Текст книги "Dearly Departed"

Автор книги: David Housewright

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

thirteen

Cynthia looked delicious in a black turtleneck sweater dress with a carefully fitted bodice and a long, sweeping skirt. You’d never have supposed that she had dressed in a feverish seven minutes flat while I monitored her progress on my watch as I paced her living room. It would have taken her six minutes except for the great “with pearls or without” debate. She went without.

The way Cynthia acted as we drove to the theater in Minneapolis, though, you’d have thought I never took her anywhere, and I told her so.

“Only sporting events and jazz clubs,” she reminded me.

There’s no pleasing some people.

“Actually, I’m amazed anything could drag you away from your precious baseball. Don’t you have tickets for the St. Paul Saints tonight?”

“It’s like Tallulah Bankhead once said, ‘There have been only two geniuses in the world. Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.’ Besides, the Saints are in Sioux Falls tonight. They’ll be home tomorrow, though; they’re playing Ida Borders and the Duluth-Superior Dukes. Want to go?”

“Oh, rapture.”

Marie Audette played Portia in The Merchant of Venice, a typical Shakespearean heroine: tough, clever, resourceful, who confounds her rivals and generally saves the day—but only while disguised as a man. And, of course, she is never recognized until the final scene, even by her lover. I pointed at Marie when she ascended to the stage.

“She gave us the tickets,” I told Cynthia.

“Shhhh!” Cynthia hissed.

She shushed me several more times during the performance, punctuating her entreaties for quiet with sharp jabs from her elbow. Yet try as I might, I could not stop fidgeting. I couldn’t stop shuffling through the notes in my head—apparently making quite a racket of it—searching for the one clue that would determine who actually had killed Alison Donnerbauer Emerton.

I had liked Irene Brown. But that was yesterday. Today, Dr. Bob, the jilted lover, looked good, except there was nothing to tie him to the scene. And both Raymond Fleck and Stephen Emerton still rated high in my estimation.

“Nuts,” I muttered under my breath.

“Shhhhh!” Cynthia hissed at me.

I tried hard not to believe Dr. Bob’s theory. I didn’t want to believe it. Alison wasn’t the kind to run away from her problems. No way. She would have stared them in the eye and taken them on. Yes, that’s what my Alison would have done. My Alison. But was my Alison the same Alison as the woman in the photograph? I had seen things in her face, emotions that touched me. Yet were they real? Was that the face of a woman who committed adultery? Twice? Apparently it was.

I shook my head, tried to clear it. Instead, my mind’s eye superimposed Alison’s photograph over the stage; I was looking at it and through it even as I watched Marie Audette going about her business. And I knew. Of course the emotions weren’t real; the photograph had been taken to promote a play, to reflect a character Alison was playing. What was the line Jon Lovitz used to say on Saturday Night Live? Oh, yeah.

“It’s acting!”

“Sheeesh,” a voice behind me answered.

Stop it, Taylor, my inner voice told me. Get a grip. Start thinking like a detective. Be objective, dammit. “Be objective,” I muttered.

Cynthia’s elbow almost cracked my rib. I didn’t blame her for being miffed. We were at a critical juncture in the play, the scene where Shylock the Jew is demanding his pound of flesh, and Portia, disguised as a hot-shot arbitrator from Padua, says he can have it, just so long as he does not “shed one drop of Christian blood.” Shylock is a louse, of course. Yet I always figured he got the shaft. I mean, no one put a gun to Antonio’s head, made him take the loan, and if he couldn’t pay the vig, well … Still, I enjoyed watching Marie, standing center stage like a gunfighter waiting for the bad guy to slap leather, beseeching Shylock “to cut off the flesh” if he dared. But my concentration wouldn’t hold, and soon I was reflecting on my list of suspects again.

Irene Brown. Raymond Fleck. Stephen Emerton. Dr. Bob. Hell, all things considered, even Mrs. Donnerbauer could be considered a suspect.

I squirmed in my seat some more, asking myself, Who put the note on my windshield telling me to quit the investigation? Not Irene. Not Raymond. Both were guests of the Dakota County Sheriff’s Department at the time.

Stephen Emerton? Had to be. Who else was there?

I sighed noisily, drawing more frosty stares.

Motive and opportunity. Motive and opportunity. I kept repeating the words in my head like a mantra.

Meanwhile, Portia, still disguised as a male lawyer, was now dancing around her befuddled husband, messing with his mind, diddling him out of the ring she had given him on the day they were married, the ring he vowed never to be without.

“I see, sir, you are liberal in offers: You taught me first to beg, and now, methinks, you teach me how a beggar should be answer’d.”

Marie Audette was a good actress. Wait a minute! my inner voice shouted. So was Alison! My mind spun back to the first act of the play. What was it that Portia told Jessica when she took up her disguise?

“I’ll hold thee any wager.… I’ll prove the prettier fellow … and wear my dagger with the braver grace; and speak, between the change of man and boy, with a reed voice and turn two mincing steps into a manly stride; and speak of frays, like a fine bragging youth: and tell quaint lies, how honourable ladies sought my love, which I denying, they fell sick and died.… And twenty of these puny lies I’ll tell, that men shall swear I have discontinued school above a twelvemonth. I have within my mind a thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks which I will practice.”

Motive and opportunity.

“Alison really is a genius,” I muttered loud enough to earn another punch in the ribs.

Remember when you first came to my office?” I asked Truman the next morning. “Remember I said Alison might have gone out for a pack of cigarettes and kept on going? That it’s been done before? Well, maybe she did.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Truman answered, pacing my office floor like a caged cat.

“Hey, man, this is America,” I reminded him. “It’s always been easy for Americans to go somewhere else and start over. That’s what our ancestors did. That’s why America exists today. Remember the executive director of the Minneapolis City Council? She packed her bags, arranged for her attorney to pay off her debts, and—poof!—she was gone. Nobody knew where she went. Everybody thought she had run away with a lover or had been abducted or ripped off the city. Turned out she simply went to San Francisco to become a different person.”

Truman was unimpressed. He pointed out that the police had had the same theory but rejected it because none of Alison’s belongings were missing. She hadn’t packed, as the executive director had; she hadn’t closed her banking accounts and settled her affairs; she hadn’t contacted an attorney—hadn’t contacted him.

“All that means is that what she left behind didn’t concern her,” I told him.

“This is insane. You’re saying Alison staged her own disappearance, the tape recording, the blood, everything?”

“Yes.”

“Bullshit. There’s no evidence of that; you haven’t got any evidence. All you have is a self-serving theory from some bum-fuck doctor who might have been the one who killed her in the first place. I can’t believe you’re buying this shit.”

“Dr. Bob doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Oh, no? Then where the fuck did this amazing theory come from?”

“Two things. One, the note on my windshield. Whoever put it there didn’t want us looking into Alison’s disappearance. I think it was Alison. That was a mistake because instead of quitting, it made us look harder.”

Truman snorted at that.

“Yeah?” he asked. “What’s number two?”

“The Merchant of Venice.”

Truman stopped his pacing and stared long enough to measure me for a white jacket that fastens in the back.

“You’re shitting me,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” I assured him.

“I can’t believe I’m paying for this,” he groused.

“Think about it,” I told Truman. “Raymond Fleck, Irene Brown, Stephen Emerton, Dr. Holyfield, her parents: They all wronged Alison one way or another. Now each of their lives has been turned upside down; each one is paying a price. Why? Because no one knows for sure exactly what happened to her. She got ’em. She got ’em all at the same time; a brilliant girl is our Alison.”

“You’re saying she staged her own murder just to get even?”

“‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’”

“That’s ridiculous,” Truman replied to the line I had memorized the evening before.

“Oh, and you would never do anything like that. You would never go out of your way to stick it to someone.”

Truman didn’t want to hear any more. “Find her, goddammit!” he demanded, throwing his hands in the air. “You think she’s fucking alive, find her.”

I made an effort to explain just how long, tedious, and expensive a missing-person’s search could become, especially if the missing person was working hard at not being found. I don’t know if I was trying to talk him out of it or not.

“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.

“I’m a private investigator,” I told her. I liked the sound of that so much I repeated the phrase—I’m a private investigator—a half dozen times with different inflections, making it sound like I was either a swashbuckling adventurer or I made my living repairing refrigerators.

“You’re annoying me,” she said.

“This is getting old, Cynthia. Ever since I told you I thought Alison was alive, you’ve been ragging on me to quit the case, telling me she didn’t break any laws, telling me she has a right to be left alone. Fine. I get the message. Now quit it, will ya? I don’t tell you what cases to take.”

We were in bed—my bed to be precise—and for the first time since we’d become intimate, our bodies did not warm each other. She was lying on one side and I was lying on the other, and the few inches that separated us might as well have been the Grand Canyon.

“What’s the big deal, anyway?” I asked.

“It’s wrong.”

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong. What’s wrong is Irene Brown and Raymond Fleck sitting in the Dakota County jail because neither can make bail, waiting to see if they’re going to be tried for killing a woman who’s not dead.”

“Since when do you care about them?”

“I don’t,” I admitted. “But I’m the one who put them on the spot—at least Irene—and that makes me responsible.”

“If only I could believe that.”

“What?”

“I think you’re trying to find Alison because you want revenge.”

“Revenge?”

“Yes, revenge. When you thought she was dead, you acted like she was the great lost love of your life—”

“Stop it,” I told her.

“You kept staring at her photograph with such longing—don’t tell me you didn’t; I know you did—but then you discovered that she had an affair, and suddenly you don’t like her anymore. Taylor, you act like she had cheated on you. Well, she didn’t cheat on you. She didn’t do anything to you. She didn’t even know you. So why don’t you leave her alone? She was treated shitty enough in her life.”

“She gave as she got,” I told her.

“How do you know?”

“I know.…”

“You know nothing about her except what some people told you, and even then you’re only listening to the bad and none of the good. Why do you believe Emerton and that doctor? Why do you insist that they’re right about Alison and not Marie Audette and Alison’s other friend, the deputy?”

“Because—”

“Because you don’t want to.”

“Are you going to let me finish?”

“I’ll tell you what I think. I think you hope Alison really is dead. That way you can recast her as the virginal innocent in the fantasy you’ve created in your head.”

Something cold gripped my heart. Alison dead? No, I didn’t want that. I most certainly did not.

“You might find this hard to believe, Cynthia,” I said, working hard to keep my voice calm and level, “but I have no emotional investment in locating Alison.”

“Yeah, right.”

“If you want to argue that I’m trying to find her just to prove that I can, fine. Maybe there’s something to that. But it’s my job, you see. It’s what I do for a living.”

“It’s wrong,” Cynthia reiterated.

“Why? Why is it wrong? When I was trying to find her dead body, I was a good guy. Now, because I’m trying to find her live body, I’m a jerk. Why is that?” Cynthia didn’t answer, so I added, “It’s just a job, honey.”

“And if someone gave you four hundred dollars a day and expenses to investigate me, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

“Cynthia, please. This is not about you.”

“But it could be. That’s the thing. It could be. If somebody wanted to learn about my past, if they wanted to hurt me with my past—”

“I’m not hurting anyone,” I insisted.

“—me or anyone else on the planet, all they have to do is pay you four hundred dollars a day and expenses.”

And then I understood. Cynthia didn’t want me to find Alison because she didn’t want a detective to one day find her, the real her. The expensive clothes, the furniture, the store-bought manners, they allowed Cynthia to do what Alison was doing: hide. That was why she worked so hard at her profession, why she so enthusiastically embraced the media. She was building a life beyond reproach, strengthening her reputation against the day that someone—like me—would discover that Cynthia Grey, attorney at law, was once a drug addict, that she had danced topless for a living. I understood that, only I wasn’t thinking. Instead, I let my mouth do all the work, my brain just standing there leaning on a shovel while I talked myself into a hole.

“I ferret out people’s secrets,” I replied, trying to make my voice sound just as icy as hers. “I do it for money. And most of the people who hire me? They’re lawyers. You act like all this is new to you, Cynthia. But we both know it’s not. You’ve worked with PIs before; hell, you’ve worked with me. You want information you can take into court, you come to us. You want dirt you can use to help your clients and hurt your adversaries, you don’t even quibble about our fee. Well, what I’m doing now is no different than what you’ve hired done in the past. You’re no different than Hunter Truman.”

Cynthia had nothing more to say. She left the bed and dressed in the dark. The rustle of her clothes and the creak of floorboards told me she was near, but I couldn’t see her, and when I reached out, I caught only air. I wanted to say something to her, but what? I’m sorry? Yeah, right, that would cover it. I’m sorry, Cynthia, I was only joking. Sure.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that,” I told her.

She didn’t reply.

“Cynthia?”

The floorboards creaked again.

“Cynthia, if you loved me, you would ignore me when I say stupid things.”

“Taylor, you’re a jerk,” she answered softly. And then she was gone. I listened as she made her way down the stairs to the front door, slamming it behind her.

“Taylor, you are a jerk!” I agreed.

I had run out of coffee beans and was finishing my last Dr Pepper when Hunter Truman called. He wanted an update. I told him I had nothing positive to report and asked if I should give it up. He said no, and I sighed my relief. I had no intention of quitting the chase, but it was starting to get expensive. That’s why so many skips and missing persons remain unfound because it’s not worth the cost of finding them. And I would rather hunt for Alison on Truman’s nickel than mine.

“What do you want ’em for?” Stephen Emerton asked when I requested all of his and Alison’s canceled personal checks starting one year prior to her disappearance.

I convinced him that I was helping the Dakota County attorney strengthen his case against Irene Brown; told him that if she were convicted of killing Alison, the insurance company would be forced to pay off on Emerton’s claim. He gave me a box of canceled checks dating back eighteen months.

“What do you want them for?” Sarah Selmi asked when I requested Alison’s complete employment history at Kennel-Up, emphasizing those days when she did not report to work, plus a record of all her business trips and a list of the long-distance phone calls she had made.

I was bound by Hunter Truman’s directive not to tell her the truth, and I couldn’t think of a viable lie, so I simply said: “Because it’s important that we have all the information correct for the trial.” It sounds absurd, I know, but it worked. It usually does. Half the time when you start a sentence with the word “because,” people don’t even hear the rest of it. They hear only the word “because,” which they translate to mean, “It’s all right, go ahead.” If you don’t believe me, try it sometime.

Sarah Selmi gave me everything I requested except for the phone information. Kennel-Up had a WATS line, and they had no way of determining which employees called where. She said it was an ongoing problem since her employees shamefully abused the service, dialing up long-lost relatives halfway around the planet.

I got back to my office and started sifting through the information I had gathered. Kennel-Up promoted itself as a national company, yet in reality it was strictly regional, selling its products almost exclusively in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Alison had visited each of those states several times in the months before she went missing. However, she wrote no personal checks in any of them.

One personal check, though, did catch my eye. It was made out to Bosch Publications. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I closed my eyes and let it bounce around for a while, but nothing came of it. When I opened my eyes again, I was staring at my bookcase, specifically at the volume with the blue cover and the title Minnesota Sex Offenders on the spine. The book listed the names and offenses of nearly everyone who had been convicted of a sex crime in the state of Minnesota, along with the criminal’s current address and any other information that the author could secure. It was very popular among the “not in my neighborhood” crowd.

I went to the bookcase, slipped the volume out, opened it to the title page, and noted the publisher.

Bosch Publications, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Stephen Emerton was becoming increasingly annoyed by my presence in his life. But he did remember seeing a copy of the book I described. It was probably in one of the boxes he had stuffed with Alison’s belongings and stashed in a ministorage garage near the intersection of Highway 36 and I-694. And, yeah, he’d leave the key with his secretary if I wanted to take a look.

I did.

It turned out that Alison had a great many books. Maybe a thousand. At least it seemed like that as I rummaged through the boxes stacked inside the garage designated 54A. It took about two hours before I came up with Minnesota Sex Offenders.

I took it out of the garage into the light, leaned against my Colt, and flicked through it. The corners of seven pages were turned down. Alison had circled the name of at least one sex offender on each of them. One of the names circled belonged to Fleck, Raymond G. The copy under his name listed Raymond’s offense, how long he had spent in prison, his record there, and his current address and place of employment.

Well, well. I put the book back, locked the storage garage, and returned to my office, stopping to drop off Stephen’s key on the way. Once inside my office, I examined the canceled check, the one written to Bosch Publications. Alison had bought the book two months before she left the health-care organization to work for Kennel-Up, Raymond’s employer.

She had known about Raymond’s record before she even met him.

I smiled.

“Mistake number two, Alison,” I said aloud. “You should never have kept the book.”

I continued to search through Alison’s canceled personal checks. Three more interested me. One was written for Dog Universe magazine and a second for X-Country, a magazine for cross-country skiers. I contacted both publications and arranged to purchase their subscription lists.

The third check had been made out to a print shop a few weeks before Alison began working for Kennel-Up. I guessed it was written to pay for copies of her résumé. I guessed wrong.…

The woman behind the counter at the print shop was confused, so she called on a co-worker for assistance. He was no help, so she summoned the manager. The manager inspected my photostat and the canceled check and asked, “Why do you need this information?”

“Because it’s vital that we compare it to other information that we have.”

Sounded reasonable to him.

After about ten minutes, the manager produced an invoice with Alison’s name on it dated seven months before she disappeared. The check hadn’t paid for the printing of résumés after all.

“It was a joke,” the manager said. “I remember now. Mrs. Emerton asked us to make a plate of her birth certificate, burn off the name and date, then run off a few copies; it had something to do with her parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary.”

I almost said it out loud: You should have paid in cash, Alison. Third mistake.

A birth certificate is the cornerstone for creating a new identity. It’s the most widely accepted form of identification in the United States. And Alison had several on which she could print any name and date she desired.

Once she fills in the blanks, she leaves them in the backyard, letting the sun age them. She mails one stating that she’s fifteen to the Social Security Administration, along with a note written in longhand on ruled paper saying, “Daddy is making me get a job.” Wham, she has a bona fide social security number.

She brings a second birth certificate stating her age at anywhere between twenty-four and thirty, along with the social security card, to the Department of Motor Vehicles, pick your own state. If anyone should ask, she explains that after living overseas for ten years with her father, who is in the U.S. Air Force, she needs a valid driver’s license. She takes a test. Bam, now she has the second most widely used form of ID, accepted by grocery store clerks and traffic cops throughout the nation.

Now she can get a passport, a bank account, credit cards, insurance; she can get a job, start her own business, borrow money. All she needs is time and patience—and Alison had both.

Perfect. Just perfect.

Spurred by yet another hunch, I fired up my PC and began conducting a credit-bureau sweep and a vital-information trace against Rosalind Colletti, Alison’s erstwhile stage name.