He Found His Niche Finding Missing Persons : From its main office in San Clemente, Pat Rutherford’s Worldwide Tracers tracks as many as 800 cases a year.

He is a short guy in a purple sweater in an office about the size of your average bathroom, only better-decorated.

He has a phone stuck in one ear, and in a soft Texas twang, he’s telling someone “the McDonald’s was a pretty good lead.

“But she’s probably with her pimp now.”

Pat Rutherford, 68, spends most days at Worldwide Tracers like this, packed into his tiny office in San Clemente, tracking down missing persons.

You might expect someone like him to be a little hard-boiled--keep a bottle of rye in the desk drawer, say. Instead, with his white beard and generous stomach, he is more grandfatherly than menacing.

On the wall behind him is a window-sized collage of dozens of snapshots--some of the people Rutherford has found.

Some of them would just as soon have remained missing--men who had abandoned their families, for instance. “That’s one of our specials,” says Rutherford, married 50 years and, indeed, a great-grandfather. “We like to quote people a real good price on those.”

Other snapshots are of mothers who gave babies up for adoption long ago; through Rutherford, they have been reunited with their adult children. Some were runaway teen-agers, like the 16-year-old who was last seen at a McDonald’s restaurant.

Most of the faces look happy; a few still look haunted. One, an ex-cop from Los Angeles, was tracked by Rutherford to a ghetto in Washington, D.C. The man told Rutherford he didn’t want to talk to his family. Now he has disappeared again.

Rutherford’s history, as he relates it, is almost as colorful as one of his cases: He was running a company in his native Texas that made parts for bombs during the Vietnam War. About that time he found religion, sold his stock and quit.

For a while, he was retired in Hawaii, “lying around eating everything in sight,” he says. “I put on 70 pounds in four or five months.”

Then a friend sent him a book on tracking down people who were owed money by the government. He tried that and turned out to be good at it. Worldwide Tracers followed in 1982.

This is the type of business--lucky for Rutherford--that draws publicity like a magnet. Stints on most of the local TV shows, plus national shows like “Oprah,” “48 Hours” and Sally Jesse Raphael’s over the past five years or so have brought a lot of business through the door.

Worldwide Tracers’ main office is on a San Clemente hillside in a three-story stucco building populated by podiatrists, insurance salespeople and other businesses.

Worldwide will handle as many as 800 cases a year, Rutherford says, and the business will bring in $500,000 this year. As much as a fifth of that is profit, though Rutherford says he plows most of it back into the business. “It’s a good thing I don’t have to do this to eat,” he says.

A missing persons case usually costs a client a flat fee of $250. Tracking down a birth parent is $400. Runaways might run as much as $1,200. For that, the client gets a search that these days is more high-technology than old-fashioned flat-footed shoe leather.

Starting with just a name, for instance, Rutherford can go through one of the credit bureaus to get a social security number. The rest of a person’s credit history is ostensibly off-limits to people like private investigators, though that information has been known to leak out.

That’s how Rutherford found a guy who walked out of his family’s house in New England in 1977 as a young man and was never heard from again. So desperate was he to get lost that he changed his name and even got a new social security number.

Recently, though, the man used the old number again, and Rutherford--hired by the man’s dying mother--tracked him across several electronic databases to San Francisco. The man had the AIDS virus. Rutherford talked him into going home to see his mother a last time.

Sometimes, though, he still has to use shoe leather, such as when a runaway’s friends have to be asked about where the youngster went. That’s when Rutherford’s four or five young workers--some of whom can pass for high-school students--come in handy.

“No high school kid is going to talk to an old guy with a white beard like me,” he says.

His young cadre will never get rich at his company, though. Even his most gifted tracers make no more than $1,600 or so a month. Most are getting enough experience to get their own private investigator’s license.

Rutherford has made only one customer unhappy enough to complain about the service to the state Department of Consumer Affairs, which labeled the incident a minor transgression. The client’s fee was refunded. Two entries aren’t unusual for a company in business 11 years, the state said.

The future looks pretty good. Rutherford brings out a letter from TV producer Dick Clark. The producer may want Rutherford to track down missing people, whom Clark can then reunite with their families on camera.

“That,” says Rutherford, “is my favorite part of the business.”