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receptionist and a personal secretary to the man himself. I hadn’t done any jobs for Security before, but I’d heard of them: a big underwriter who, for a percentage of the moneys saved, would determine if an injury claim was false. And apparently they’d heard of us; Schute wondered if Kirk and Associates could take an assignment on short notice. I allowed as we might.
    “We’ve received a tip about a claimant in a motorcycle accident who’s just moved to the Denver area. We’d like to clean this one up as soon as possible—we’re facing a statute of limitations on it.”
    I said fine and we settled on the fee schedule, and Schute gave me the particulars. One William “Billy” Taylor, who claimed permanently debilitating leg and back injuries as the result of a car-motorcycle collision, had recently left the metropolis of T’s Corner, Virginia, and moved to the Denver area. He was supposed to be looking for work as a roofer.
    “With a bad leg and back?”
    “That’s what we hear from his ex-girlfriend. She’s the one who tipped us off that he submitted a false claim. Now, she may or may not be telling the truth; they had a big fight and she ended up in the hospital, I understand, with a few broken bones and a craving for revenge. But we did have our doctors look at him following the accident, and they suspected then that he was faking it. But you know about back injuries—they can’t be determined with any accuracy, so we went ahead and settled out of court. Christ, the way juries are making awards nowadays, we were afraid to take it to court. Which he knew, of course.”
    “Do you have a local address?”
    Schute gave me all the information he had, which wasn’t that much. Taylor’s mailing address was a rural route near Erie, Colorado, a small town about forty miles north of Denver. His ex-girlfriend said he was staying with some motorcycle buddies there. Schute read off a list of Taylor’s known acquaintances in the Denver area and mentioned Ace Roofing as a possible source of information. “Apparently it’s run by a buddy of Taylor’s who moved out there a couple years ago. After he got off parole.”
    “What was he busted for?”
    “Moonshining. No big thing among local law enforcement in that corner of the state. But the feds get pretty excited about it.”
    “Do you have a description of Taylor?”
    He did, and was delighted to learn my office had a fax machine. A few minutes later, the machine murmured and then beeped the arrival of a three-page police file, which noted that Taylor—thirty-two years old, five eleven, one eighty-five, black hair and blue eyes—was affiliated with a group whose interest in motorcycles was not solely recreational. In fact, it edged into the criminal. Fortunately, I didn’t have to arrest the guy; all I had to do was photograph him on the job or on his motorcycle, thereby demonstrating his ability to lead a normal life. But to do that, I had to find him.
    Erie, Colorado, was named after Erie, Pennsylvania, because of the coal mines that meandered under the surrounding prairies. The seams had played out decades ago, and except for the name of a bar and a handful of relics in local museums, there was no reference to mining anymore, and no one made their living at it. I cruised down the cracked and ragged pavement of the town’s single main street: A small pizza restaurant, a fast-food drive-in, a liquor store, and four or five bars. The rest of the town’s income came from highway maintenance work, school teaching, and, especially, jobs outside the community.
    Aside from a few kids riding bicycles up and down the lone stretch of lumpy pavement, the town seemed deserted. Over many large store windows boards warped from long weathering, and rock facings whose stains hadn’t been blasted for years said the town was a quiet eddy out of the mainstream of progress and development. The dirt streets wandering off between houses implied that was the way the