PART THREE THE HUNT
Caleb had a friend. Wyatt. Wyatt was a computer science major with a side business and no interest in questions. Wyatt could find people. Caleb could not pay him. Wyatt said he would owe him a favor, a big one, to be named later. Caleb agreed.
He gave Wyatt everything. The phone number. The email. The username. The photos Maren had sent. The voice memo.
Wyatt started with the photos. He ran them through reverse image search.
Google Lens first, then TinEye, then Yandex, which was better at faces.
The results came back in twenty minutes.
The photos were not of a woman named Maren Cole.
They were of a woman named Maren Delgado.
They had been lifted from a public Facebook and Instagram.
The oldest one was three years old. The newest was two weeks old.
Wyatt showed Caleb. He said the photos were stolen. He said that meant Maren Cole was probably not a woman at all, or not the woman in the photos. He said someone had taken this real person’s pictures and built a fake person out of them.
Caleb looked at the screen. The real woman, Maren Delgado, lived in Albuquerque. She was married. She had two kids. Her Facebook was full of them.
Caleb said: that’s her. That’s the woman I’ve been talking to.
Wyatt said: it might not be. The photos being stolen means it might be anyone. Could be a guy.
Caleb did not hear him. Or he heard him and put it in a drawer and shut it.
He had spent four months in love with a voice and a face.
He needed the face to be real. He needed there to be a woman at the end of it.
He said: she used a fake last name. She’s married.
She’s been hiding it from me. That’s why she stood me up.
Wyatt looked at him. He said: maybe.
Caleb said: find her.
Wyatt traced the phone number first. It was a VoIP number, routed through an app, registered to a burner email. The email headers from Maren’s messages pointed to an IP address. Wyatt pulled the geolocation. It resolved to Denton, Texas, to a block of student housing near the university.
Then Wyatt ran the username. Maren Cole had reused a username on a hobby forum three years ago.
That account was tied to an old email. The email was in a breach database.
The password was in the breach database.
Wyatt did not need the password. He needed the recovery phone, which was in the breach file too.
A real number. A real name. Devin Crowe.
North Central Texas State. Apartment 4C, the Harlowe complex.
Wyatt handed Caleb a printout. He said: the person you talked to is almost certainly a twenty-two-year-old man named Devin Crowe. The woman in the photos had nothing to do with it. Do not do anything stupid.
Caleb took the printout. He said: thank you.
He did not hear the warning either.
Caleb also searched for the accident. He spent weeks on it.
He pulled the Denton police blotter for Valentine’s Day.
He searched the local paper. He searched the county hospital incident logs.
He searched Google News for car accidents in Denton that night.
There was one. A fender bender on I-35. No injuries. No woman named Maren.
There had been no accident. There had never been an accident. Caleb read this fact and felt the floor tilt. He sat with it. He got up. He went back to the printout.
He told himself a story he could live with: Maren Delgado was real.
She was the woman in the photos. She had used Devin, or someone, to talk to him, maybe out of shame, maybe because she was married and afraid.
She had panicked on Valentine’s Day and faked the accident to get out of it.
She was hiding. He would find her. He would make her tell him why.
It was not true. He knew it was not true. He chose it anyway, because the alternative was that the only person who had ever loved him was a lie, and he could not stand in that.