Necessity by Brian Garfield Page A

maybe they go into a hospital for some disease and the hospital needs a history on the patient. Whatever. Sometimes people just can’t help getting in touch with their mothers or fathers or sisters or brothers. Or their children.”
    â€œBut some of them must be smart enough not to get in touch with people that way.”
    â€œSome are, sure. There’s still ways. A lot of skips seem to figure all they need to do is move to another state and they’re safe. It’s such a big country, you know, two hundred and forty million people, seems so easy to lose yourself out there. A lot of skips don’t even bother to change their names. It’s a hassle, changing your name. You got to start all over with fresh documents, new identification from scratch—it’s hard work. So a lot of people just keep their name and their Social Security number and all that. They move someplace halfway across the country and they apply for a driver’s license and open a bank account and bang, it’s in the computer and we got ’em.
    â€œCredit applications, that’s another one. We buy the subject’s old credit applications from companies that the subject got an account with. We just keep developing facts that way. A friend of mine, investigator out west in Marin County, he likes to say the thing about facts is, is that you put them together and it’s like sex, they produce more facts. So you work the facts. You contact the oil companies and half the time you find out the subject left a trail of gasoline credit card charges all the way across the country right to the new doorstep. You get in touch with the company, you give the subject’s name, you say you’re the subject. Maybe you act angry. You complain you haven’t been receiving your bills and you don’t want to risk your credit rating. You think maybe they got the wrong forwarding address and you ask what address the bills are being mailed to.”
    The thin cigar had grown a tall ash. He tapped it into a glass tray on the desk.
    He’d warmed to the subject just as he had that night at the dinner table. He said: “Around Christmas, New Year’s, if it’s a priority subject and a real dead skip—I mean one where all the leads have turned up empty—sometimes in the holidays we’ll post people on stakeouts or we’ll drive around and do spot checks on the relatives. A lot of skips just can’t help going home for Christmas. Sometimes we just offer a reward and tell the relatives about it. You’d be surprised how many people turn in their own brothers for a thousand dollars.
    â€œSometimes we try to use the Internal Revenue. They’re not supposed to give out information but sometimes you can get through. You tell them you’re on the bookkeeping computer at ex-wye-zee company, you’ve got a W-2 or a 1099 form that you need to send to this person but it came back address unknown and maybe does the IRS have a forwarding address for this person so he can get his taxes straight. I’ve used that one a dozen times. It’s illegal, of course, but I guess we all know you don’t get much done if you don’t bend the regulations a little, just now and then.”
    She remembers how his sycophantic wink made her feel soiled. The cigar had gone out; he relit it with a plastic lighter. “If you’ve got some idea what part of the country the subject may have headed for, you call the phone company out there, you ask for the New Listings Operator. Sometimes that gets you an address.
    â€œYou keep tabs on the subject’s boyfriend or girlfriend if there was one. A lot of people, especially women, skip out because they’ve been having an affair with a married man and he plans to take off in three weeks and meet her in Yucatan or Hawaii or something. So you ask around, secretaries and whoever the subject used to work with, and if you hear rumors about an extramarital