JM01 - Black Maps by Peter Spiegelman Page B

bag swung from a metal stand. Her hands and wrists were taped like a boxer’s, and so were her ankles and bare feet. I could see where some layers of tape, over the striking surfaces of her hands and feet, had been scuffed away by contact with the bag. Her elbows and knees were a little scraped up too.
    She was looking at me, and I realized I was staring. I was also regretting my peevish tone. Her fretful look vanished, replaced by a little smile. “You’re Lauren’s brother, aren’t you? You guys look alike.” She stuck out her taped right hand. “I’m Jane Lu.”

Chapter Seven

    “Al Burrows? Yeah, that was my father. He died last year, at ninety-eight. But he never worked in no bank. The bastard barely worked at all.” She paused to belch demurely. “What else you want to know?” Ada Burrows had a thick Long Island accent and sounded pretty old herself, but she was one of the more accommodating Burrowses that I’d spoken to all day.
    “You know any other Al Burrows—any brothers or cousins or uncles by that name?”
    “Nah, not too many Burrows men still alive. None named Al. I got a cousin Albert on Mom’s side, but he’s a Boyle, and I think he’s dead anyway. What else?”
    “Nothing else that I can think of,” I said. She sounded disappointed. I was too. I crossed another name off my list.
    Besides globalizing the market for junk in people’s attics, and bringing joy to pornographers everywhere, the Internet has been a boon to private investigators, at least to the ones it hasn’t put out of business. Thanks to the many search services available on the Web, the job of finding people, a staple of the PI trade, is vastly easier these days. Easy enough that a lot of folks dispense with PIs altogether and do it for themselves. The relentless march of progress, I guess.
    Personally, I use the services all the time. Provide them with your subject’s name, and you’ll get back a list of people, complete with addresses and phone numbers, which just might contain the person that you want. The more data you can supply—a city, a state, maybe a date of birth—the better your results. And you can get more than just addresses and phone numbers. Many services provide information on criminal convictions, property ownership, bankruptcy filings, marriages, divorces—a whole range of public data. Much of it is available immediately, online. But while the services are big timesavers, they’re not magic. If you’ve got nothing more to go on than a name, and that name isn’t Rufus T. Firefly, or something equally distinctive, you may get back a very long list indeed. And then it’s time for some old-fashioned legwork, or, as in this case, phone work.
    By Monday afternoon, I’d been through nine A. Burrowses, Ada included. That was over half the number I’d turned up in a search restricted to the New York metropolitan area. Based on what Pierro had told me, the A-for-Al Burrows I was looking for was a white male, over six feet tall, and by now in his late forties or early fifties. Eighteen years ago he’d been heavyset and had thinning, dirty blond hair. By now he could be a bald blimp or, technology being what it is, a skinny redhead. No way to know until I found him.
    Ada’s father was my second dead A. Burrows, the other one having been run over crossing Queens Boulevard two years go, at age twenty-seven. His mother was inconsolable still, and I was sorry that I’d bothered her. I’d found Albert Burrows, out in Chatham, New Jersey, who might have been the right age, but who assured me, in barely civil tones, that he’d never worked in banking, and that eighteen years ago he’d been living in Capetown. Arthur Burrows, of Dobbs Ferry, was also about the right age, but his career had been in B&E and GTA, and eighteen years ago he’d been right in the middle of his second nickel bit upstate. Next to Ada, he was the chattiest Burrows I’d spoken with, and he told me more than I wanted to know about