4

For four days, Amalia Suarez is exactly where she’s supposed to be at any given time. She goes to work at Building 93 of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where Vroom is located – from her route, as well as the speed at which she travels and how it doesn’t deviate across elevations, I’d guess she’s commuting by e-scooter. Afterward she’s off to one engagement or another, all consistent with the schedule Mason has given us for her: coed soccer league game, dinner with Mason and another couple, trivia night at her local bar in Crown Heights, date with Mason. Just watching this level of activity makes me feel like taking a nap on the couch.

Mason has requested that we provide a daily accounting of Amalia’s whereabouts the next time he comes in to Veracity for an update, which seems a tad stalker-ish to me, although I guess I’m not really in a position to comment. When we asked why, he dimpled at us and said that since he was going through all the trouble of getting this verification done, he might as well have it be comprehensive. ‘I mean, assuming it’s something you can do?’

‘Of course,’ said Becks, and then quoted him a supplemental price that made my eye twitch. Mason simply looked pleased.

‘Not a problem,’ he said. ‘You have to pay for quality service, I know that.’

Just as well he doesn’t know how easy it actually is for us to deliver this quality service. All I have to do is pull up the Finders Keepers app a couple of times a day, see where Amalia currently is and has been in the last several hours, and log that in my spreadsheet.

Finders Keepers. That’s the one tool we use as verifiers that gives me the sensation of stepping from tolerably squishy moral ground into what could very well be a patch of quicksand. It’s a geolocation-tracking app: if we have someone’s phone number and they keep their GPS function on – which everyone does, because then your Lyft driver can find you, and you can get accurate directions on Google Maps, and for a thousand other reasons – we can see where they are. I used to believe what Komla told me, which was that we technically had our targets’ consent. Users on dating platforms agreed to share their locations via phone GPS with the matchmakers, in order to improve matching results, and the matchmakers in turn had an arrangement to sell that data to third parties like Veracity. Then I found out nobody knew what the hell we were doing. For now, I’m dealing by not thinking about it, which I’ve heard is the adult way to handle things that make you uncomfortable.

On the fifth day, over the weekend, Amalia vanishes.

I first notice late Saturday morning, after my usual pickup game of Ultimate in Prospect Park. Our side wins, thanks in part to a dive-across-the-grass intercept by yours truly, and so I’m equal parts filthy and triumphant when I pull on my hoodie and take out my phone and do a quick Finders Keepers check on the two targets I’m currently observing. The first is at his parents’ house in Westchester; Amalia is MIA. When I look at her location history, I see that Finders Keepers last recorded her at her home, at 8:39 am. She probably forgot to charge her phone after she got home last night – she was out until 3:00 amat a warehouse party in Bushwick – it died, and she’s still asleep.

Seven hours later, she still hasn’t popped back up on Finders Keepers.

I consider the options. Her phone suffered a more permanent death. Or she could, for whatever reason, be choosing to leave it off. Maybe she’s embarked on a digital cleanse? That would be commendable of her, but it’s going to leave a sizable gap in my spreadsheet of Amalia Suarez’s whereabouts – and I hate the thought of having to tell Mason Perry that it turned out keeping track of his girlfriend was something we couldn’t do after all.

I pace up and down in my living room, in the hope that movement will activate my little gray cells. InInspector Yuan and the Sichuan Seven, one of the prime suspects is abian lianopera artist, a face-changer who switches through hundreds of masks in the course of his performances. The inspector has no idea of the actor’s true appearance, not until he sends Constable Zhang to follow the suspect’s mother during the Qing Ming Festival and note the man who shows up to help her sweep the ancestral grave. (Of course, the fact that this suspect exhibits such filial piety is a clue to the reader that he cannot be the vicious killer.)

Mason told us he and Amalia would be spending all of Saturday together, and we haven’t received any updates to the contrary. So: if I find him, I should be able to find her.

When I enter in Mason’s number, he shows up just south of Union Sq