JM02 - Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home by Peter Spiegelman Read Free Book Online Page A

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