I shrug. “I’m only about fifty pages in, but I like it so far.”
As he reads the cover flap, I reach over, finger-brushing the hair at his temple. “How was the rest of the event?”
“Good. Photo ops.” He sets the book down and reaches up, massaging his cheeks.
“Lots of smiling?”
He laughs, nodding, and shifts so that he’s lying with his head in my lap. Alec stares up at me. “I’m so glad you agreed,” he says finally. I watch as he takes a deep breath and gives it ten beats to fully exit his body.
“Me too.” Seeing my presence as a relief to him is a bit like drinking champagne. I tingle all over.
“I don’t think I realized how badly I wanted you here until I saw you.”
“Well,” I say, bending to kiss his forehead, “I’m glad.”
“Will you be able to work here?”
I nod. “It’ll be quieter here than it would be at my place. This week is going to be nuts, so I can work while you’re out being England’s heartthrob.”
“Oh.” This piques his interest. “What’s going on?”
“Billy is all in,” I say. “He anticipated this blowing up and brought in our London correspondent to do the heavy lifting on the follow-ups, which means a shared byline, but I honestly couldn’t do it from here anyway. This guy, Ian, usually covers the politics desk, so he’s great. He went back and looked into guest logs and video footage and discovered what I actually knew already, which is that there is no record of who came into or left the club on the nights we know the chat-room videos were recorded. Or the night you went to get Sunny.”
Alec frowns. “Really?”
“Those records have been ‘misplaced,’?” I say with implied air quotes. “However”—I hold up my index finger, and grin proudly—“there is a hotel next door to the club, the Hotel Maxson. Well, the parking lot where nonhotel guests tend to park to access the club is not attached to the hotel. It’s a separate structure that is closer to the outdoor entrance of Jupiter. And the company that manages security there is independent of the club security, which you probably remember is run by the father of one of the owners. Turns out this other security outfit keeps footage for six months, and no one has bothered asking them for it.”
Sitting up, Alec turns to face me. His voice is quiet, but every letter is enunciated: “What does that mean, specifically?”
“It means that although we don’t have a guest log for Jupiter for the dates corresponding to the videos, Ian was able to get the footage from the parking lot that most club guests use to park their personal vehicles. It isn’t ideal—obviously, video of everyone entering or leaving the club itself would be better for time-stamp purposes, but if Josef—or any of the other owners or affiliated VIPs—parked in this structure, we’ll get a record of the dates and times they could feasibly have been inside the club.”
“This is great,” he breathes.
“And,” I add, beaming, “although things are sketchy with the club surveillance, the Hotel Maxson is cooperating so we can cross-reference their lobby footage with the parking structure surveillance footage so, for example, if we see Josef parking in the lot but do not see him in the Maxson, he can’t simply say he was visiting the hotel bar.”
“How many hours of footage is there to go through?”
I laugh. “So many hours.” Finger-combing his hair again, I say, “Welcome to journalism. But it helps that we have a number of dates to start with, and Ian has a few interns working on those. They’ll send us possible segments to review tomorrow and cross-check against names. I’m only going to be support from here on out so I can more quietly focus on the Josef Anders of it all.”
He looks up at me and nods. I know without having to ask what this means to him, that I can help like this. “So you’re done working for the night?”
“I am done working for the night.”
He sits up and reaches for me, coaxing me over into his lap so I’m straddling him. “Are you hungry?”
“Well, now I am.”
“Food hunger,” he says, laughing. “Since the coffee at your place this morning I’ve only had half a muffin. I could eat everything in the minibar right now.”
“Room service?”
“Read my mind.” Alec reaches past me to feel for the menu on the coffee table. Bringing it between us, he turns it to the side so that we can read it together, but I go in for his neck.
“Pick something salad-y for me,” I say.
“Like a Caesar or like… a grilled veggie platter with brown rice?”
“Yes. That.”