We were hired by a large multinational company to find a witness to an industrial accident, but had only his name and a long out-of-service telephone number. With databases we found only one piece of information -- a recent address in a southern state which did not come up on MapQuest or in directory assistance.

We called the town’s tax collector who told us the address was a trailer park. The manager of the trailer park informed us the man had left the week before, but when asked told us where the man had been working in the town. Two more phone calls (to the man’s former employer and one of that company’s subcontractors) tracked down the man’s new workplace three states away. We were able to get him on the phone the next day at his place of work. He gave us his new cell phone number (from a state in the Pacific Northwest) but this number did not appear on any database.