Catfishing on CatNet Naomi Kritzer (reading strategies book txt) 📖

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 just 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,