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more often via email. But after the fire and all that happened in its wake, my brother and I had stopped talking about unimportant stuff, such as job titles and life facts, and tended more often to discuss feelings and thoughts.
    When you share a tragedy that way, you find yourself living a different sort of bond.
    Once Lydia had given me every piece of information she could find, I thanked her and told her I would call back in about an hour, hopefully with some good news, though deep inside I feared it may be the opposite. My main concern was that the man who broke into my house this morning had confronted my brother in a similar manner last night—but that Bobby hadn’t managed to escape from him the way I had. With that thought in mind, I started my trace by calling the Lancaster and Chester County, Pennsylvania, hospitals, morgues, and police stations to see if they had encountered anyone matching Bobby’s description, dead or alive. The answer was no across the board, so after I had exhausted every possible avenue of that sort, I turned to the data Lydia had given me and began running credit card checks.
    What I found was both interesting and confusing. Judging by his expenditures, Bobby’s day-to-day life, financially speaking, was so predictable, so simple, it was boring just to read about it. Late last night, however, all sorts of strange activity had suddenly taken place with his accounts. From what I could tell, between the hours of ten and eleven p.m., Bobby had made strange ATM withdrawals, rented a car, bought anairline ticket—to Las Vegas of all places—and changed his name, address, and contact information on various bills and accounts all over the map. Either his identity had been stolen and someone else had done all this, or Bobby had done it himself in an attempt to obscure his path and disappear. In my expert opinion, the types of things that had been done seemed to indicate the latter.
    While this maze of hits and misses left me baffled and confused, it also made me feel hopeful. If these transactions were really conducted by Bobby himself, then at least I could conclude that his disappearance had been self-orchestrated. I still didn’t know why he would have done such a thing, but at least that was better than learning he had been the victim of a crime and was lying somewhere unconscious with no one around to help him.
    “Bobby, what’s going on?” I whispered, trying to put myself into his mind-set, wondering what he would do if he found himself in some kind of trouble. Running possibilities around and around in my mind, I initiated an ISP search so that at least I could find the computer of origin, the place where he had been sitting when he made all of those strange computer maneuvers last night.
    As in any good skip trace, diligence and careful research would win out in the end. At least that was what I told myself as I pressed onward, my fingers flying across the keyboard, my heart inching toward despair.

 

SIX
     
     
     
     
    Some digging was required, but in the end it turned out that Bobby had done all of his online activity from an Internet café in Exton, Pennsylvania, last night between ten and eleven p.m. That at least locked him in to a specific place and time. Just to be sure the person at the keyboard had been him and not someone else, I contacted the café and spoke to the manager, who was very accommodating. She had been on duty last night, and she distinctly remembered a man coming in around ten and staying for about an hour. According to her, the guy was “really good looking,” in his early thirties, with curly brown hair and green eyes. She said he had bought a black coffee with an extra shot of espresso, but he was already so tense she couldn’t imagine why he needed it.
    “I thought about talking him out of it,” she said, “like a bartender refusing to serve a drunk, you know? But I figured it was none of my business.”
    “Was he alone?”
    “Far as I could