The following morning...

Ross stretched and yawned lazily, the sun in his eyes. What time was it? Where-

He sat bolt upright as the events of the previous night rushed back to him. He jumped up and darted into the living room to find Madison at the dining table, perched over a laptop.

"Morning! I made coffee. Do-"

"What the fuck are we still doing here?" he demanded. "We gotta get out of here now! Chambers' ex-wife could be leading the cops here right now!" He looked through the blinds at the street outside. "Shit, they could pull up any second!"

"I've got some good news about that," Madison said. "Come. Sit. I've been doing research while you were asleep."

Ross, out of breath from his panic attack and slightly light-headed, sat down beside her. She had browser with a number of tabs open.

"First things first," she said. "I found her facebook profile. It says she currently lives in Portland, Maine. That's over eight hundred miles away."

"She could easily drive or fly-"

"This video is from last night," Madison said, and pulled up a low-res phone video of a bar. On stage, a band was blasting out a country tune while drunks tried to talk over the music. She paused it and pointed to a woman in the back playing a guitar solo. "That's Patricia Chambers."

"So maybe she went home," Ross said with relief. "Maybe she gave up after all."

"Maybe," Madison said patiently. "But she posts a lot, and it doesn't look like she's been outside of Maine in months. It could all be fake, of course, but why bother faking it? Especially if you're going to go snooping around in a different city using your real name?"

"So, what, do you think Lauren was wrong?" Ross said. "Did she mishear?"

"I don't think so. We have pretty good hearing, you know. There's another possibility here, though. What if the woman asking around..."

"...isn't actually Patricia Chambers?" Ross finished. "But why would someone pretend to be her? And does this mean she's still out there gathering data?"

Madison shrugged at this. "Maybe she's doing it to get access to the professors? They divorced ten years ago, so I doubt any of the professors know or remember what she looks like. Maybe this woman was just claiming to be his wife to get more information."

"But why? Why would someone do all this?" Ross said. His voice was high and reedy, full of tension. "So we're not any better off, really."

"We're much better off," Madison said. "We know that this woman is claiming to be someone she's not. That's going to hurt her credibility if she wants to go to the police. I also found this."

She changed tabs and Ross was now looking at a credit report on Dr. Chambers. "Our friend Dr. Chambers was up to his eyeballs in debt, Ross. He owed a lot of money to a lot of people, and I'm guessing some of them aren't too scrupulous to hire a PR firm or do a little snooping around."

"Banks don't pretend to be your ex-wife!" he said.

"No, but off-script golem techs do. You know how much some of that off-script stuff goes for, Ross. Why would a guy like Chambers let them foreclose on his house when he could make seventy grand in an afternoon writing scripts for the black market?"

"Great," Ross groaned. "So it's not a vengeful wife that's after us. Just a criminal organization."

"Maybe," Madison said. "That's a theory. The point is, we don't know what we're dealing with here, but we're gonna find out."

Suddenly her phone buzzed on the table. She glanced at it and frowned. "That's Andrew," she said. "Why's he texting me?"

She picked it up and her eyes widened when she read the text. She held it up and Ross's breath caught in his throat when he saw what was on the screen.

we have a problem. it's about chambers. can't talk, very urgent. 1408 pygmalion ln. lmk your eta