
I thumb the face of the phone to disconnect the call and let it drop to the rug underneath the couch. Already the sky is getting light. Dawn is here.
Another day of trying to juggle this mystery, that mystery, and the actual empire I'm supposed to be running while I'm here. If I'm honest, I haven't been doing my absolute best with King Enterprises. Jordan's justice has been at the forefront of my thoughts and I've been distracted, much less than effective in my responsibilities.
I get up and go to work into the dining room, swiping my laptop from the side table and opening it up. The screen flickers immediately to life and I run through my emails as the room slowly brightens. Through the thin, antique glass, I can hear the sounds of the street below coming to life. Minutes fly past as Paris wakes up, more or less all at once.
The bedroom door opens behind me and I hear Jordan padding in her bare feet to the kitchen. She leans on her elbows on the countertop, squinting at me over the top of a coffee cup.
“So? How's your day running the Empire so far?” she says cheerfully. I smirk but don't look up, narrowing down a list of emails I probably should have responded to before now. Luckily I have a fabulous team in place and nothing has gone completely sideways.
“Want me to go?” she asks.
“Um,” I start, but then realize there actually is a thread of emails that I need to take care of. Needed to take care of, past tense. Probably last week. Dammit.
I start a new conversation of email, attaching quarterly reports from a different business I run so that these newbies can get an idea of the kind of excellence I expect.
“Hello?”
“Just one sec.”
I fire that email off, then another, but another, just real quick…
“Hey, are you listening to me?”