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a court later heard.

Gonzales signed up for various online dating accounts, presenting the picture of the perfect man. Perfectly groomed at all times, he looked like a hunk from a barber shop poster. His profile photos included tight-vest selfies taken in a gym’s mirror, and portraits with his two sons, whom he dressed in immaculate matching outfits. “I’m very fun, positive, humorous and adventurous. I love sports, music, water sports and traveling, and dining out and try[ing] new things,” his profile read. “Looking for someone to be super adventurous and create a lot of memories and smiles together.” He was against casual flings. “Not my style,” he wrote. “#TooClassy.”

Just days after his date with Marjorie Moon, Gonzales finished a crème brûlée at the Yard House in Long Beach. He held up two fingers, and told Irene Rodriguez that he “had to go number two,” before escaping into the night. “I just sat there dumbfounded,” she recalled, “I was mortified, embarrassed.” In July 2016, Lynise Levine, 52, said Paul had promised her Barbra Streisand tickets, but ditched her at a Mexican restaurant in Westwood.

Two years later, in the spring of 2018, he was still at it, leaving Tina Martinez to pay for his filet mignon at Smitty’s Grill in Pasadena. Even when Gonzales was arrested, for a “snip-and-ditch”—he fled a barber’s shop with the smock still tied around his neck—police found no outstanding warrants. His dates were too ashamed to report his dining misdeeds. Had he created the perfect crime?

On April 13, 2018, Detective Victor Cass was summoned to his sergeant’s office at the Pasadena Police Department. The 49-year-old investigator was handed an anonymous Crime Stoppers report concerning an incident at Buca di Beppo, an Italian chain restaurant in nearby Glendale. An onlooker had noticed a male diner abandon his date, and filled out an online report. Cass is slim, with tidy black hair, and holsters his Glock 9mm beneath sharply-cut designer suits. He specializes in commercial burglary, but unlike most detectives he has a Fine Art degree and leads a double life as a novelist. His romantic thriller, Telenova, was a Latin indie-publishing hit. Colleagues call him “Casanova.”

Cass is also a veteran of online dating. “I was divorced in 2003,” he told me, at an Irish bar in South Pasadena. He recalled a decade of searching and swiping before meeting his long-term girlfriend while on duty. “Back in the old days, I was on the more primitive dating sites like eHarmony, I even used online matchmaking services.” Over the years he met women from MySpace, Match and PlentyofFish (both owned by IAC, which also owns The Daily Beast), and Bumble. According to one wise-cracking cop in the office: “Maybe it takes a casanova to catch a casanova.”

Cass thought a ‘dine and dash’ was a fitting crime for a food-lover’s city like Pasadena. It is the birthplace of chef Julia Child, home to 500 restaurants, and one of America’s fe...