Undercover

FOR Philip Marlowe, life as a private eye mostly involved tracking down dames; for today's private investigators, forensic accounting is about as sexy as it gets. Kroll Associates, the world's leading investigative and risk-management firm, is living proof that sleuthing is not what it was. On April 1st, after striving in vain to wed a big accountancy company, Kroll agreed to be bought for an undisclosed sum by Insurance Services Group (ISG), a division of Equifax, America's largest provider of credit and insurance data. Why was Kroll so eager to track down such a pedestrian sort of business partner?