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“There is something a little off about him,” he said. “And he didn’t tell us much about himself.”
“To be fair, we didn’t tell him much about us,” Slade pointed out. “But he is awfully smooth for a guy who’s just out of college. We don’t run into many people around our age who’ve got that much confidence.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We need to know who we—and Maddie—are actually dealing with. Ifhe’shiding anything, it’s better that we find it out sooner rather than later.”
Slade rubbed his hands together, not showing any sign of fatigue despite the late hour. “Let’s get started then. We never got a last name, did we?”
“No. But Beckett isn’t that common a first name. Between that and knowing he’s got a significant family business that involves real estate, I should be able to track some stuff down.”
I grabbed my laptop and dropped onto the sofa between my friends. Slade sat down to watch my search while Dexter pulled out his phone. “I snapped a few photos of him. I’ll see if there are any distinctive details I didn’t notice in person that we should follow up on.”
It only took a couple of minutes for me to find the first reference to a Beckett I assumed was the one we’d met this afternoon. His last name was apparently Alderman. With that additional information, I quickly dug up a couple of social media profiles. The blond guy with the slick smile who’d walked into the Vigil office like he owned the place gazed back at me from the profile photo.
“Jackpot!” Slade said. “What’s he been up to?”
We both peered at the screen as I scrolled down through the profiles, but they were sparse, nothing but a few photos of Beckett around the city and innocuous posts about a café or a restaurant he liked. The business information I uncovered connected the company he appeared to work for to some real estate acquisitions, like Maddie had said, but when I looked up those buildings, I couldn’t see anything unusual about them. The only unusual thing was that this guy had his life so together at twenty-three, and maybe that was a different kind of jealousy talking.
“He’s got a strangely small internet footprint in general, doesn’t he?” Slade said, though I could hear his enthusiasm for the search was dwindling. “Usually you’d find all kinds of photos and references for an ordinary guy.”
I sighed. “He’s not totally ordinary, though. Maddie said he’s in a family business, so he’s probably been coached to keep a low public profile so that nothing he gets into on his personal time can interfere with his professional life. It makes our job harder, but there’s nothing all that odd about it in general.”
“His clothes appear to be expensive brands, but I’m not getting much else from the pictures.” Dexter flicked through to more of his albums, but at this point checking any other photos he’d taken seemed like grasping at straws. “I wonder how he and Maddie happened to meet?”
Slade cocked his head. “She said they just bumped into each other downtown, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” My teeth gritted all over again at the memory of that guy with his hands all over her. Making her moan. Urging her to beg him for release.
My frustration must have shown on my face. Dexter glanced up from his phone and hesitated. “Maybe there isn’t any reason to be worried about him. But… you’ve been into Maddie for a long time. Are you really okay withanyof the rest of us being involved with her?”
The tentativeness with which he asked the question made me flinch inwardly. He sounded almost… afraid of how I’d respond to him, as if he thought I might be angry with him.
I should never have made him feel like he had to even ask that question, like I might try to bully him out of pursuing Maddie if she was interested in him too. Dexter had barely even dated before—why shouldn’t he have just as much of a shot as anyone?
Hell, both he and Slade had treated Maddie way better than I had in the past month. If anything, they both deserved a chance with her more than I did, no matter how long she’d been on my mind.
“It’s up to Maddie who she dates, not me,” I said. “You know she’d have my head if she thought I was trying to lay claim on her. Shedoesn’tbelong to me. I’m totally aware of that fact.” Even if part of me wished that she did. I took a deep breath. “We’ll just see how it goes. And if she ends up wanting just one of us in the end and it’s not me, it’ll be my own damn fault. I won’t resent either of you, no matter what happens. I swear it.”
When it came to Beckett, I couldn’t make the same promise, but I didn’t really care how he felt about any of this anyway.
A faint smile touched Dexter’s lips that both reassured me that I’d said the right thing and sent another jab of guilt through me that he’d needed my confirmation.
I threw myself back into looking for an excuse to drive off the one guy I didn’t have any loyalty to, which I could admit at least to myself was what this continuing search amounted to now. With the late hour and the emotional strain I’d already gone through tonight, the lines of text on the screen were starting to blur before my eyes.
I shook myself back into alertness and got to work hacking into one of Beckett’s social media profiles in case he had private photos or messages that might tell a different story. But when I cracked in, it turned out there was nothing I hadn’t seen already. It didn’t appear that he used the messaging function there to communicate with anyone. He hadn’t posted anything that wasn’t publicly viewable.
As I scowled at the screen, Dexter let out a startled sound. “Look at this.” He shoved his phone toward Slade and me.
It took me a moment to figure out what I was seeing. The photo on the phone was from the club where we’d gone with Maddie a few times. I could see her with Slade at the edge of the image—Dexter had been taking his usual surveillance photos for future reference, not focusing on any specific part of the club, just documenting all of it.
“What about it?” Slade asked, looking equally puzzled.
Dexter took the phone back for just a second to zoom in on the opposite side of the image. When he showed us again, my pulse stuttered in my veins.
Beckett was standing off to the side of the bar, far enough away that his face was slightly pixelated, but still recognizable. He was talking to someone I couldn’t make out between the mottled club lighting and the crowd around them.
“This was the first night we were there with Maddie?” I clarified, based on the clothes I’d seen her wearing. “Weeks ago?”
Dexter nodded. “I’m not sure if she’d even met him yet at that point. He definitely didn’t come over to talk to any of us while we were there.”
