“Billy, my main man.” Jimbo puts on a terrible Rastafarian accent. “You want a toke my brother?” He offers me a puff on the joint, but I say no, and instead I go off to bed.
Chapter Fifteen
But I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m still buzzing and I want to do some research. Even though Eric told me I mustn’t talk about the Lily-Palace, he didn’t say I couldn’t Google it. So that’s what I’m going to do.
I’ve got quite a good set up here, computer-wise. I have my laptop, and I bought a separate monitor after I arrived, quite a big one too, because I’m going to have to do work here at some point and I like to work on two screens. And I thought it would make me feel more at home.
So anyway, I minimize everything else I’m working on and open up a couple of new web-browsers – Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and Mozilla Firefox – you get different results on different platforms, so it’s worth trying lots. Then I start typing in some of the terms I picked up earlier, hoping to get Lily’s surname, so I can find out more about her. But it’s harder than I expected. Either they were careful not to actually say anything that would let me find her online, or I was just a bit too excited about everything that was happening. Actually the latter is the most likely.
So then I remember that Lily texted me, which means I’ve got her cell phone number. I’ve tracked people this way plenty of times. Sometimes people put their phone number online, like in a Facebook post or something, so you can get them that way – which is pretty dumb, so I’m almost pleased when I see she hasn’t. And anyway it’s not a problem, it’s fairly easy to access the database listings from the various phone companies. It is a little bit illegal though, so I hop onto the dark web to do it where I won’t be tracked by bots. And it takes a little time too, because it’s not like there’s one centralized database of everyone’s phone records. It’s more that lots of different hackers have cracked the records from each of the major companies at different times. So you have to search through all of them one by one. Plus they’re not always up to date, meaning if her number is newly assigned, then it won’t be on there. Anyway – long story short, after a bit of digging around (if you really want to know I wrote a short program that creates a lookup table and ran that to automate the job), I discover it’s not there. Her phone number isn’t on any of the major networks used in the States. This is odd, and I don’t know what it means, but I move on.
I try with the address now. I know where it is, obviously, but I don’t know who owns it, other than it’s Lily’s Grandfather, or she says it is. But it’s such an amazing place, there’s got to be something about it online. One of the easiest ways to find out who owns a property is to see who’s paying taxes on it, which you can find out through the local tax assessor’s office. They usually have a website, and all you need is the address, and a bit of patience, because they’re not the best websites. Annoyingly however, in the case of this tax office they also want you to pay a fee of a hundred dollars, and – get this – go down in person to pay it because they haven’t even set up an online payment portal. And even if I was going to pay them (which I’m not) they’re not open at – what time is it now? Three in the morning. Never mind. I’ll check the County Records instead.
In most States the deeds and title documents of all buildings are publicly available. I have to hold my breath a bit when I check if that’s true here, but I’m pleased to see it is, and there’s no fee either. So then I enter the address and see what’s listed, only to find a new problem. The records are only digitized back to the 1960’s, and clearly Lily’s Grandfather’s house was built before then. So it’s not listed on the indexed part of the site. It’ll still be there, but I’ll have to look through images of scanned in handwritten records. I am actually getting frustrated now.
It takes me another hour to figure out that they’ve organized it on a map basis. You have to find which grid square the street you’re looking for is on their map, and then you can look through all the records for that square. Because it’s a city, there’s quite a lot of records, and you can’t search them because it’s just an image of a handwritten ledger. But eventually I find the correct square, and the correct street and there it is – Lily’s address. Only there isn’t anything listed against it. For some reason, while every other address has a neat handwritten block of text giving the deed-holder, for Lily’s address there’s nothing given. This is really odd. So I hop back onto the dark web and run a couple of searches for what this might mean, but I can’t find anything, so in the end I leave the question on a message board and log off. These message boards, they’re full of mega geeks who are totally into all this stuff. There should be an answer in the morning.
So that done, I log off and this time I actually go to sleep.
Chapter Sixteen
There’s an answer waiting for me when I wake up, quite early as I have a nine o’clock lecture. I have to read
