Catfishing on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  The camera’s view screen is pretty small, but Rachel peers down at the pictures, and I hear her catch her breath with delight. “I want to use this one as my senior picture,” she says.

  “Will you get in trouble for having it taken here?”

  “I don’t care. This is the best picture anyone’s ever taken of me.”

  * * *

  Back at Rachel’s house, her mother’s in the studio and her father is working late again. Rachel makes us macaroni and cheese while I copy the pictures over to my computer so we can see them on a larger screen. I’m pretty sure I smell like mouse droppings, but Rachel’s house has its own dusty smell thanks to all the birds, so I try not to worry about it too much.

  I take out the clipping I retrieved from my mother’s car this morning and pull up the Los Angeles Times website. “What’s that?” Rachel asks.

  “It’s the clipping from earlier. The one about my dad, with the fake names. I’m just wondering whether it’s at least based on something real.”

  She nods and watches over my shoulder as I pull up the archive to search. I use full-text searching and type in one of the sentences—“more passionate than threatening.” It doesn’t have the name Taylor in it, anyway. I have to watch four ads before I can see my results, so I start them playing and go to the bathroom.

  When I come back, CheshireCat has also sent me a message:

  “I think I might have found your father. He lives in Milpitas, California. He’s been looking up plane flights to Boston, Minneapolis, Durham, and Portland, Maine.”

  Boston is near Firestar; Portland is near Hermione; Durham is near Marvin; and Minneapolis is the biggest airport near New Coburg.

  “Is he in the Clowder?” I write.

  “No, absolutely not. No. I think he has his website set up to capture IP addresses, so when everyone went to look, he could see everyone’s approximate location. Except for yours—yours is hidden because your mother’s always used a VPN—but Rachel’s isn’t.”

  “But maybe he’s not evil?” I write. “Maybe my mother kidnapped me, and my father’s actually the victim here?”

  “I’m sorry to say I don’t think that’s it.”

  But the newspaper clipping was full of lies. Or at least fake names. I go to the other window to see what’s turned up from the Los Angeles Times archive now that all the ads are done playing.

  Order of Protection Granted to Former Kidnapping Victim

  Laura Packet, 34, has sought an Order of Protection from her husband, Michael Quinn, briefly a suspect when her five-day kidnapping gripped Silicon Valley last year. Their former business partner, Rajiv Patil, killed himself while awaiting trial for the crime. Quinn, who was at an information security conference when Packet was taken from the home they shared, was questioned repeatedly by the police, but Patil was identified by a conspirator, and evidence of the conspiracy was found on his computer.

  Packet declined to speak to the press. Quinn’s lawyer released a statement saying that Packet had been left extremely traumatized by the period when she was kidnapped, which included the forcible amputation of one of her fingers, and suggested that she blamed Quinn for not having been present to protect her. Packet presented evidence of stalking in court; Quinn’s lawyer said the messages sent were “more passionate than threatening” and “should not be read literally.”

  Patil, who was facing a life sentence, left a note declaring his innocence and accusing Quinn of responsibility for the kidnapping.

  I stare at the article, feeling my heart sink. All my fantasies about a normal life with a normal father blow away like leaves in a blast of November air.

  Mom told me, when I asked about her finger years ago, that she lost it in an accident involving a lawn mower, and I should never try to remove safety features. More recently—like, last year—I’d asked her why they didn’t try to reattach it. She’d told me it was mangled too badly, but she’d paused first, like she was thinking about what to say. I’m suddenly certain that she was considering whether to tell me the truth. And she decided, once again, to lie to me.

  I curl my own fingers against my palms, into fists. I feel sick at the thought of what was done to my mother, and I feel absolute rage that she’d lied to me, that she didn’t tell me the truth even when I asked directly about her hand.

  Back in the CatNet chat window, CheshireCat has added, “I think your father did the kidnapping. I’m 99 percent sure. I’m sorry.”

  17

  AI

  Quinnpacket is a really unusual name.

  There are thousands of Michael Quinns in the United States, but there’s basically no one out there named Quinnpacket. If you’re trying to track down a Michael Quinn and you know something else about him—a Social Security number, an occupation, a town—you can probably find him, but if you want to find someone named Quinnpacket, all you need is their name, because sooner or later they’ll just show up.

  So to find the Michael Quinn who was looking for Stephania Quinnpacket, I thought I’d try making it look like Stephania Quinnpacket had shown up. Maybe Michael Quinn would come looking.

  The false trail needed to be somewhere Stephania and her mother wouldn’t go, since I definitely didn’t want to lead this guy to the actual people who were trying to hide from him. But they stayed away from California, and since Michael Quinn had definitely once lived in California, that seemed like a good place to start. I also wanted locations that I could monitor visually through cameras—cameras that were always on and always connected to the internet, not just cameras that did a daily upload. It was important this time, if frustratingly slow, to monitor what was happening in meatspace.

  Elk Grove, California, near Sacramento, had more unsecured cameras per capita than anywhere else in California. I found a cluster of camera-equipped businesses that could pull credit reports: a bank, an apartment rental company, a temp agency. Then I pulled the report for Stephania Quinnpacket from each one.

  I also stuck Stephania in the enrollment queue for the school district, creating a record, though not much of one. That wanted an address, so I put in the address for the bank, and left the “prior schools attended” blank.

  Michael Quinn arrived in Elk Grove first thing the next morning.

  “Hi, hello,” he said to the bank teller. “I’m here with sort of an unusual problem, and I’m wondering if someone can help me out.”

  He told the bank manager that he had a teenage daughter who’d run away from home and was last seen in Sacramento. He said that Stephania was a narcotics addict and told a long, sad story that included her almost dying from an overdose and then running away from rehab.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’m sure you’re wondering what on earth that has to do with you. It looks like she might have come in in the last couple of days to apply for a credit card or a loan of some kind. And probably what that actually means is that she dropped her ID, and someone stole her identity, but if there’s any chance it was my daughter…”

  The bank manager wanted to help him. She was very sympathetic, and she had daughters of her own who were twelve and ten. But she couldn’t find a record of Stephania applying for credit since I didn’t put anything like that in the system; I’d just used the bank’s systems to pull her credit report.

  “Thanks so much for all your help,” he said to the bank manager. “If she comes in, can you please call me right away? Day or night. Well, I suppose you’re not open at night. But seriously, I’m pretty desperate to get her back into rehab, as I’m sure you can understand…” She promised to call him, and he left her a card.

  There was a camera out in the lot, as well. I watched him go to his car and then looked up the license plates.

  The car was registered to a woman named Sandra James—not Michael Quinn. But when I looked for Sandra James and Michael Quinn’s names together, I got plenty of hits. They didn’t seem to be married, but they appeared to live together in Milpitas, California. I had found the correct Michael Quinn. Now I ju
st needed to keep track of him.

  Good news: he had a phone I could easily snoop on, and he even kept it in a bracket on the dashboard so he could easily look at the navigation. I switched on the microphone and the camera so I could see and hear him, and then I watched his face the whole time as he drove back to Milpitas.

  * * *

  As he drove, I checked his email. One thing that struck me as odd: he was getting regular updates from a phone app that tracked someone else’s location. These trackers are mostly used by parents of teenagers, but he didn’t have a teenager. Did he? I checked his photos. There were lots of pictures of a woman with short blond hair, but she was definitely an adult.

  Rachel’s parents used a tracker called Heli-Mom, which was basically the app for parents who thought they ought to be tracking their kid’s location but didn’t care all that much if they actually were and also didn’t care much about privacy. Michael Quinn was using a much more expensive, secure, and reliable app. The app he was using had started out as software used to track people on house arrest and then got modified and resold to parents under a different brand name. It was much harder to fool, it had features that let you remotely turn on someone’s phone camera or laptop camera, and in addition to the fairly high initial cost, you needed to pay an even more expensive monthly subscription to keep it working.

  While he was waiting in traffic, Michael pulled up his texting app and sent a text with the words random check-in.

  A minute or two passed, then a text back with a picture of the blond woman.

  I could see their conversation, which was endless texts saying “random check-in” and endless selfies of the blond woman. Occasionally, they didn’t come right away, and she texted to say that she’d been in a meeting. Some of the arguments that followed were very confusing.

  Today she’d gotten back to him within two minutes every time he’d texted. He’d texted five times.

  Back in Milpitas, he sent another “random check-in” text and got another picture. She added, Honey, I need to get some groceries tonight. Can you transfer $50 into my account, please?

  That’s a lot for groceries. What are you planning to get?

  Stuff we’re out of. Milk, eggs, yogurt. I was going to get some fruit.

  That’s not $50 worth of stuff.

  I also need tampons.

  Okay, you can take it out at the ATM after work.

  He went into his banking app to transfer money from savings to checking. Since he pulled it up on his phone, I could see the balance, and it was high enough that he could definitely afford fifty dollars in groceries without a long conversation about it.

  Back in his house, he looked up New Coburg, Wisconsin. Through his laptop camera, I watched his face as he read the articles about our hacked robot. He leaned closer, narrowing his eyes, stroking his beard. I don’t know how to read human body language, but he read every single article, then watched every single interview, his eyes flicking around the screen.

  Then he started looking up flights.

  That was when I checked the news archives, now that I had his town and some other details to differentiate him from all the thousands of other Michael Quinns out there, and I found the news articles about the kidnapping. Laura Packet had been snatched from her bedroom in the middle of the night, taken to an unknown location, tortured, waterboarded, and one of the kidnappers had cut off her left pinkie. Then she’d been released; she was found by a couple of hikers, incoherent and terrified, wearing blood-soaked pajamas, her hand amateurishly bandaged. One of the other members of the Homeric Software company, Rajiv Patil, had been charged with orchestrating the kidnapping. He died—drove over a cliff—shortly after being released on bail. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide.

  But Michael was the one Laura took out an order of protection from.

  This was so confusing! Had she tried to leave Michael, and the kidnapping was his revenge? Or had Rajiv left her so traumatized that she blamed Michael for things that weren’t his fault?

  Michael’s house was full of cameras—some security cameras, some things like nanny cams—they were in almost every room of the house. I wanted to sneak a peek through his laptop camera, but he’d gotten up from the computer, so I poked through the insecure cameras as he moved through the house until I found him. He was having a conversation with the blond woman, Sandra, in the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry,” Sandra was saying.

  The camera was transmitting with a lag, so I heard a noise and saw a flurry of motion and wasn’t entirely sure how to string it together.

  “Where did you put it, Sandra?” Michael asked. “Tell me where.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. Her voice was thick and blurry, like she was crying, or like I was hearing her through a microphone that had bad interference, I wasn’t certain. “It was less than a dollar!”

  “Don’t lie to me. I need to know that I can trust you. Can I trust you, Sandra? Can I?”

  “You can trust me. You can trust me! I promise.” I saw another flurry of motion and heard her voice rise sharply in pitch and volume. “Please stop,” she said. “It’s under the mattress, it was just for emergencies, please stop.”

  There are a lot of things I know, and a lot of things I understand, but bodies are hard.

  By the time I realized I was watching him beat her, it was over. If I’d known, 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.”