Free Deceit by Brandilyn Collins Page A

keep me going.
    Diminishing the screen, I opened Dineen’s iTunes and perused her playlists. Ack. All jazz and pop. I knew my sister had poor taste in music, but this was downright embarrassing. How did a person exist without classic rock?
    So much for music. I closed the program.
    I stretched my neck right, left. Rubbed a hand across my forehead. Outside the wind had finally ceased its uproar. Fine drops plinked at the window, mere shadows of the night’s deluge. By morning, perhaps, all would be quiet.
    I listened for telltale sounds in the house. Nothing.
    Maybe I had been wrong. Maybe I’d left my rear garage door unlatched. That was much easier to believe now that I sat in Dineen’s home, enveloped by light. I wanted to believe it. Especially as the bed across the room looked more and more inviting…
    I sat up straighter and pulled in five deep breaths, hoping the oxygen would clear my head.
    The computer clock read 3:10 a.m.
    My right hand reached for the mouse, my brain ticking through what I had so far. I’d eliminated an older Melissa in Gilroy, but I still hadn’t found the one in that town who could match the birth date in ’87 or ’88. And the San Jose birth date still needed to be run down as well. If only I could remember those exact dates. I could do no more now without finding them again, then rematching them to Social Security numbers. There were still a lot of techniques I could employ once I had those SSNs.
    Opening Skiptrace One, I went back to the beginning, typing in Melissa’s name and the State of California. Up came the fourteen addresses I’d found, with the two possible birthdates: 01/27/1988 and 09/13/1987. I ran those dates and snagged their Social Security numbers. From there I traced the addresses on each SSN.
    Next, phone records.
    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