The Match (Wilde, #2)(27)

When Wilde hit the edge of the woods, he called Rola. It was early, but he figured that she’d be up or have her phone off. She answered on the first ring. He could hear the cacophony of morning breakfast with five kids in the background.

“What’s up?” Rola asked.

He filled her in on what Matthew had told him about Peter Bennett.

“When you say he’s missing,” she began.

“I don’t know. I need to do some research too.”

“Well, we have his name now. That should be enough. I’ll run his credit cards, phone bills, the usual. I’m sure it won’t be that hard to track him down.”

“Okay.”

“We also got a new guy at CRAW named Tony, who is good at family tree stuff.”

“Why would a security firm need ‘family tree stuff’?”

“You think you’re the only person looking for a biological parent?”

“Kids from closed adoptions?”

“Less and less. What happens is, a lot of people sign up for one of the DNA sites, mostly for the fun of it. To learn their ancestry or whatever. Ends up, they learn that their father—mostly it’s the father, though it can be the mother or both parents—isn’t really their father. Blows families apart.”

“I can imagine.”

“A lot of times, the father doesn’t even know. He thought the kid was his and he raised them and now when the kid is grown up—twenty, thirty, forty years old—he finds out his wife slept with someone else and his whole life is a lie.”

“That must get unpleasant.”

“You have no idea. Anyway, I’ll get Tony to start working up a genealogical breakdown on Peter Bennett. Someone on it may connect to you.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll call you back when I have something,” she said before disconnecting.

Wilde retrieved his charged laptop from the Ecocapsule and found a spot two miles away where he could hook up to the internet without any chance of being tracked. He Googled “Peter Bennett” and “PB&J.” The sheer amount of hits overwhelmed him. Love Is a Battlefield had fathered thousands if not millions of fan pages, social media hits, podcasts, Reddit boards, whatever.

Peter Bennett.

Wilde stared at a few of the many, many images online of his cousin’s face. Did Wilde see some resemblance between his own face and Bennett’s? He did. Or he thought he did. It could be projection or want, but the darker skin tone, the hooded eyes, the shape of the mouth…something was there. Peter Bennett’s Instagram had 2.8 million followers. Wilde assumed that was a lot. There were over three thousand posts. Wilde scanned through them. Most featured a smiling Peter Bennett with a glowing Jenn Cassidy, the photographs’ composition signaling that these two were in love and rich and, for many, probably crossed the line between aspirational and envy-inducing. Wilde clicked on Jenn Cassidy’s profile link and saw that she had 6.3 million followers.

Interesting. Do women reality stars just have more fans?

He headed back to Peter Bennett’s page for a deeper dive. Bennett’s profile image featured him shirtless. His chest was waxed smooth. His stomach had the kind of chiseled six-pack that screamed show (as opposed to strength) muscles. For a couple of years, Peter Bennett had posted at least one photograph a day—him and Jenn on vacation in the Maldives, attending openings and premieres, trying on designer clothes, making extravagant meals, working out, dining in fancy restaurants, dancing in the clubs. But the posts had slowed down over the last year or so, petering out until the final one, four months ago, was a view of a large cliff with a cascading waterfall. The location was listed as the Adiona Cliffs in French Polynesia. The caption read:

I just want peace.





That was the exact same wording used in PB’s desperate message. Little doubt now—Peter Bennett was PB.

Wilde clicked on that final posting and read the comments:

Jump already!

Buh, bye!

Can’t wait for you to die.

Hope you land on a hard rock and survive in agony and then an animal comes along and starts eating your skin and then fire ants crawl up your rectum and…

Wilde sat back. What the hell…?

He skipped back. Bennett’s photos over the previous few months were solo shots. No Jenn. Wilde traveled back. The last shot with the #PB&J hashtag featuring both of them was dated May 18. The #DreamCouple, as the frequent hashtag described them, sat in matching beach chairs in Cancun, both holding a frozen margarita in one hand and a bottle from a major tequila label in the other. Sponsorships, Wilde realized. Pretty much every photograph doubled as a paid advertisement.

After that last photo of the beautiful couple, no new post appeared on Bennett’s page for three weeks—a lifetime, it seemed, in this social media world. Then there was a plain graphic with a quote inside of it:

Don’t be so quick to believe

what you hear,

because lies spread quicker

than the truth.

The total likes on his last picture with Jenn in Cancun? 187,454.

Total likes for this quote? 743.

Wilde spent the next two hours finding out as much as he could online about his possible cousin. Wilde read boards, social media, and the cesspool of all cesspools, the comments. It all made Wilde want to shower and vanish even deeper into the woods.