The Stories You Tell

by Kristen Lepionka

  “Unfortunately, I can report that that’s true,” I said.

  On the way out, I passed Elise’s husband making a mess with a snow blower in the driveway. When he saw me, he turned it off. “Hey, that chicken was good. Did you make it?”

  “Hell no. It’s from the Eagle, in the Short North.”

  “Well, thanks for bringing it over. Elise was making baked fish, and believe me, I was glad to see that hit the trash can.”

  I glanced back at the house, though Elise was still in the basement. “She threw away what she was making?”

  “Yes, thank god.”

  I felt like a jerk. “Well, I didn’t want her to throw out what she was cooking. I was just trying to be nice.”

  Brock blinked dumbly at me. “Oh and you were! That was great!”

  “Well, have a good night,” I said.

  “You too, Miss Roxane!”

  I refused to look at him, even when he revved the snow blower in my direction as I pulled out of the driveway.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Kenny Brayfield was very concerned that I was going to embarrass him in front of his business partners. “Just be nice,” he had told me in the elevator as we rode up to the suite that housed Transit Tech. “Don’t, like, wave a gun around or something.”

  I almost laughed. “Do you actually think I would do that?”

  “Please just don’t,” he said.

  I could have told him that my gun was locked in the glove box of my car, but I didn’t.

  He introduced me to the officers of the company and gave me a brief tour through the office, a two-story loft with a Ping-Pong table, a rock-climbing wall, and a free vending machine that dispensed beer—all of which existed, no doubt, to trick the employees working seventy hours a week into thinking that they loved their jobs. The sky was blue and clear through the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of the office. There were no cubicles or even actual desks, just a bunch of tables of varying heights where said employees could sit, stand, or sprawl at will.

  The person I really needed to talk to had his own office, albeit one with a sliding glass door that probably just made everyone assume he was talking about them whenever it was closed. His name was Ramonte Barnes, and he served as Transit Tech’s resident data expert.

  “It’s not like we want to make a habit of just splashing people’s info to whoever,” he was saying, “but in this case, I mean, we don’t want to sit on something that could help you find the young lady. I heard her name on the radio, on WOSU. So you know it’s serious.”

  I nodded. I liked him; he was probably about Addison’s age, dressed like a college kid in jeans and a Black Nerd Problems T-shirt, but he seemed to be handling my request with the gravity of a professional.

  “So basically, we have a ton of data. The app is about making human connections, but it’s also about data, and using that data to make other types of connections, right?” As he spoke his eyes were on his computer screen, fingers flying across the keys. “We’re using the data we collect to develop a really sophisticated advertising platform. Micro-targeting already exists, but we’re drilling down into user behavior on a neighborhood level, specific to Columbus—something that has huge potential in the ad space. Does that make sense?”

  “Not really.”

  Ramonte grinned. “Okay. Here’s an example. Where do you live?”

  “Olde Towne,” I said, and he nodded approvingly.

  “Okay, so you live in Olde Towne. If you were using the app and you went to, say, New Albany, the app would pay attention to the businesses you checked into, how long you spent there, if you used social media there, if you reviewed on Yelp or Google, and so on, and then, it would integrate that information into future display ads shown, specifically, to other Olde Towne East users who happen to go to New Albany. Obviously that’s a massive oversimplification of what it does, but does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” I said, “and it sounds creepy as hell. So the app keeps track of every place every user goes?”

  “It’s saved anonymously, but yeah. And before you think it’s a little too Big Brother-ish, you have to remember, every app you use is collecting data on you constantly unless you opted out from their terms of service.”

  “That just makes me want to delete all apps, rather than look the other way for this one.”

  Ramonte shook his head. “It’s kind of like, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. This kind of data collection is happening all the time, so you might as well embrace it and benefit from personalized recommendations.”

  This was all very troubling. But it probably had nothing to do with Addison’s disappearance. “So when you say the data is stored anonymously, does that mean you can’t pull up anything on a specific user?”

  “No, we definitely can. See, the location data for the purposes of the display ads? That’s one thing. It’s like how the navigation app Waze can integrate real-time traffic without actually tracking users on an individual level. Location info is not saved to a user profile. But, activity within the app, that’s a different story. Here you go.”

  Ramonte spun his monitor around to show me; it displayed a wall of text, dates, and times of everything Addison’s profile had done via BusPass. I said, “Exactly what am I looking at?”

  He leaned forward so he could look at the screen too. “This here,” he said, tapping at a line of text, “means her user session lasted almost an hour. She passed left on ten profiles, right on twenty-three, and spent most of her time reading Missed the Bus posts.”

  That seemed about right. “Can I see her profile?”

  Ramonte copied a string of characters from the list on his screen, switched applications, and pasted. The profile that popped up said ADDISON S below a picture of a curvy shadow against a graffiti-covered wall.

  “This is it?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Addison’s short bio was very short indeed:

  Least likely to.

  That was all it said.

  “Does she have any other pictures?”

  Ramonte clicked on the arrow next to the shadow. There were two other images: one of a pair of black stilettos discarded on a parquet floor, colored lights shining on them; the other was a close-up of a brown eye with electric-blue mascara.

  “It doesn’t look like she was seriously trying to use this to meet somebody,” Ramonte said. “I mean, I get it, she’s artsy and cool, but this app isn’t about that.”

  “I think she did meet someone, though. She connected to someone through a Missed the Bus post.”

  Ramonte went back to the list of data and scrolled for a while. “Here we go. It looks like she only ever interacted with one post from Missed the Bus.” He copied another string of text from the window into the page with Addison’s profile, but the screen that came up displayed an error.

  “Okay, so that means whoever posted it has since deleted their page.”

  I sighed in frustration.

  “Easy, tiger,” Ramonte said. “We can still get to it—just have to go about it a different way.”

  A few dozen keystrokes later and he’d pulled up a Facebook profile belonging to one Corbin Janney. “This is the profile he used to create his account.”

  The profile picture wasn’t the same one that the police had showed me, but it was clearly the same guy.

  I wrote down his name. “Can you tell me anything else about him?”

  “Well, he signed up using the Facebook authentication, meaning he didn’t have to enter an email address into our system.” Ramonte typed a few lines. “But I don’t know if—wait a minute.” He tapped the keyboard with a bit more force. “That’s weird.”

  “What’s weird?”

  “Well, I know that deleted user account data is regularly removed from this system, though it’s copied over into our long-term storage—just to keep the data size reasonable. That happens once a week, but it looks like only part of Corbin’s old profile actually got moved, which shoul
dn’t have happened. Unless he actually only ever interacted with one user. Your girl Addison.”

  The data list on Corbin’s file was much shorter than Addison’s, and only showed him passing right and messaging with the string of characters that represented her user ID.

  Ramonte said, “I’m going to have to look into that a bit further.”

  I asked if he could go back to the page that showed Addison’s public profile. “What’s this?” I said, pointing at a grey circle under her name.

  “Oh, that means she’s not online.” He moused over the dot and a box that said OFFLINE. “It shows when a person was last active for up to three days—so if she’d last been on yesterday, it would say LAST SEEN YESTERDAY. And if the person is online right now, it’s a green light, obviously.”

  I studied the scant information on the page for a bit and pointed next to a small green arrow with text beside it that read: DOUG J. “How about this?”

  “Oh, that just means that a user recently looked at her page.”

  “It displays that publicly?” I said, immediately feeling embarrassed for Doug J and every other user of this app.

  “No, only people you’re connected to.”

  “So Addison’s already connected to this person?”

  “No, we are.” Now he pointed at the log-in bar at the top, where the profile picture was the BusPass logo. “This is basically a master account. It’s connected to all the users, but invisibly. So because this account is ‘friends’ with both Addison and Doug, this shows up. The point being that if two of your friends are checking each other out, that’s something you might want to know. It would also display in the main feed, here,” he said, switching to a view that listed activity from dozens of users within the last few minutes. “But because this account would get these from every single user in the system, it’s probably buried.”

  That seemed like a treasure trove of information, much more useful than my pathetic attempts to create a fake profile who had zero connections. “I don’t suppose there is any way you could give me access to this? Or printouts? Just so I could explore Addison’s connections a bit closer.”

  “You mean without a warrant?” He winked at me. “I guess there’s no harm, since none of this is private information that the users submit to the app—it’s all public-facing stuff to their connections. You just have to promise not to let anyone else use it. We don’t need a paper trail here.”

  “You got it,” I said as it dawned on me that Kenny had told Transit Tech that I was a cop. That would explain why everyone was being so helpful.

  I did not exactly tell him otherwise and just let him write a convoluted web address and password on the back of his business card.

  In the elevator back to the lobby, I elbowed Kenny in the ribs. “You could have at least warned me that you told him I was a cop.”

  “What? No! I said you were working with the police department. Not for.”

  “Well,” I said, “it worked, so I can’t be too upset. So thank you, even though I almost blew it there at the end. It just would have been nice to know.”

  Now Kenny tried to act like this had been his intention all along. “I knew you could handle it,” he said, smoothing down the front of his hoodie.

  Curated existence, Addison had said. That applied to way more than just a dating app.

  * * *

  It would be helpful of me, I decided, if I got some background information on Corbin Janney before I reported back to the police on my findings. With this in mind, I went home and helpfully sat at my desk with my laptop. But this was not the ace in the hole I had been hoping for. Corbin Janney had a Facebook page and an Instagram feed wherein he posted lots of pictures of his post-workout smart watch, Spotify screenshots, and the occasional wet-haired mirror selfie in what appeared to be a locker room. His captions were emojis, mainly. Nothing especially helpful or unusual there. But other than his social profiles, I didn’t find anything. No driver’s license, no address. His Facebook page was set to private, so nothing there, either. I was about to close the browser tab when I noticed that we had a mutual friend, and when I clicked on the square, my mouth went dry.

  * * *

  I badgered Julia Raymund into claiming I worked for her as an investigator so that I could visit my brother again before regular visiting hours. Well, we. I thought this, unfortunately, was a matter that required both of us, but I wasn’t actually telling Julia anything she didn’t know; Mizuno and Blair had been to the jail to talk to Andrew about it that very morning.

  “I swear to god, I have no idea who this guy is,” Andrew was saying. He leaned back in his chair, hands over his face. He was pale and jittery. “I mean, Facebook isn’t real life, right? Do you personally know every single person you’re friends with on there?”

  “Yes,” Julia said.

  Andrew parted his fingers long enough to look at me. I said, “No, but I only use it to spy on people.”

  My brother went back behind his hands.

  “And you have no idea why or how you’re Facebook friends with this Corbin Janney,” I said.

  “I have, like, twenty-nine-hundred connections on there. I tend bar, in a hotel; you have no idea how often people are like, ‘Hey, let me friend you and I’ll send you the whatever video we were talking about.’ It’s literally all the time.”

  “So you think you met this guy there?”

  “No? I don’t know? I get requests and I just accept them. It’s not like I have a bunch of personal information on there or anything.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that after what I’d learned from Ramonte that morning. But this was not the time to lecture him on data security.

  Julia said, “I think the answer to that one is no. Blair said this Corbin Janney may not even be a real person.”

  That tracked with my admittedly brief background research. “But what then—” I began, stopping as I realized. “They think you’re Corbin Janney.”

  No one spoke for a while.

  “So—what—they think you catfished Addison into coming over to your house, a place she’s been before? That makes no sense. And besides, wouldn’t there be a digital footprint of some kind? On your computer, your phone? There are—”

  “Rox, just stop,” Andrew said.

  I ran my hands into my hair and tugged just enough to make it hurt.

  “They said Addison hasn’t used her phone or her debit card since last Wednesday.” Julia flipped pages in her legal pad somewhat officiously. “The voice mail places her in Andrew’s apartment, and that’s the last place she was known to be. All of this other stuff is just distraction.”

  “What about the roommate?” I said. “She mentioned that Addison had burned her eggs that morning, so she’d obviously been home.”

  Julia’s eyes narrowed like she wanted to throw me out of the tiny attorney meeting room. “So what? That doesn’t change the facts.”

  “Okay,” I said, my voice going up a little in pitch as I got more and more wound up. “What about security cameras in the lobby of Andrew’s building?”

  “They’re working on it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they’re working on it, Roxane. I don’t know the precise steps they’re taking to do so.”

  “Does it exist, or not?”

  “I. Don’t. Know.”

  “Did you ask?”

  Julia looked at my brother in exasperation.

  “Or is this like Schrödinger’s Security Footage, which may or may not exist, despite the fact that they are working on it? How much work is required? What is it, eight millimeter?”

  Silence fell over the room again. I pinched the bridge of my nose as my eyes filled with angry tears.

  Finally, Julia said, “The good news is, there’s a lot of digital information for them to comb through, and precisely none of it is going to show that Andrew made up this Corbin Janney person. Eventually, they’ll have to see that.”

  I wasn’t so sure it
worked that way, and Julia obviously knew that. “So now what?”

  “Now we just wait. This could take a while.”

  I wondered if Addison even had a while.

  * * *

  Corbin Janney did sound like a made-up name. The only other person called Corbin I’d ever even heard of was the L.A. Law actor and for all I knew, his was a made-up name too. That night I sat at my desk and pored over his fake Facebook page, the one I’d been looking at when I reached the terrible conclusion that my brother knew him in a digital sense. He had two-hundred-some Facebook friends, a believable amount, but as I scrolled through them I saw that they were mostly minor local celebrities—tattoo artists, dudes in bands, restaurant managers, artists. People who, like Andrew, would probably just accept any and all requests.

  So was this a profile that existed for the sole purpose of being able to set up a BusPass account? I could believe it.

  I wasted some time trying to find a cached snapshot of Corbin’s Missed the Bus post and found nothing. Had it actually been about Addison—a targeted attempt to ensnare her—or was it about some other woman with a big tattoo, or about no one in particular, a wide net content with the first user who nibbled?

  This was a case that existed in the cloud, in the space between people. There were few physical clues to follow, just a smattering of digital footprints that didn’t tell the whole story. I preferred hard clues, like suitcase tracks in Addison’s bedroom carpet. Like the card Wyatt had given her.

  I went back to the dating app and pulled up Wyatt’s profile. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing it; I had no reason to think he was Corbin Janney, or that he wanted to hurt Addison in any way, but I knew he was involved—somehow—and wasn’t sure how to go about getting him to talk to me. Maybe I could figure out some of his other friends this way, other people he socialized with since it creepily captured recent activity if you knew where to look.

  Next to the green arrow, it said the person WYATT A had recently messaged with was ADDY MARIE S.

  ADDY MARIE S

  I stared at the name for a second, at the profile picture that was most definitely Addison Stowe—but this was not the profile I’d looked at yesterday with the blue-mascaraed eye and the cryptic bio and the same email address as Addison’s real Facebook page.