How are you searching? An eyeball search, or a grep search? You could be grepping for my %CONTACTS in code that uses our %CONTACTS, or my (%CONTACTS), or %Foo::CONTACTS = (...), or use vars qw/%CONTACTS/;. Lots of search terms that could apply.

Maybe this is code that uses tie to tie %CONTACTS to a database.

At the top level of your code's directory structure try:

...and see what you get. It could be nothing. But since nothing else has worked out yet, it doesn't hurt to try.