“Why are there two companies?” she asked, and I had no answer.

She copied the first company name onto a sheet of paper and searched the address beside it, and the address belonged to an office building in another country where the suite number did not appear in the building’s own directory.

She circled it.

“That’s strange.” “Yes.”

She searched Chad’s name with the second company, and this time the same photograph — the real one, the face Monique had shown me — appeared beside a different business name entirely.

Then she opened the trade-conference page, where Chad was listed as a speaker on a date six months before the company he claimed to run had supposedly been founded.