Looking for a person in hiding is a little different than looking for a garden-variety missing person, but I decided to exercise due diligence and look in the obvious places first.
Three minutes later, I was assured that there was no Weston Joseph Blakely listed in the St. Anselm phone directory, or in any directory in the United States. After another half hour, I was pretty sure that he didn't have a business license, a driver's license, any outstanding warrants, or a home mortgage under his own name.
So much for the easy stuff. Time to roll up the sleeves.
In the old days, the easiest way to establish a foolproof new identity was to get ahold of the birth certificate of a child who died in infancy, before being assigned a Social Security number. You would then take that birth certificate as proof of identity to the local Social Security office and spool out some cock-and-bull story about having been raised in a foreign country since shortly after birth, and consequently having never gotten a Social Security Number. They would assign you one, and from there you could use it as a foundational proof of identity for everything else in your new life: get a driver's license, apply for a job, sign a rental agreement, and so on.
Even though it's a government department, the Social Security Administration eventually wised up and started looking askance at anyone who came into their office with a birth certificate and a tale of expatriate childhood. The racket eventually shut down... and a new one came into being.
These days, hackers rule the new identity industry. They can steal unassigned Social Security Numbers, and even better, they can insert fictitious assignments into the government computers. Once the government says you exist, there's really no way they can take it back, so you're set. Plus, fake IDs are really easy to create convincingly these days, so a good hacker can have you walk you walk out of his office with not only a brand-spanking-new SSN, but the driver's license and other documents to back it up. Get a couple of crummy credit cards to cement your financial paper trail, and the New You is here to stay.
So what hope did I have of finding Weston Blakely if he didn't want to be found?
Simple; the person seeking a new identity is his own weak spot. With the old methods, you had to take the name and birthdate of any child roughly the right age that you could get ahold of. These days, someone looking for a new identity can choose their own name and age for the hacker to insert into the government computers.
And wouldn't you know it, people almost always opt to keep their real birthdate.
They also usually create their new name as a variation of their old one, or draw inspiration from relatives or childhood heroes. Which means that, after having picked Joshua Blakely's brains, I had plenty to work with.
I spent an hour brainstorming possible new names for Weston Joseph Blakely based on everything I had learned from Joshua. Then I e-mailed all of them, along with Weston's birthday, to AnneMarie Robinson so I wouldn't have to input them all by hand into the various records searches, along with a few instructions.
Not terribly exciting, I admit, but that's what the bulk of detective work is: slogging along, looking for the end of some insignificant thread that can lead you to what you're looking for, if you're lucky.
** ** **
That was all of the work I did for Joshua Blakely for two days. That didn't stop him from calling each day, asking about my progress.
In the morning on the third day, AnneMarie got back to me with some results. She e-mailed the list, then called to follow up.
"I left everything I found on this list for completeness' sake," she said. "But there are some that are pretty obviously not who you're looking for."
I thanked her for the heads-up and opened the file she had attached. It was a thorough Excel spreadsheet, showing the name she had found, address and telephone, birthdate if available, where she had found the information, and anything else worthy of note. As usual, AnneMarie's thorough access to every kind of data imaginable shocked me. I had limited myself to legal, publicly-available sources; she had exhibited no such restraint.
Which is why, halfway down the list, I hit the jackpot. A. Mr. Joseph West, sharing a birthdate with Weston Blakely, had ordered a magazine subscription and paid cash for it. He had filled out their entire customer profile in doing so, which was why his birthdate was recorded.
It was, incidentally, a skiing magazine.
His mailing address put him near Snowcrest, one of the ski resorts in the mountains to the west of St. Anselm. Yet another good sign. AnneMarie had determined that the owner of the address was one of the larger rental property owners in the resort area, and that the phone at that address was registered in the name of one Christina Blascomb.
I mulled over the address. Joshua Blakely would definitely want me to call him, especially with his instruction to leave the actual contact of his brother to him.
I had a better idea.
I called Sammy Moapa. "Hey," I said, "got some spare time this afternoon?"
"Sure, I'm easy," he said.
** ** **
We were on our way by about noon, heading southeast out of the city as the sun started to fall behind us.
The tippy-tops of the mountains had managed to get the slightest frosting of October snow already, but not enough for any of the ski resorts to open their doors for the season. If Weston Blakely, aka "Joseph West", was living near Snowcrest year-round as the magazine subscription would indicate, that was a good sign that he was employed in the area, possibly even by the resort or some hanger-on industry. If we had good luck and he worked a normal daytime shift, Sammy and I would have time to find his place and stake it out before he got home. Deciding exactly what to do then...well, that could come later.
While Sammy was driving up the canyon, my cell phone rang. It was Joshua Blakely.
"Do you know anything?"
"Well, maybe," I said. "I found a name that could be your brother; he has the right birthdate, anyway. I'm trying to confirm the address."
"Don't go there," he said. "Let me contact him."
"No, I don't actually have the address," I lied. "I've got a post office box. I'm trying to work backward and discover the street address."
"All right, if you're sure that's all you've got," he said. "Just let me know when you do find it."
"Roger," I said, and hung up.
Sammy glanced over at me from the driver's seat. "So you're supposed to tell this guy when you find the address."
"Right."
"But you're not."
"Nope."
"You billing him for this time?"
"Nope."
"Well, I guess it's okay then," he said.
