Using the search-by-address screen, I ran the most recent San Jose address—820 Willmott, a single family residence—through the system’s real-time directory assistance. Real-time directories are up-to-date, unlike the stored data on free Internet directory sites, which could be six months old. Regular folks use those sites. Not an experienced skip tracer—except when old data are needed.
The Willmott address yielded no listed number. Melissa might well be there and choosing to guard her anonymity.
If I were Melissa, weighted by a dark secret, I’d certainly have an unlisted number. Once you’d lived through something like that, had seen a man you believed in and respected warp into a monster, whom could you ever trust?
The unlisted number wasn’t necessarily a dead end. Skiptrace One provided a data source for such numbers. Unfortunately the data wasn’t always complete. Beyond that I could turn to the information broker in Los Angeles I used for finding hard-to-obtain data. Numerous times Jeff Cotton had uncovered information I simply couldn’t find. But I hoped not to turn to Jeff here. I didn’t want anyone else knowing I was searching for Melissa.
I ran 820 Willmott through the unlisted number search, asking God for a little help.
Bingo. A phone number. For a Melissa Harkoff.
I keyed the number into a different kind of search—to see if it was a landline or cell phone. Answer: cell.
Hmm. My Melissa? Sounded promising. These days younger people often used cell phones only, no landlines.
Cell phones were both good and bad news for skip tracers, since people tended to keep their numbers when they moved. If this number was attached to my Melissa, it was probably still accurate. On the other hand, she may no longer be at the address that had led me to the phone.
But I still had other tricks up my sleeve.
Using credit headers instead of directory assistance this time, I ran a reverse address check to see what names came up attached to 820 Willmott. Melissa Harkoff appeared second on the list. First and more recent—only two months ago—was a Tony Whistman. Either Melissa had moved out and Tony had moved in, or they lived together, and Tony had recently done something—bought a car, applied for a new credit card—to activate a report.
I noted my findings in my computer file, then took a little time hunting down information about Tony Whistman. It wasn’t hard to find. He was a realtor with RE/MAX in San Jose. He had his own website, which included his photo and a cell number. Tony looked to be in his mid-thirties, gray eyes, light brown hair. Beneath his may-I-help-you smile lay a hungry, intense expression, as if this young man sought to make millions and retire by age fifty. Make that forty-five.
Interesting. He’d be thirteen years older than my Melissa, but these days that meant little. Could they be living together?
I copied Tony’s information into my file. Printed out the color picture from his website.
Although I continued searching, I found nothing to definitively tie Tony to the Melissa Harkoff I sought. No blog or pages on his website with personal photos. Neither did I find anything to detract from that possibility, such as a newspaper article about his marriage to someone else.
Turning aside from Willmott and Tony, I ran the older San Jose addresses attached to a Melissa Harkoff through phone-number searches. Each came up with a listed number in someone else’s name. If my Melissa had once lived at those addresses, she didn’t anymore.
Willmott remained.
Using the Gilroy addresses I repeated the process. The older ones yielded numbers under different names. The most recent came up with a phone number for a Melissa Harkoff. My gal or the florist?
I’d bet on the florist. She had to have a home number somewhere. Likely it was in the same town as her flower shop. But hunches could be wrong. A phone call in the morning should tell me what I needed to know.
Morning. I blinked at the computer clock. Four-fifty. In a few hours it would be light.
I pushed back from the computer, walked through the darkened hallway and into the bathroom. Exiting there a minute later, I found myself skulking through the house, checking locks again, peeking through a curtain to look outside. The rain had stopped. The world, what I could see of it, lay sullen and spent. Small branches and leaves littered Dineen’s front lawn and her neighbor’s yard across the street.
Where was Hooded Man now?
Who was Hooded Man?
I returned to Dineen’s computer, wishing it were my own. I needed to search my photos for a picture of Melissa. I knew I had at least one of her and Linda together. I could picture them now on my back deck, Melissa looking proud and lovely in the new clothes Linda had bought her. She’d been living with the Jacksons less than a week, and I had just met her at church the previous Sunday. Melissa would speak little of her childhood, saying only that she was glad the horrible days following her mother’s death were behind her. She seemed so grateful to be living at the Jacksons’ home. To her it was a mansion, a new life.
The Café Latte Jelly Bellies were gone. I ate what remained of the Chocolate Puddings. Rot my teeth with sugar, yeah right, Dineen. It would never happen. She was just jealous of my hard choppers.
I drank the last of my water and looked over the information in the computer file. Somewhere along the way I’d eased up on my handwritten notes. Not good. Even though I’d ask Dineen for a flash drive to copy the file and take it back to my computer, I still wanted the written backup, just in case.
I stopped to write the notes on the yellow pad.
Finished with that, I sat back, data chugging through my tired brain. I would run other searches while waiting for dawn. Meanwhile the Willmott address held real promise.
A page I had seen on Tony Whistman’s website suddenly registered. I blinked. Returned to the site. I found the page…and in my soggy head a plan began to form.
SIXTEEN
JUNE 2004
The sounds wafted into Melissa’s subconscious, chilling hands pulling her from another terrible dream of her mother dead on the kitchen floor.
Melissa’s eyes blinked open to focus blearily on the open door of her walk-in closet. She was in the Jacksons’ house, not her old trailer. Her new bright and shiny life.
Relief washed through Melissa, aching and cold. She shifted in her grand bed. Cracks of light shone through her closed curtains, promising another sunny day.
In her mind’s eye she could still see the broken linoleum of the trailer kitchen. Her mom’s bare feet, her body spread on the floor. The whiskey bottle and the blood—
The sounds came again—whatever had awakened Melissa. Now they clarified. Muffled voices in argument. A man’s rapid words, pulsing with anger. A woman’s retort.
Baxter and Linda.
Melissa raised up on one elbow, head tilted, listening. The voices sounded like they were coming from somewhere on the right side of her bedroom.
How could that be?
She threw back her covers and slipped from bed. Stood still, barely breathing, eyes roaming the room as if ghosts of the Jacksons morphed along the walls.
Maybe she’d imagined the sounds. The Jacksons didn’t argue.
“Stop it, Baxter!”
Linda’s words filtered sort of thick and tinny, as if from some distance. Melissa’s focus jerked toward the ceiling across her room.
The heating vent.
She trotted over to her desk, picked up the chair in front of it, and set it down beneath the vent. Then climbed up on the chair, cocking her ear toward the ceiling.
“How dare you talk to me like that in my own home?” Baxter’s voice was rough, seething.
“It’s my home too.” Linda’s words caught, as if she was about to cry.