The thing about building a convincing lie is that it requires more research than the truth ever did.
I knew this already, in the abstract, the way you know things you’ve never had to use.
What I hadn’t appreciated, until I was three hours into constructing a fictional suspect for a manhunt aimed at myself, was how much actual, legitimate analytical work goes into a good decoy.
You can’t just point at someone and say probably him.
You have to build a case.
You have to make the case feel like it cost you something to find.
So I built one.
His name, in my head, was nobody real, which mattered enormously, because the one rule I gave myself before I started was that I would not let an actual human being take the fall for being mistakenly suspected of being me.
I found, instead, a small, mostly-dormant blog — a guy who’d posted maybe thirty times over six years about minor grievances, coffee, the occasional book review, before going silent eighteen months ago, the kind of internet ghost town nobody checks anymore.
I cross-referenced his posting times against Red’s.
I noted, with the specific satisfaction of a man committing fraud against his own employer, that they overlapped in a handful of plausible windows.
I built a slide.
I titled the slide Preliminary Pattern Analysis — Candidate A, because Candidate A sounded like the kind of thing a serious person would write, and serious people, in my experience, got believed faster than nervous ones.
“You’ve been weirdly productive today,” Wren said, drifting past my desk around two, glancing at the screen before I had a chance to angle it away.
“Is that a — wait, are you actually doing the Red thing?”
“Fenrir wants a progress update by end of day.”
“Already? It’s been one day.”
“He didn’t strike me as a man who measures progress in business-appropriate increments.”
She leaned over my shoulder, reading, and for a second my whole chest went tight, the specific tight of a person watching someone read evidence assembled against them, even though — especially though — the evidence was fake.
“Huh,” she said.
“This is actually kind of good detective work.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean it as an insult. You’re better at this than is comforting.”
“I have no idea what to do with that.”
“Neither do I,” she said, and wandered off toward the printer, and I sat there for a second with my heart doing something irregular, wondering exactly how many more times this week I was going to have to sit very still and let somebody almost see something.
Dru materialized around three, the way she always did, appearing at the edge of my desk with no audible footsteps, like the building itself had decided to grow her there specifically to make my afternoon worse.
“I heard you found something,” she said.
“I heard things too. Most of them weren’t true.”
“Fenrir mentioned it in the four o’clock leadership sync. Said his digital guy was ‘making real headway.'” She said his digital guy with a specific weight, like the possessive pronoun was the part she actually wanted to discuss.
“Funny, since two days ago you didn’t even know who Red was.”
“I knew who Red was. Everyone knows who Red is. Knowing isn’t the same as being able to find him.”
“And now you can.”
“I can build a hypothesis. There’s a difference between a hypothesis and a name.”
She looked at my screen, which I’d had the sense to minimize the second I’d heard her coming, a reflex I was getting uncomfortably good at.
“You’re very protective of your work for someone who claims it’s thin.”
“I’m protective of my job. Fenrir’s specific about wanting things kept quiet until they’re confirmed. You’d know that if he ever called you in to discuss something that wasn’t a calendar conflict.”
It came out sharper than I meant it to, and for half a second something flickered across her face that wasn’t the usual brittle hostility, something closer to actual hurt, gone again before I could feel properly bad about it.
“Careful,” she said, recovering, voice gone bright and flat again.
“He likes competent. He doesn’t like cute. Don’t confuse which one he’s currently rewarding you for.” And then she was gone, the way she always was, leaving behind the specific unsettled feeling of having won an exchange I hadn’t wanted to be in to begin with.
Fenrir’s office at five o’clock had different light in it than it did at eleven in the morning, gold instead of gray, the river outside gone the color of a bruise healing, and I noticed this specifically because I’d had an entire day to think about very little else besides the architecture of his office, which told me something about the state of my own head that I wasn’t eager to examine.
He read the slide twice.
Properly twice, not the performative kind of twice people do when they want you to think they’re being thorough.
He had a way of going still when he was actually concentrating, a stillness that had nothing in common with the controlled, simmering stillness he had during meetings he found tedious, and I’d apparently catalogued the difference between the two without meaning to, which was either a professional skill or a personal problem, depending on how generous you wanted to be with me.
“Posting overlap, geographic indicators from a since-deleted tagged photo, syntax similarities in how he structures lists,” Fenrir read, mostly to himself.
“This is thin.”
“It’s preliminary.”
“It’s thin and you know it’s thin, because you wrote preliminary on it like a man covering himself in advance.” He looked up.
The Fenrir Line was doing its thing again, but softer this time, more curious than annoyed, which was somehow more unsettling.
“You’re good at this. Faster than I expected.”
“I told you I run digital strategy. I’m not bad at finding patterns in data, even if the data’s noisy.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He sat back, considering me in the specific way that made me feel, every single time, like I was being read instead of looked at.
“You built a whole profile in a day on a man who’s spent years actively designing himself to not be profiled. That’s not just competence. That’s instinct. You think like he thinks.”
The room got very quiet, in the way rooms get quiet right before you say something you’ll regret, or right before someone else does.
“I’ve read a lot of his stuff,” I said.
“Cover trends. Office culture. I’m targeting the same kind of voice in my head, looking for who else might sound like that.”
“Mm,” Fenrir said, which from him was either total agreement or total disbelief, and I genuinely could not tell which, and the not-knowing sat in my stomach like a stone the rest of the conversation.
“This isn’t enough for Friday,” he said, finally, sliding the laptop back toward me.
“But it’s a start. I want you digging deeper into the geographic angle. If he’s local — and I think he’s local, the references to the river, the weather complaints in March, they’re too specific to be generic — that narrows the field considerably.”
The weather complaints in March.
I remembered writing those.
I remembered the exact night, an ice storm that had taken out power in half my building, and I’d written four hundred furious words about municipal infrastructure by the light of my phone, and apparently a man across town had read it closely enough to file it as evidence three months later.
“I’ll dig deeper,” I said, and meant it in the sense that I would absolutely produce more slides, and absolutely none of them would lead anywhere true.
“Good.” He paused at the door as I gathered my things, which I’d learned by now was a tell of its own, the pause before he said something that mattered more than the conversation that came before it.
“Come to the house tomorrow night. We’ll go over what you’ve got somewhere I can actually think without forty people walking past the glass.”
“The house,” I repeated, like I hadn’t understood the words, even though I had.
“Seven.
Norwood will let you in.” And then, like an afterthought, except nothing Fenrir said ever really sounded like an afterthought: “Don’t wear anything you’d mind getting roses on.
He’s got a garden situation going on out front that I haven’t had the heart to stop him hiring people for.”
“Norwood gardens?”
“Norwood does everything. It’s deeply inconvenient for the rest of us, having one person be that competent.” And then he was gone, down the hall, leaving me standing in his doorway with a laptop full of lies and an invitation to his house that had landed somewhere in my chest with significantly more weight than a work meeting had any right to.
I told Beck and Wren about the house thing over the kind of drinks you have specifically because you need to tell two people about something and can’t bring yourself to do it sober.
“He invited you to his house,” Wren said, with the precise emphasis of someone setting a trap and waiting for me to step in it.
“To go over the investigation. It’s a work thing.”
“Sure,” Beck said.
“Work things happen at houses all the time. Very normal. Very standard practice.”
“You’re both being insufferable.”
“We’re being accurate,” Wren said.
“Fenrir Grey does not invite people to his house. I’ve worked here three years longer than you and I have personally never once heard of anyone going to his house. Not for drinks, not for a holiday thing, nothing. Lark’s been there because she’s his stepsister and even she says it’s like visiting a museum with one extremely judgmental butler.”
“Norwood’s not judgmental. He’s just thorough.”
“How do you know that.”
“Fenrir’s mentioned him before,” I said, which was, again, technically true, in the sense that you could call one slightly awkward sentence at a holiday party two years ago “mentioning.”
“You’re acting weird about this,” Beck said, not unkindly, in the same observational way he’d noticed I wasn’t moving fast enough to start the investigation.
“Weirder than the Red thing weird. Different flavor of weird.”
I didn’t have a good answer for that, because I didn’t have a good name yet for the flavor myself.
It wasn’t dread, exactly, the way the Red assignment was dread.
It was something closer to standing at the top of a staircase in the dark, fairly sure there were stairs there, not entirely sure how many, committed anyway, for reasons that had stopped being about my job sometime around the second mention of his house and hadn’t quite found their way back yet.
“Maybe he’s lonely,” Wren said, in the breezy, unbothered tone she used for theories she hadn’t fully committed to yet.
“Big house, judgmental butler, no holiday parties. Maybe he just wants someone to eat dinner in a room that isn’t a glass box.”
“It’s not dinner. It’s a meeting.”
“At seven, at his house, with a warning about roses.” She counted the points off on her fingers like she was building her own slide deck.
“Clancy. That’s not a meeting. That’s a date with a deliverable attached so neither of you has to call it what it is.”
“He’s my boss.”
“I’m aware. I’m just saying the math doesn’t math.” She took a sip of her drink, entirely too pleased with herself.
“You’re allowed to just say you’re nervous, by the way. Nobody’s going to write it up.”
“I’m not nervous. I’m professionally apprehensive.”
“Sure,” Beck said.
“That’s a totally different feeling. Very distinct from nervous.”
I let them have it, mostly because arguing further would have required admitting which parts of their teasing had landed somewhere true, and I’d already spent the whole day protecting one secret.
I didn’t have the bandwidth to start defending myself against a second one I hadn’t even fully named yet.
I almost didn’t go home that night without writing something.
I sat with the laptop open for twenty minutes, the cursor blinking, the day replaying — Fenrir’s stillness, you think like he thinks, the river going the color of a bruise healing, don’t wear anything you’d mind getting roses on — and every single draft I started came out sounding less like Red and more like a man trying very hard not to write about one specific person, which was its own kind of tell, the kind I couldn’t afford to publish to two billion strangers.
I closed the laptop instead.
I lay in the dark and thought, with a clarity that arrived too late to be useful, that I had spent the entire day constructing an elaborate fictional decoy to protect a secret from a man who’d just invited me into his actual house, and that somewhere in the last forty-eight hours the most dangerous part of this whole situation had quietly stopped being the internet, and started being him.
I thought about Dru’s voice, he likes competent, he doesn’t like cute, and how much it had bothered me, and how little sense that should have made, given that I had no stake whatsoever in what Fenrir Grey liked, professionally or otherwise, beyond keeping my job long enough to make rent.
I thought about roses, and which jacket I owned that I wouldn’t mind ruining, and how strange it was that I’d already started thinking about tomorrow night like it was an outfit problem and not a professional obligation, and I fell asleep somewhere in the middle of deciding I didn’t actually own a jacket I’d mind ruining at all, which felt, even half-conscious, like it meant something I wasn’t ready to look at directly.