CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Donovan entered his apartment and sat down at the dining room table, spreading the pages he had taken out of his briefcase in front of him. His manner was one of subdued excitement. It had taken several weeks, dozens of phone calls, and a massive amount of leg work to accumulate the information he was now sifting through.
Initially, the task seemed more than daunting; indeed it had seemed destined for failure through sheer numbers. During the year LuAnn Tyler had disappeared, there had been over seventy thousand scheduled international passenger-aircraft movements at JFK. On the day she presumably fled there had been two hundred flights, or ten per hour, because there had been no flights between one and six A.M. Donovan had whittled down the parameters of his search at JFK to include women between the ages of twenty and thirty traveling on an international flight on the date of the press conference ten years ago, between the hours of seven P.M and one A.M. The press conference had lasted until six-thirty and Donovan doubted she could have made a seven o’clock flight, but the flight could have been delayed, and he wasn’t taking any chances. That meant checking sixty flights and about fifteen thousand passengers. Donovan had learned during his investigation that most airlines kept active records of passengers going back five years. After that the information was archived. His task promised to be easier because most airline records had been computerized in the mid-seventies. However, Donovan had met a stone wall in seeking passenger records from ten years ago. The FBI could get such records, he had been told, but usually only through a subpoena.
Through a contact at the Bureau who owed him a favor, Donovan had been able to pursue his request. Without going into particulars and naming names with his FBI contact, Donovan had been able to convey the precise parameters of his search, including the fact that the person he was seeking had probably been traveling under a newly issued passport and traveling with a baby. That had narrowed things down considerably. Only three people satisfied those very narrow criteria and he was now looking at a list of them together with their last known addresses.
Next, Donovan pulled out his address book. The number he was calling was a firm called Best Data, a well-known national credit check agency. Over the years the company had amassed a large database of names, addresses, and, most important, Social Security numbers. They serviced numerous firms requiring that information, including collection agencies and banks checking up on the credit of potential borrowers. Donovan gave the three names and last known addresses of the people on his list to the person at Best Data, and then provided his credit card number to pay for Best Data’s fee. Within five minutes he was given the Social Security numbers for all three people, their last known addresses, and five “nearbys,” or neighbors’ addresses. He checked those against the records from the airlines. Two of the women had moved, which wasn’t surprising given their ages ten years ago; in the interim they had probably moved on to careers and marriages. One woman, however, had not changed her address. Catherine Savage was still listed as living in Virginia. Donovan called directory assistance in Virginia, but no number came up for that name and address. Undeterred, he next called the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, or DMV, and gave the woman’s name, last known address, and Social Security number, which in Virginia was also the driver’s license number. The person at DMV would only tell Donovan that the woman had a current, valid Virginia driver’s license but would not reveal when it had been issued or the woman’s current address. Unfortunate, but Donovan had chased lots of leads into brick walls in the past. At least he knew she was now living in Virginia or at least had a driver’s license in the commonwealth. The question now was where in the commonwealth might she be? He had ways of finding that out, but decided in the meantime to dig up some more information on the woman’s history.
He returned to the office where he had an on-line account through the newspaper and accessed the Social Security Administration’s PEBES, or Personal Earnings and Benefit Estimate Statement database on the World Wide Web. Donovan was from the old school when it came to research methods, but even he occasionally lumbered out to do some Net surfing. All one needed to find out information on a person was their Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, and the birthplace of the person. Donovan had all of those facts in hand. LuAnn Tyler had been born in Georgia, that he knew for certain. However, the first three digits of the Social Security number he had been given identified Catherine Savage as having been born in Virginia. If LuAnn Tyler and Catherine Savage were one and the same, then Tyler had obtained a phony SSN. It wasn’t all that difficult to do, but he doubted whether the woman would’ve had the connections to do it. The PEBES listed a person’s earnings going back to the early fifties, their contributions to the Social Security fund, and their expected benefits upon retirement based upon those contributions. That was normally what was shown. However, Donovan was looking at a blank screen. Catherine Savage had no history of wage earnings of any kind. LuAnn Tyler had worked, Donovan knew that. Her last job had been at a truck diner. If she had received a paycheck, her employers should have withheld payroll taxes, including amounts for Social Security. Either they hadn’t or LuAnn Tyler didn’t have a Social Security number to begin with. Or both. He called up Best Data again and went through the same process. The answer this time, however, was different. As far as the Social Security Administration was concerned, LuAnn Tyler didn’t exist. She simply did not have a Social Security number. There was no more to be learned here. It was time for Donovan to take some more serious steps.