“Find her,” he repeated.

I quickly produced a standard contract. He signed it after reading it twice and then threw the pen down on my desk blotter.

“No one is to hear about this,” he ordered. “Not your friends with the police, especially not the media. I don’t want anybody getting away with murder just because you have a fucking hunch. Understand?”

I understood. I told him I would keep the investigation to myself unless Irene Brown or Raymond Fleck were indicted. If that happened, I would probably have to speak up. Truman disagreed and commenced to argue with me the fine points of Minnesota Statutes 326.32–326.339, the licensing requirements and procedures for private detectives and protective agents. He thought there might be a loophole. I disagreed.

“Just find her,” he said at last.

fourteen

Iretrieved a missing persons form from my desk drawer and I started filling it with information. The form was basically a cheat sheet I had picked up at the last convention of private investigators I attended. Once complete, it would contain nearly every known fact about Alison, from her style of dress (lots of sweaters and natural-fiber blazers) to her hobbies (dogs, cross-country skiing), from the languages she spoke (French and Russian) to her driving record (three speeding tickets in two years) and spending habits (two credit cards, paid entire balance monthly). All this plus a Portrait Parle, noting in detail Alison’s physical characteristics—everything from the size and shape of her ears to the quality of her walk.

Much of this information was already available in Anne Scalasi’s file. The rest I would acquire through interviews with Alison’s neighbors, co-workers, paperboy, hairdresser, investment adviser, high-school and college professors, veterinarian, insurance agent, travel agent, Marie Audette, her family, her husband, and so on. It was a complicated, tedious process. Not as complicated as a shuttle launch yet complicated enough to give me a headache.

The reason for all this work is simple: People are creatures of habit. After spending a lifetime doing a specific thing in a certain way, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to change. Consider the case of Christopher Boyce, the Falcon in the movie The Falcon and the Snowman. Boyce escaped from prison, where he was serving a life sentence for selling secrets to the Soviet Union, and disappeared. Completely. However, Boyce was a nut about falconry, thus his nickname. So the government staked out those locations frequented by people who shared Boyce’s passion—there are only so many places where people go to hunt with falcons. Sure enough, Boyce was discovered in one of them, a small town in Oregon.

The past had led investigators to Boyce’s new life. The past would lead me to Alison Donnerbauer Emerton.

“All right, darlin’,” I told the photograph I taped to my office wall, the photograph of Alison and Marie Audette in costume. “Let the games begin.”

As with all my missing persons cases, I tried to find Alison the easy way first. By telephone.

“How may I help you?” the operator asked in a machinelike monotone.

“That damn daughter of mine. My wife says we got a telephone bill with all kinds of long-distance calls on it that we didn’t make, and she thinks my daughter has let her low-life boyfriend use our phone. I was outta town when we got the bill, and my wife kept the first page, which is the bill, but not the bottom pages, which lists the numbers. So could you mail me the bottom pages so I can get this kid to pay for his calls? Cause I ain’t gonna pay for ’em.”

“What is your home number and billing address?”

I gave the operator Mr. Donnerbauer’s address and telephone number but added, “Could you send them to my office?”

Sure she could.

“Customer service,” a pretty voice chirped.

“Yeah, this is Phil Gaffner over at WorldNet. We got a DNP and we’re tryin’ ta verify some toll charges. Could ya give me listings and returns on 666-2273?” I recited Stephen Emerton’s telephone number.

“Just a second while I pull it up on my screen, Phil,” the woman replied, much of her cheerfulness gone. Telephone companies hate people who don’t pay and are usually more than willing to help even competitors get their money.

“Customer service, how may I help you?” a man’s voice asked.

“This is the Ian Ravitch Agency representing Miss Marie Audette. Miss Audette will be out of town for the next forty-five days on an acting assignment, and she requested that we pay her bills until her return. Could you send Miss Audette’s telephone bill to our office, please?”

“What is the telephone number and regular billing address, sir?”

I read them to the operator directly from the missing persons form.

“And what address do you want the bill sent to?”

After gathering their records, I discovered that Mr. and Mrs. Donnerbauer had not made any long-distance phone calls to their daughter—or to anyone else since her disappearance. All of Stephen Emerton’s calls were to credit-card and insurance companies. Marie Audette had made sixteen long-distance calls, most of them to agents in Chicago and Los Angeles. One set of digits did interest me, however. She had dialed a Deer Lake, Wisconsin, number the day I spoke with her. I dialed the number myself after preparing a sure-fire pretext designed to obtain me the name and address of whoever answered. The pretext wasn’t necessary. A tape recording told me I had reached the residence of Deputy Gretchen Rovick, please leave a message.

Framed in silver and hanging above my computer is a photograph of a ridiculous-looking man dressed in a trench coat and fedora and leaning against a personal computer. The photograph was accompanied by a long newspaper article explaining how a private investigator had squashed the hostile takeover of a beloved local firm. According to the article, the investigator—the female reporter described him as James Bond-handsome; I just thought you should know—used his computer skills to uncover several secret bank accounts in Nevada and the Bahamas where the corporate raider’s chief officers had quite illegally stashed fifty million undeclared bucks. The IRS, SEC, and FBI had been quite impressed and leaked the news to the media. I would tell you who the investigator was except, well, modesty forbids me.

Truth is, I am not an expert with a computer, merely tenacious. I approach it like John Henry, that steel-driven’ man. I ain’t gonna quit. I’m gonna find what I need if it kills me.

Fortified with a fresh pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain and armed with my PC, hard disk drive, printer, modem, and telephone and source books, I started dragging databases. There are literally thousands of them, most created and maintained by the government, most free and easily accessed. The trick is knowing where to look. I looked everywhere. I conducted credit bureau sweeps and social security number traces. I accessed the U.S. Post Office’s National Change of Address Index, another database containing names compiled from every telephone book in the U.S., and another filled with voter registration information. I searched the motor vehicle registration records of forty-nine states and the criminal records of every county in all fifty states. I hired an information broker to hunt through bank accounts. I personally examined the membership directories and subscription lists of every public-relations-related association and newsletter I could find as well as a database that recorded the names of executives who have moved from one job to another in the past year.

Days turned into weeks. And I learned only one thing: Alison Donnerbauer Emerton was hiding real, real hard.

“Why are you doing this?” Cynthia Grey asked in a tone that made me think of icebergs and polar bears.