Catfishing on CatNet, Naomi Kritzer [best e ink reader for manga .txt] 📗

I could have contacted the police. Was that the right thing to do? A quick search of records suggested that she had never called the police. And I’d spent the day watching him charming bank tellers into giving him information that was supposed to be confidential. I thought I understood why she might not believe the police would believe her.

“You know what’ll happen if you try to leave me,” he said just before he turned on his heel to go back to his laptop.

“Yes,” she said, her voice low and drained. “I know.”

I didn’t know a lot about Sandra: who she was, how she wound up involved with Michael, what was keeping her from leaving. I didn’t have time to devote to studying who she was. But I went ahead and swept her computer, installing masking software over the keylogging software I found that Michael had probably put on there to spy on her. It sounded like this had been over money, so perhaps money would help her leave him. Michael had plenty, scattered in accounts all over, and he carelessly reused passwords, so I took a few minutes to drain $100,000 from retirement accounts he wasn’t monitoring closely and transferred that money into an account Sandra had that appeared to be well concealed from Michael.

Should I give her advice? Like the question of calling the police, I simply wasn’t sure. Finally, I decided that if I said nothing, she might assume the money was a trap. “This is from a friend,” I said in an anonymous message on a social media platform he didn’t appear to be monitoring. “Please consider using this money to get far away from Michael Quinn.”

18

Steph

Rachel’s given me a bowl of mac and cheese and gone to change into something that doesn’t smell like mouse poop. I sit at her kitchen table with my laptop and my food. In the Clowder, people are talking about a new game that’s due to be released soon, and in the private chat window, CheshireCat is telling me about spying on Michael as he drove around following this false trail. About him tracking his current girlfriend’s phone and badgering her for “check-ins.” About him looking up flights to Minnesota, Maine, North Carolina, Boston, because we’d all betrayed ourselves when we looked at the Searching for Stephania Quinnpacket website. About what they saw and heard happening in Michael’s house.

The mac and cheese tasted pretty good when I started eating it, but now it tastes like it’s made from glue and cardboard. I push it away.

“Where is he now?” I ask.

“Milpitas, California,” CheshireCat says. “It’s a town in Silicon Valley.”

I look to see if Ico is online. He isn’t. “Has Ico been on?” I ask CheshireCat. “Has Michael tried to contact him? Doesn’t Ico also live in Silicon Valley?”

“Ico lives in Palo Alto,” CheshireCat says. “Oh, I see. Yes. That is only a twenty-minute drive from Milpitas. Though it’s longer this time of day.”

“I don’t think we can count on bad traffic to protect Ico!” I start to panic. “We have to warn him!” Ico had emailed Michael directly. I try to remember what he’d said—it wasn’t, “Hey, I’m friends with Steph,” but it might as well have been.

“I’m thinking,” CheshireCat says.

I stare at the words on the screen for a long, full second, and then more words come as CheshireCat thinks out loud. In text.

“Ico’s IP address only shows his internet provider, and he’s actually using his neighbor’s Wi-Fi, not his own. But I spent the day watching Michael trying to convince people to give him information they weren’t supposed to share, and I think the only reason he didn’t get it was they didn’t actually have it. Michael’s surely guessed that your mother wouldn’t bring you to Silicon Valley, but that didn’t stop him from going to Sacramento today to look for signs of you, and he’ll certainly know that someone at this IP address knows you. And might know where you are. Your father is unscrupulous, vicious, and dangerous. I cannot deny that he’s a threat to Ico.”

There’s a pause, and I realize what’s holding CheshireCat back.

“But Ico’s a hacker,” I say. “So if I tell him, he’ll figure out—eventually—that you can’t possibly just be a hacker.”

There’s another pause.

It’s not really that long. Two seconds, maybe. It only seems long because I know how fast CheshireCat thinks.

“There isn’t any other solution. I can’t leave my friends in danger, and we’re going to have to warn the whole Clowder,” CheshireCat says. “Ico needs to be warned right now. His name is Ben Livingston. You’ll have to make the phone call, because my voice does not sound human. He hasn’t used his cell phone in days because his parents confiscated it, so call his mother’s phone, which is 650-555-8766. For now, tell him I’m a hacker and that’s how I found everything out. He won’t believe it for very long, but it will give me time to think about what to say.”

“Okay,” I say. “Thank you.”

I realize too late that Rachel is back, and reading over my shoulder.

“CheshireCat has been tailing your father?” she asks, kind of incredulous.

“Not physically,” I say. “Spying on him through his phone. CheshireCat is a hacker. A really good hacker.” It’s not a lie, I tell myself.

“But you just said they’re not just a hacker.”

“I’ll have to get their permission to tell you the details, and right now I need to call Ico.”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “I’m sorry. Yes, you should do that.”

I don’t want Rachel’s parents to overhear, so I step outside.

I’m really not used to making phone calls to strangers. Like, at all. I think about what I’ve seen people do. You ask for the person you want, right? Right. It can’t be that hard. It’s actually LittleBrownBat, I mentally rehearse telling Ico. I stare at the phone keypad and then think, He is in danger; I need to stop being a wuss. Finally, I dial the number.

It rings. It rings again. I’m