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“Sylvie Sullivan,” I supplied, watching him start to type, then immediately bring up her social media. At that, he let out a snort, and shot a smirk over his shoulder at me.
“Just guilt, huh?” he asked, shaking his head.
“Plenty of hot chicks in Navesink Bank,” I said, trying to play it off.
“And yet she’s the one staying in your bed at the clubhouse,” he said, fucking around for a minute, then suddenly, her whole profile opened up.
“The fuck?” I asked, moving closer.
“I hacked it and got in. No other way to read her messages,” he said, shrugging off the massive invasion of privacy. “Spare me the faux outrage,” he said, not even bothering to look up. “The most fundamental principle about people is… they lie. All of them. Even the very pretty ones who are in a dire situation.”
“You could just ask,” I suggested.
Granted, I didn’t have social media. And my text history was boring as shit too. But for people who had bigger online lives or more communication with friends, I imagine the idea of a stranger reading those private interactions was enough to make them panic.
“Relax,” Junior said, shrugging. “I’m not looking to see how hard she tells her friends she wants to be fucked,” he told me. “I’m looking for guys who keep messaging her even when she doesn’t respond. Who she’s blocked. And maybe some buzzwords in her DMs about creepy guys or exes who don’t want to accept it’s over. That kind of shit.”
“Then why the fuck are you looking at her pictures?” I asked as he clicked through them, making her gorgeous, undamaged, face pop up.
There she was, smiling at what looked like a Christmas party at her work. Lying on a tattoo table, getting something inked into her thigh. Popping out of the window of a big rig.
“Looking for fuckers gushing about her in the comments,” he said. Yeah, well, that made sense. And I wasn’t exactly upset about getting to see the unbeaten face of Sylvie for a few moments.
“And?” I asked when the pictures went away, and he was in the messages.
“And she has her profile locked down pretty tight,” he told me. “So there’s not a lot of ways for random creeps to comment. It looked mostly like casual acquaintances, but none of it recent. She doesn’t update much.”
“She works a lot.”
“That tracks,” he said, scanning through her messages. “Not much going on here. Some chicks who it seems like she barely even knew dropping in to try to get her to buy their MLM stuff. Someone asking if she was still working at the sober house…”
“No friends?” I asked.
“Eh, seems like maybe an acquaintance or two,” he said, closing out of her messages and going back to her page, then scrolling. “She posts about fundraisers for the halfway house a lot. The occasional post about addiction statistics. Oh, okay. Here’s some traction. She lost her old man a while back. Lots of condolences.”
“Anything to note?”
“Ah, I’m gathering she has no friends because she traveled with her old man a lot as a kid.”
“Traveled? Was he military?”
“Trucker, seems. Lot of He was a good man and He had a good heart. This might be why she works at the halfway house,” he said, pointing to another condolence.
He might have had his demons, but he would be so proud of you for devoting your life to helping others fight them. Sorry his got him in the end. I’m a message away if you need anything.
“Is she friends with anyone?” I asked.
“Yeah. I mean… seems a lot like… maybe people she knew for short periods of time. But there’s a lot of men here,” he said, pulling up her friends list.
I saw Russ, the guy she worked with at the sober house. But other than that, yeah, it was a lot of random dudes.
“Maybe former residents there,” he said, since they were all of too varied ages to have been exes. “Or other truckers she knew growing up. These two also seem to work at the house,” he said, pointing to the pictures of two other men. They were somewhere in their thirties or forties. One married, one not.
“I’ll do quick profiles on anyone who is in the area. Especially the coworkers,” he offered. “It would help if she gave us a list of exes, though, since she scrubbed her social media clean of them, if they were ever on here to begin with.”
“I appreciate it,” I said.
“You’re paying for it,” he said with a shrug. “Once I get the profiles, we can set a time for checking out her place. And I might need to talk to her about some of these fucks once I know more about them.”
“That should be fine. She was pretty upset about the lizard. Figure she wants to find him as soon as possible. What?” I asked, seeing his gears turning.
