Do You Know the Monkey Man? by Dori Hillestad Butler Page A

private detective,” I said. “And even if I could, where would I find one who’d work for a thirteen-year-old?”
    “How about online?” Coral suggested. “I bet you could find someone cheap online. And they’d never have to know you’re only thirteen.”
    Hmm. “I never thought of that.”
    “Yeah, but you have to be careful,” Angela said. “There are a lot of scams online.”
    “Plus you’d probably need a credit card to pay for it,” Melissa put in.
    “I have a credit card,” I said.
    “You have a credit card?” Melissa raised an eyebrow.
    “Well, sort of. My mom got me a debit card a few months ago and told me I could use it for an emergency.”
    “This isn’t an emergency,” Angela said.
    It was as far as I was concerned. Okay, maybe it wasn’t the kind of emergency my mom had in mind. But if that card would help me find my dad, I was willing to use it.
    I turned to Coral. “How do you find a detective online?”
    “We get ads for them all the time in our junk e-mail. Don’t you?”
    “I don’t think so. Could we go over to your house and look at those ads? See if we can find someone to hire?”
    Coral squinted at me. “Right now?”
    I glanced at my watch. “Sure. We don’t have softball for almost two hours.”
    “You’re serious about this?” Angela asked. “Don’t you think you’re getting a little carried away? How are you going to explain the charge to your mom when she sees her bank statement?”
    I shrugged. “I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
    “Well, count me out,” Angela said, getting up and turning over on her towel. “Our moms talk, you know. If my mom finds out about this, I’ll probably end up in just as much trouble as you.”
    I rolled my eyes. “I’m not going to get in trouble!”
    “Right,” Angela said.
    “I’ll pass, too,” Melissa said, stretching out on her chair. “I need to tan at least twenty minutes on this side or I’ll be uneven.”
    Coral sat up in her chair. “Well, I’m done with the rays. So if you want to come over to my house right now, I don’t mind leaving.”
    Angela shook her head with disapproval. But I didn’t see what the big deal was. My mom probably wouldn’t even notice the charge. And if she did, well, I’d pay her back.
    So Coral and I gathered up our stuff, picked up our pool passes, and biked down the street to her house.
    When we got there, her little brother and three of his friends were hunched around the computer in the family room. And her mother was using the computer in the kitchen. But there was a third computer upstairs, in Coral’s bedroom. I swear, these people had more computers than people in their family.
    “All our computers are networked, so we can still get into my dad’s e-mail files from here,” Coral said as she booted up her computer.
    She grabbed the mouse and opened the e-mail program. She clicked a couple more times and a list of e-mail messages filled the screen.
    Coral scanned the list. “Here we go.” She clicked on a line that read “Find anyone, anywhere. Guaranteed!”
    “Do you think that’s a good one?”
    Coral shrugged. “Let’s check out his website.” She double-clicked on the link and a website came up.
    “Whoa. He charges seventy-nine ninety-nine,” Coral said.
    I just about choked. “That’s a little much to put on my mom’s debit card.”
    “I think we can do better than that,” Coral said. She pulled up a search engine and typed in “find anyone.” There were thousands of matches. But Coral went right down the list, clicking from one website to another so fast she made my head spin.
    Finally she stopped. “This one looks pretty good.”
    “Hey, they even tell you how they find people.” I read the list out loud. “‘Motor vehicle registration records, voter registration records, national telephone listings, property ownership records, consumer credit reporting agencies, magazine subscription databases, pilot licenses, and more.’