David Coe: Spell Blind

Ask most people to point at the moon, and they’ll lift their gaze skyward, trying to locate it. Ask the same of a weremyste like me, and we don’t have to search for it. We know where it is. Always, and precisely. As it waxes full, we can feel it robbing us of our sanity and enhancing the strength of our magic. Like ocean tides, our minds and our runecraft are subject to its pull.

I was on the interstate cutting across the outskirts of Phoenix, and already I could feel the moon tugging at my thoughts, subtle and light, but as insistent as a curious child. Three hours before today’s moonrise, nearly a week before it would wax full, and its touch was as real to me as the leather steering wheel against my palms, the rush of the morning desert air on my face and neck.

I sensed the reservoir of power within me responding to its caress, like water to gravity. And I felt as well the madman lurking inside my head, coaxing the moon toward full, desperate to be free again.

I had five days.

And in the meantime, I had work to do.

Work for me means investigating. Once it meant being a detective for the Phoenix Police Department, but those days are gone. I was on the job for six years and eight months. The day I turned in my badge was, next to the day twenty years ago when my mother died, the worst of my life. Still, when I look in the mirror, I see a cop, a detective. I’ve heard it said among cops that once you’re on the job, you’re never really off. Some things are like that, they’ll tell you. Some things get in your blood and that’s it. You’re never the same.

But being an ex-cop doesn’t pay a lot of bills and after wallowing in self-pity for a while, I realized that wasn’t much of a living either. So I hung out my shingle, went the ex-cop-becomes-private-investigator route. It’s been done before, more often than not by ex-cops who are smarter than I am. But I have certain skills that paying customers find useful.

For the past year I’ve been owner, president, and principal investigator for Justis Fearsson Investigations, Incorporated, a one-man operation here in Phoenix. I’ve even got an ad in the phone book with my picture on it. I was going to make up a logo, but a friend-my old partner-said that I should use the photo instead.

“You’re not unattractive for a white guy,” she told me at the time. “That could work to your advantage.”

So there I am in the yellow pages, smiling out from a quarter-page ad. My hair is sticking up all over the place, and the beard and mustache give me an unseemly look, but overall the picture isn’t terrible. I have a website, too, but I haven’t done much with it. I keep meaning to, but I don’t get a whole lot of free time.

I had a rough go of it at first, trying to figure out how to run a business, how to know which cases to take. I turned to other former cops for advice, but soon learned that a good number of them didn’t have any more sense of what they were doing than I did. Most of them were just scraping by-many were getting drunk before noon and staying that way until quitting time, which is likely why they had to leave the force in the first place. I read a couple of books and visited a bunch of websites, scanning articles for tips, but they weren’t too helpful either. So, in the end I chose to teach myself.

Television shows about PIs make the profession out to be glamorous. It’s not. In a lot of ways it’s similar to being a cop. Cleaning up other people’s messes. That’s what Kona Shaw, my partner on the force, used to call what we did. And that’s what I still do now. Except instead of working crime scenes, I work on the quieter cases, the ones people don’t read about in newspapers or see on the late news. Early on I tried to stick to investigating insurance claims, and helping corporate clients identify employees who were spying for competitors or stealing inventory off of delivery trucks. It wasn’t exciting work, but it got me started, paid off most of my debts, and allowed me to move the operation out of my home and into an office not far from where I live.

From the start, I tried to avoid the peeking-through-the-bedroom-window stuff. But PIs can’t avoid the messier cases entirely, no matter how much we hate them. After following a cheating husband for several nights, or tracking down a runaway kid, or having to show a guy pictures of his wife and his best friend as they check into a motel on the outskirts of town, that work gets old. It’s depressing as hell. It pays well, and God knows there’s plenty of it, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that the kid ran away because the parents were a nightmare, or the woman was cheating because her husband was a jerk. Most of the time, there are no good guys. I don’t like that.

But the corporate cases have been few and far between, and working for the insurance companies isn’t exactly a picnic. In the end, I had little choice but to go back to the personal cases. Which is how I found myself steering the Z-ster, my silver 1977 280Z, into a part of Phoenix’s South Mountain precinct I never should have taken her to in the first place.

Two weeks ago I had been hired by Michael and Sissy Tyler to track down their teenage daughter, Jessie, who ran away from home. Tyler was one of the city’s better-known businessmen. He had made a killing in the tech sector a few years back and wound up on the covers of magazines. He and his family lived in the Pinnacle Peak section of North Scottsdale, in a house that I might have been able to afford in twenty years if I scrimped and saved and gave up a few luxuries-you know, like food and shelter. Teenage runaways from homes of the rich and powerful are like private investigator cliches; we see them a lot. More often than not the kid winds up spending a night or two at a friend’s house before returning to Mom and Dad.

Jessie’s case was different. First, none of her friends knew where she’d gone. Second, she’d taken her wallet and had, within four or five days of her disappearance, used her ATM card to clean out the checking account her parents had set up for her: to the tune of about six thousand dollars. A couple of thousand of it went in cash and another three grand in purchases at stores all over the Phoenix/Scottsdale area. Nearly one thousand dollars had vanished without explanation, which made me wonder if she had hooked up with a myste. But all of it was gone. And third, according to her friends, her younger sister, and her parents, Jessie had been showing signs of what most folks in law enforcement and social services would call “self-destructive behavior.” She was breaking rules at home and at school; she had gone from being a solid “B” student to flunking half her classes; and, though Mom and Dad were still in denial about this, the evidence I’d found suggested that she was experimenting with a variety of drugs. All she needed to complete the picture was the manipulative, perhaps even abusive boyfriend.

Early on in the case, I would have bet every dollar in my pocket that she had found him, and that he was the reason she’d left home.

It took me longer than usual to track her down, but eventually I found an addict who used to do some informing for me when I was with the PPD and who thought he had seen her near Esteban Park. I went to check out that lead, and found a second guy, another ex-cop as it happens, who had heard someone talking about a strung-out rich girl throwing money around in that part of town. I traced her to an abandoned building about a mile south of the Phoenix airport, in the growling shadows of Interstate 10. The building-an old service station garage-had become a den for users of Spark, a powerful and addictive hallucinogenic grown in the desert, which has become a Phoenix specialty for drug dealers and their clientele. I think it’s nice when a local industry can expand and prosper.