“Not yet,” she whispered. She pushed me over on my back and hooked her leg across my hips and slid on top of me. She took me in her hands and slowly fit herself around me and we lay there, barely breathing. And then she began to move.
I came out of the oblivion that had taken me, lying sideways across the bed. Jane was beside me, her dark head on my chest, an arm and a leg flung across me. The room was full of her scent and the heat of her body. In the dim light, I watched the slow rise and fall of her back, the faint flutter of her eyelids, and the tiny random movements of her bow-shaped mouth. I ran my finger lightly along her hairline, just above her right temple, and felt the small ripples there, invisible to the eye- the wake of the bullet that had grazed her last year. Jane opened her eyes and looked at me for a long while before she spoke.
“No harm done,” she said softly. I wanted to believe it.
3
Find the real estate. Find the cars. Look for criminal records and civil suits. Get the phone bills. Check the hospitals. Check the morgues. Every missing persons case is different, but every one begins the same way. It’s like the opening gambit in a game of chess, and if your missing person isn’t actually in hiding- or isn’t any good at itplay can often stop soon after. I spent much of the morning making these moves, and thanks to the marvels of technology and the wonders of outsourcing, I could do it all without leaving home.
I put a Charlie Haden disc on the stereo, filled a mug with coffee, powered up my laptop, and fed Gregory Danes’s name and Social Security number to several of my favorite online search services. For a price, they would make mincemeat of his privacy.
Nina Sachs had already given me the address of Danes’s Upper East Side apartment and his home, office, and cell phone numbers, and she’d told me about the big black BMW he sometimes drove on weekend jaunts, and all of that was helpful. But what I was really interested in were the things she couldn’t tell me about- like any other phone numbers listed in Danes’s name, for example, or any other cars or houses he might own. The search services could find those for me, and a whole lot more. Plane registries, boat registries, criminal convictions, voter registrations, bankruptcies- the vast universe of public records was at their disposal. One service would even find any court cases that Danes had been involved in, and another would scan the SEC’s databases for any complaints or arbitration claims made against him. They weren’t infallible, but they were a good place to start, and a lot faster than doing the legwork myself. And they were legal. Buying his phone bills was another, murkier story.
Telephone bills are not public records, and the online services that deal in them sometimes vanish from the Web without warning, often to reopen- under new names and at new sites- a few days later. Their legality is questionable but not their usefulness, not to someone like me, and I submitted Danes’s home phone and cell numbers to one of them.
Not all the preliminary work could be done online; for certain things, I had to pick up the phone. Simone Gautier is an elegant Haitian woman who runs a small detective agency in Forest Hills. She does mostly personal injury and divorce work, but for a reasonable fee Simone will send one of her many day players out to cruise the hospitals and morgues. We agreed to start in the five boroughs and we agreed on a price. I e-mailed Danes’s description to her and faxed her a photograph.
Results would take some time- hours for the search services, days for Simone, and more days for the phone bills- but Danes’s trail on the public search engines was enough to keep me busy in the meanwhile.
Danes had been more or less invisible lately, at least as far as the media was concerned, but before the bubble burst- and immediately afterward- he had been a very public guy indeed. In the perpetual now of the Internet, his fame lived on. I started clicking on links.
Danes’s biography on the Pace-Loyette corporate Web site was terse to the point of mean. It gave his date and place of birth (July 23, 1962, Maplewood, New Jersey), and told of his undergraduate (BS, Cornell) and graduate (MBA, University of Chicago) education, and stated that he’d joined Pace as an analyst in the late eighties. And that was it; there wasn’t even a picture. I kept clicking.
A long derelict investment advice site, iLoveYourMoney. com, carried a head shot and a more expansive version of his biography, probably copied in happier times from the Pace-Loyette site. This edition included a laundry list of Danes’s professional affiliations and the accolades he’d received over the years from the industry and the business press: Tech Analyst of the Year, Top Tech Stock Picker, Most Influential Tech Analyst, New Economy Avatar of the Year… it went on and on.
A more current site, RobberBaronsRedux. com, carried the same bio on a page entitled “Top Pimps.” This account, however, was ironically and brutally annotated, and adorned with a large photo of Danes, digitally enhanced with mustache, goatee, glasses, and devil’s horns. Childish, yes, but I laughed.
I clicked away, and the arc of Danes’s career emerged from a fog of data. He’d started as a computer hardware analyst, initially at a big broker-dealer and then at Pace-Loyette, and never distinguished himself from the legion of other analysts tilling the same soil.
That all changed when he was reassigned to cover what was then a relatively new market sector: computer-networking equipment. The first company he analyzed was a little-known manufacturer of network routers called Biscayne Bay Technologies. When he called Biscayne management’s projection of earnings “cautious to the point of wimpy” and predicted that the company’s share price would triple in six months, reaction ranged from incredulity to ridicule. In fact, it took five months and Biscayne’s shares quadrupled. It was the first in a string of home-run calls.
Danes was the right guy in the right place and time. He saw the coming commercialization of the Internet and understood its implications, both for the tech companies that were making it possible and for companies that could sell their goods and services there. And he had the courage of his convictions. He followed Biscayne Bay with similarly astonishing- and accurate- predictions on Ambient Reasoning, Surfside Search, ColdKarma. com, and a half-dozen other companies. By the late nineties, Danes had made his bones many times over. He was The Man in the tech sector, and his word was enough to move share prices. More importantly, it was enough to ensure a successful IPO.
Danes logged a lot of miles in the late nineties on road trip after road trip with Pace-Loyette investment bankers, pitching the prospects of one tech company after another that Pace was about to take public. A few of those firms would grow into real businesses, with actual products and profits, but most would not, and many were no more than cocktail-napkin doodles, tarted up with PowerPoint. But the Danes imprimatur pulled a lot of weight with investors who, if they didn’t always buy his hype, at least understood the buoyant effect it could have on a newly issued stock.
When the new millennium came, the market, like so much else, turned to lead. And though he had predicted the boom, Danes hadn’t foreseen the bust- or maybe he’d believed that his say-so alone would be enough to prevent it. While share prices plummeted, Danes and a handful of other analysts maintained their crazed enthusiasms, until many of their favorites became penny stocks or vanished altogether.
If the collapse of the market was a surprise to Danes, its aftermath was a whack in the head with a two-by-four. The hopeless tangle of quid pro quos and conflicting interests that bound together investment banks, their corporate clients, and the people who ran those corporations were open secrets on Wall Street. But when the particulars of these arrangements- the bartering of favorable stock ratings, personal loans, and shares of hot IPOs for lucrative investment banking engagements- were dragged out for the public-at-large to see, the public-at-large got sorely pissed off. While analysts hadn’t built the trough or gorged themselves at it as deeply as some, they were wide and obvious targets- and so often painted with convenient bull’s-eyes. The brightest one on Danes’s backside was Piedmont Science and its affable chairman, Denton Ainsley.