But what kind of relationship did they have, really, if she couldn’t be honest?
Dani took a deep breath and typed.
Sanfrandani: I was forced to.
She stared at the screen, her heart racing, her hands sweating.
Englishcrumpet: Did someone sign you up like my daughter did with me?
Oh, dear. Dani snuck another look around the office before returning her trembling hands to the keyboard.
Sanfrandani: No, I signed up myself.
Kangagirl:???
Dani felt sick, but the truth had to be said. Er, typed.
Sanfrandani: I’m a spy.
“There’s something you should see.”
Bryce Delaney heard his assistant’s voice, but didn’t glance up from his computer monitor and the database query he was writing. He didn’t have to.
Joelle Chang would be standing two feet from the edge of his walnut-stained desk holding a manila file folder with a pen—blue ink only so she could tell the difference on photocopies—tucked behind her ear. Despite her college-girl long hair and trendy clothes, forty-one-year-old Joelle was dedicated, thorough and one-hundred-percent predictable. Exactly the way he liked things. And people. “I pay you enough to see for me.”
“You said you wanted to be kept in the loop about possible security issues.”
Security. A top priority at his Web site Blinddatebrides.com. Bryce looked up. “Possible or probable?”
Joelle’s almond-shaped eyes grew dark. “Two red flags.”
Damn. He didn’t need this on top of the other problems they’d been dealing with. Scammers, spammers, hackers, marrieds, the list went on.
“It might not mean anything,” she added.
In the last year, there had been a handful of false alarms. “But it could mean we have a troublemaker on board.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. He’d dealt with escorts, cheats, thieves and liars. Had charges brought against them when possible, too.
Bryce wasn’t about to let anyone take advantage of his customers. Too many people pretended to be something they weren’t, both in real life and online. He had experience with that. His sister, too. But she was more trusting than him. That was why he’d started a dating—make that a relationship—Web site: to protect good people like Caitlin.
“What do you have?” he asked.
Joelle handed him a file. “This particular client has been a member of the site for over six months. Everything about her looks good, including her background check.”
“Her?”
“Yes,” Joelle answered. “None of the e-mail filters have picked up anything to suggest she’s an escort.”
Those were usually easy to detect since they asked for money in almost every e-mail.
“But the chat filter picked up something so we did a little investigating,” Joelle said. “The subject spends hours logged on to the site each day, but she has not accepted a date yet, even though her profile has been marked highly compatible with several men.”
Bryce had worked with a psychologist to create an algorithm to match clients based on their interests, backgrounds and personalities. Chats, based on compatibility, were also arranged with groups of well-matched people, too, since many people preferred group interactions to one-on-one. Some clients, though, preferred to peruse the profiles themselves and pick matches that way.
He opened the file and studied the photo of a woman. The messy blond hair piled on top of her head and secured with a—was that a red bandana?—caught his eye first. Not the most appealing hairstyle. The picture itself was far from flattering. She wasn’t smiling or looking at the camera. Shadows obscured what he could see of her face, though she looked flushed unless her skin was always red like that. Her profile stated blue eyes, but he couldn’t distinguish the color, really anything about her. “She’s been matched?”
“Yes. The compatibility program has matched her with seventeen clients so far. Five of those contacted her. Others must have seen something they liked in her profile because they e-mailed her, too. She replied back to each one, but that was it. No additional correspondence. No chat invites. Nothing.”
“At least she’s following the guidelines about replying to others even if you’re not interested in them.”
“Yes.”
He read more in the file. Turning down potential dates wasn’t unusual. Bryce remembered one shy female client in particular, but others in the past had misrepresented themselves. Better to err on the side of caution. “You’ve taken the usual steps?”
Joelle nodded. “Customer service called to discuss her experience so far. She asked as many questions as they did, and they were on the phone for two hours.”
“Two hours?”
Another nod. “I called her myself after that. She came across as highly intelligent and very friendly, but remember that identity thief? Never assume anyone who is nice is also harmless.”
“That’s for sure.” Bryce flipped through the pages in the file. He noticed a familiar zip code. She lived here in San Francisco. Many of the scammers he’d dealt with lived overseas. But this was on his home turf. He could follow the prosecution to the end if she were guilty. “Where does she go on the site?”
“Chat rooms, particularly the Ladies Lounge, and private IM conferences. She spends most of her time exploring the Web site. Not client profiles, but the content itself.”
Most people, whether they wanted to date or not, liked checking out the profiles of people in their area. On some Internet relationship sites that earned revenue through advertising; anyone could register and search profiles for free. Not on Blinddatebrides.com. Only paying members, who’d filled out a detailed questionnaire and agreed to a background check if they lived in the United States, were allowed to search the database, read profiles and contact members.
Joelle continued. “She’s online during normal work hours as well as late at night. Two different IP addresses have been linked to her account name, depending on the time of day.”
Nothing unusual about that. “Work and home.”
“Seems likely, but I don’t know many employers who would encourage their employees to spend that much time each day at a dating site while at work.”
“Unless the boss doesn’t know.” Bryce skimmed the rest of the pages and saw one of the red flags. She’d said she was a spy during a chat. “Or she has an employer who wants her checking us out.”
The online dating world was cutthroat. The competition stole from each other regularly, but pretending to want to meet dates went against the terms of service users agreed to when they joined Blinddatebrides.com. But she hadn’t mentioned anything about her job prior to her saying she was a spy.
“What does she do for a living?” Bryce asked.
“She listed sales as her occupation,” Joelle said.
“That’s too vague, given the list of options she could have chosen.”
“Red flag number three?” Joelle asked.
Bryce nodded. He prided himself on making his Web site a safe and secure place to meet and fall in love. His sister had had her heart broken, as well as her bank account drained, thanks to the “love” she’d found on a competitor’s site. The guy had turned out to be the exact opposite of what he’d claimed to be. No one was going to pull a stunt like that on Bryce’s site, during his watch. “I’ll get right on it.”
Joelle