It was after ten when Virgil got back to his room but he still had work to do before he could sleep. It took a few moments for his laptop to connect to the hotel’s wi-fi and then he began again his seemingly endless search for his vanished child.
Before he left the Marshals’ office in disgrace he copied his partner’s log-on and the passwords for both the Marshals’ computer system and the third-party services like Spokeo, Checkmate and Intelius to which it subscribed. None of those companies, of course, were going to show any results under Helen’s or Nicole’s names, but they were helpful in checking the histories of any potential new identities that he came across. Any candidate whose resume stopped at or shortly before Helen’s disappearance would merit further scrutiny.
Once or twice Virgil thought he might have found them. The first time was when he managed to get a copy of the list of new subscribers for a quilting magazine that Helen had been addicted to before she vanished. He collected the names and addresses of every person, male and female, whose new subscription began between the day Helen disappeared and one year later. Next, he ran those names through the background search sites with the goal of finding two things: (1) a new subscription address that was different from the subject’s pre-disappearance address and (2) a pre-disappearance personal history that was essentially blank.
Two people survived the cut. One turned out to be a woman with a two-million-dollar life insurance policy who had supposedly burned to death in a car crash but was now a million dollars richer and living happily half a continent away from her bereaved, millionaire ex-husband. The second was another woman like Etta Latham, a battered wife who had left everything behind and gone into hiding a month before her criminally-abusive ex-husband was scheduled to be released from prison.
Virgil’s second close call came four years after Helen fled. He had previously checked all new school registrations for children whose birth certificates were outright fakes and had come up empty. Apparently, Helen had cloned the identity of a woman who also had a real daughter close to Nicole’s age. This necessitated a brute-force approach, and Virgil compiled a list of every nine-to-eleven year old female child who had been registered in a new school in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Washington and Oregon in the Fall after Helen disappeared.
He culled all the non-Caucasian children but that still left thousands of possibilities. Next he deleted all the names where the father was listed as living at the same address as the mother and child. That reduced the list to hundreds of names. He checked each of those several hundred mother’s names through death records in each of the fifty states. He was left with seven who showed as deceased.
Three of them turned out to be typos either in the school’s records or in the entry in the corresponding bureau of vital statistics files. One was simply a living person who was wrongly classified as dead. Two more were living people who coincidentally had the exact same names and dates of birth as the dead ones. The last candidate turned out to be a lunatic who had kidnapped the little girl three years before and randomly hopped from state-to-state, school-to-school, whenever her fevered brain got the urge. Virgil notified the FBI who immediately dispatched agents who recovered the child and arrested the phony mother.
Had Helen not stopped in the Western United States? Had she gone on to Kansas, Alabama, Maine? It had been difficult enough running his school-registration search in only seven states. Reproducing it in forty-three more would be impossible.
Or had Helen manufactured a fake husband for the school’s records as well? For a fraction of a second Virgil thought about running the names of all the newly registered girls in the seven states through the birth/death indexes of all fifty states but abandoned the idea for two reasons: firstly, on his own that would take him years, and secondly, the number of positive results it would turn up would be beyond his ability to process. And even if he accomplished all that, when all was said and done, it still might not work.
If Helen had cloned the identity of a still living person such a search would turn up nothing. And if she had settled someplace outside of the seven target states the search would also fail. But he did not give up.
For the first six years after Nicole disappeared, whenever he could steal computer time he continued to troll the school registration lists, new bank account filings, and any other databases that he hoped might provide some trace of Helen and Nicole’s whereabouts, all in vain.
For the last three years Virgil had been thinking about social security numbers. As a child Nicole could get by without one, but as she grew older, eventually she would have to apply. If Helen had cloned the identities of a living mother with a real daughter then at some point the real child and Nicole would both file applications with the social security administration, both using the same date and place of birth, which would immediately raise an alarm. Based on her success so far, Helen was too smart to let something like that happen, which meant that she must have picked a dead child’s name for Nicole to assume.
Since Helen also needed a social security number she was either using the real mother’s social security number or a real number stolen from someone else. Both were risky. If the real person was employed then Social Security would get employer and employee contributions from two different locations and that would trigger a flag.
On the other hand, if Helen was using the social of a random dead person the Social Security Administration fraud division might pick that up which would also trigger an alert, and even if it didn’t, any bank or employer that ran a check on the bogus number would quickly discover that it didn’t match Helen’s new identity. Still, Helen might have decided to take that chance.
Virgil contacted the fraud division of the Social Security Administration and spent several months running down any warning flags that might tie back to his vanished wife, but, again, without success. What did that mean?
It meant, he decided, that Helen was either using the social security number of a dead woman whom the Social Security Administration did not know was dead or she was using the number of a living woman who was not actively employed. It also meant that whoever that woman was she also had a daughter of about the right age who herself had probably died before applying for a social security number. Who would fit those criteria? Virgil asked himself. Women in long-term hospital or psychiatric care and women in prison, he answered.
He decided to start with women in prison. How many women of about the right age had been in long-term confinement nine years ago and who also had had a daughter who would have been nine, ten or eleven at the time that Nicole disappeared? There couldn’t be that many, Virgil figured. Back to the brute force approach.
Since he didn’t know when this mythical woman had been arrested, and he had to allow for the fact that her child could have been born up to a couple of years before or after Nicole’s date of birth, and allowing for the possibility that the child had been conceived before the mother was locked up, the best he could do was go back twelve years before Helen left. In the entire United States how many Caucasian woman had been incarcerated in that twelve year period who were still in jail today?
Once he asked that question Virgil started to comprehend the magnitude of the task he had set for himself. State-by-state, checking both local and federal courts, he slowly compiled a list of women in long-term incarceration. But that was only the beginning. Next he had to track down every name through the birth records of every state’s bureau of vital statistics to discover which of those convicts had had a daughter of about the right age. It took him two more years to create that list and then narrow it down to one-hundred and nine women.
Eleven months ago he had started going through it. Apparently, selling your identity was a popular sideline for female convicts. Sixty-two of the one-hundred-nine social security numbers showed some kind of activity during the period of incarceration, either new bank accounts, full or part-time employment, disability claims, or various other issues and inquiries that made it into the Social Security Administration’s files.
One-by-one Virgil had worked his way down the list. Occasionally, he was able to sweet-talk a local cop into staking-out the subject’s listed place of employment, taking her picture with a camera with a telephoto lens and emailing him the photos. Often they were grainy or badly lighted. Even the clear shots were sometimes hard to rule out.
How much had Helen’s and Nicole’s appearances changed over the years, either by simple aging or through cosmetic means? Would he even recognize a nineteen-year-old young woman as the child who had been ten years old the last time he had seen her? He knew that a parent was supposed to be able to always recognize their child but Virgil feared that he could not, especially since he had no pictures of either of them except for Helen’s old DMV photo.
Then there were the names that turned into dead ends – credit applications long defunct; schools no longer attended; jobs once held years before but no longer valid; often the employer itself was closed and gone. If that wasn’t enough there were the legal barriers.
A bank might know the current address of the person who had opened an account under a particular social security number but it wasn’t going to tell the government where she lived without a court order. Getting one court order half the country away was tough enough. Thirty or forty of them were close to impossible. Still, name-by-name, Virgil slogged through the list. Nineteen down. Forty-three to go. The latest suspect was Kimberly Heister whose last known address was Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania? Would Helen have gone that far? Virgil bounced the question around for a few seconds then moved Kimberly Heister to the bottom of the list. Next was Shirley Rensalier of Bozeman, Montana. Five years ago a potential employer had made a citizenship inquiry. Jesus, Virgil muttered, then started typing.