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officer,” I muttered. “I haven’t got all day.”

FOUR

    T HE TELEPHONE was ringing as I unlocked my office door and I caught it before my answering machine kicked in.
    “So, who is it?” Randy asked after he identified himself.
    “How you doing, Randy?” I asked.
    “Oh, I’m hurtin’, man. I’m hurtin’. I don’t think I can take much more of this,” he moaned. Randy hates for people to think that he is actually making money at his chosen profession and over the years I’ve discovered that his physical pain increases and decreases in direct proportion to his winnings. Considering his extreme discomfort, I guessed that Randy’d had a pretty good weekend.
    “Did you finger the mechanic?” he asked again.
    “Yeah, no problem.”
    “Who is it?”
    “Do you really want to know?”
    “What the fuck? That’s why I hired you, man.”
    “What I meant is, would you be satisfied with your money back? Your money and the money I lost?”
    “You lost money? I didn’t hire you to lose money.”
    “Aww for crissake, Randy …”
    “I want his balls! I want ’em served up with eggs and hash browns!”
    “Then I won’t give you the name.”
    The way Randy carried on, you’d have thought he was going to have a heart attack; I almost asked him where I could send flowers.
    “I don’t goon, Randy, you know that,” I told him when his ranting finally subsided.
    “Who’s askin’ you to? I got guys to do the heavy work.”
    “Here’s the deal,” I told him. “I’ll get your money back. I’ll put the fear of God into the mechanic. And you can keep my fee.”
    Randy paused to think about it. “How long have I known you?”
    “Twelve years, ever since I busted your Super Bowl party.”
    “Okay, ’cuz of them twelve years I let the mechanic walk; I figure you got your reasons.”
    “I do.”
    “But I want my money and I want it by Friday or I’m gonna send my guys to talk to you.”
    I was so frightened I hung up the phone without saying good-bye.

    Every man and woman in America leaves little threads wherever they go. They leave them in computer databases when they are born, apply for a driver’s license, graduate from school, get married, get divorced, buy on credit, make airline reservations, stay at a hotel, apply for life insurance, order freshwater pearls from the Home Shopping Network—hundreds of little threads that when woven together produce a garment of who and what they are. In fact, it is virtually impossible not to become the subject of a record. The average person is on fifty databases at any one time and nearly all of them are readily available to someone with a personal computer, a modem and a telephone. Like me.
    Most threads of information are stored in public files gathered by the government that I can access simply by signing on as “anonymous” and using “guest” as a password. Much of this information is contained in private databases such as those of credit bureaus that I can access for a fee. It isn’t easy, of course. Locating banks of files that actually contain relevant information often requires as much detective work as investigating a dozen flea markets in Iowa. I often have to drag one database after another until I find the name I’m looking for. Or the Social Security number, our de facto standard universal identifier. Still, given time, I can usually gather enough bits and pieces to assemble a reasonably complete sketch of an individual, everything from date of birth to high school locker number.
    I know PIs who conduct entire investigations by computer, never leaving their offices. There’s a guy in Texas who does nothing but skip traces; he can run one in about ninety seconds. Other agencies specialize in background checks, verifying an individual’s personal history for five hundred bucks a pop. Mostly they run these checks for businesses, pre-employment checks. Yet more and more they run them for single women who want to investigate their male friends