Page 79 of The Five Year Lie

A few cops, though, have found grosser uses for LiveMatch. One cop has tagged a womanwifey, and he checks her whereabouts several times a day. Hopefully she’s his actual wife. But still. And then there’s a cop with a watch list calledMILFs. Every face on the list is a different brunette captured outside a public school.

The cop checks it every night at ten or eleven p.m. Drew feels sick thinking about why.

The effect is that LiveMatch is equally useful for finding criminals as it is for stalking.

Last evening Drew began composing a letter that he’ll eventually send to a handpicked list of journalists who cover technology and privacy. He’s including screenshots, dates and technical specifications.

But he’s not done yet. He still has to nail Officer Ward for stalking Amina, and for accessing Ernie’s private camera.

That footage could only have landed in the cop’s hands one of two ways—if someone at Chime Co. gave it to him or if he had a judge’s warrant for it.

If it was an inside job, Drew will probably never find it. It would be a proverbial needle in a haystack. And since the camera is already offline, the haystack will have been deleted.

But if the cop used a bogus warrant, Drew can still find it. He’s taken the risky step of downloading all the Chime Co. police warrants for the weeks leading up to Amina’s death.

They aren’t sorted by geography, so he’s had to slog through hundreds of warrants on pdfs from judges all over the country, one by one.

Quietly, he sits up in bed. Sleep isn’t happening. So he swings his legs over the side and reaches for his crutches on the floor.

His small living room is lit by moonlight as he opens his laptop on the sofa. He has about two hundred more warrants to read before he’s finished. But tonight could be the night.

After reading the first twenty-five, he gets up and fetches himself a soda from the fridge. It’s past midnight, and before he settles back in to read, he closes his eyes to listen to the soft sound of Ariel sleeping in the next room.

Every good moment is a gift, Ernie used to say. And he finally understands how true that is.

Opening his eyes, he refocuses on the task at hand. The coldsoda fizzes on his tongue, and he says a silent prayer of thanks to Ernie.Thank you. I’ve got this. I won’t let you down.

With his free hand, Drew opens the next file on his hard drive and double-clicks the document.

As it resolves on the screen, the first words he sees areShawmut Street.

26

ARIEL

I don’t sleep at all the night after I hear from the cemetery. The next morning, I call in sick to work. I text my uncle.

Ariel: Woke up with a sore throat.

The office manager shouldn’t disappear the day after a move. This is not cool.

But I can’t function. Not really. It takes all my energy just to smile my way through the preschool drop-off. After that I climb back into my bed and hug the pillow. And that is where I stay for another hour or two, drifting in and out of sleep.

Drew comes to me in my dreams. He invites me on another picnic in the park. But this time when he opens the cooler, there’s nothing inside it at all. “I can’t stay,” he says. “I have to go. You know that. I warned you.”

I wake up sweating and agitated. It took me years to deal with Drew’s death. I’m not equipped to handle the idea that he might be alive.

Or maybe he’s not. Round and around we go. My uncle had responded within minutes:

Ray: So sorry! You did look tired last night. Get some rest and don’t worry about a thing!

I drag myself out of bed and google the hell out of Fayetteville cemeteries. There are dozens, it seems. But some of them have been shut down for years. And then I hit on the idea of calling a funeral home and asking a helpful person’s opinion of where my friend might have been buried in late 2017.

That narrows down the list quite fast, and I end up making five calls. And each time I reach another cemetery, I brace myself.

“I do apologize, but we do not show an interment for Andrew Miller or Jay Marker during that year or the next.”

That’s what I hear five times in a row.