I was a homicide detective for the NYPD for just over 16 years. 16 years of misery, pain, and death daily. I wish I could say that getting a conviction for a suspect and putting the cuffs on could be satisfying but..it wasn't. In my first year of the job, we bagged a guy who had killed 2 tourists just to take a few dollars out of their wallets. That same guy took a plead deal, did just 14 years, and was out the second to last year of my time working for the Detectives Beau, I think that's when I decided I had just about had enough. As a homicide detective, you want to get murderers out of the streets for good. Not to just delay the whole cycle of violence by just a decade or so, I felt useless, like I was just a cog in a machine that didn't work properly.
Then about a year before I put my papers in I had spoken to an old partner of mine who had become an independent investigator down in Miami, He said that it was the best decision he had ever made. He was raking in 3 times the salary without doing any of the serious dirty work that made homicide detecting almost unbearable. He also mentioned that if you get a good reputation for delivering on investigations or if people hear you are an ex-cop that the job offers come so thick and fast that you can pretty much just cherry-pick the jobs that you want while naming your price.
By that time I was divorced, had grown up kids in college across the country, so there wasn't anything tying me to New York City anymore, So once I finished my job at the NYPD I picked out an apartment in Miami, Caught a flight to Florida and started my new life down in the sunshine state. I started by doing the jobs that my ex-partner couldn't find the time for. He'd get a call and have to turn the person away but would give them the ole' "I can't do it but I know a guy ex- NYPD like me, solid worker, smart and diligent". Time after time this gave me, well-payed P.I work that mostly consisted of insurance, and personal liability stuff, basically if someone made a personal injury claim against an individual or company, I'd follow them around a little to make sure the injury was genuine and that they weren't hitting up the gym in their spare time, but there was another kind of job that accounted for the great deal that we did, and that was suspected infidelity, A wife or husband would get in contact with us and say that they believed that their spouse was having an affair, we would then follow the suspect around for a while, tracking their movements whenever they weren't at the family home, to see if they were seeing someone else on the side, and depressingly, more often than not, the suspicious party's gut feeling, was correct. We would catch them sneaking into some apartment complex with a bottle of wine, just to leave the next morning with a certain glow about them, if you catch my meaning. In other cases, it was much more difficult and requires steak-outs and this kind of call turned out to be one of the most disturbing and terrifying cases I have ever worked on.
One morning, my ex-partner gives me a call and tells me that he'd passed my contact information onto a woman who suspected her husband of having an affair. When she called she gave me the usual spiel of how he was disappearing for in-ordinance amounts of time, and accounts of his whereabouts were inconsistent and how their intimate life had dropped off entirely over the previous few months. To me, it seemed like an open and shut case, all I had to do was obtain the necessary photographic evidence, maybe snag some audio the husband made to his mysterious side piece and then collect my fee. Whilst on the phone with the woman in question, who I will keep anonyms for reason that will become clear. I made a note on all of her husband's hobbies, habits, and where abouts before I got to work tailing him, One of the woman's main complaints was that her husband was coming home particularly late on certain nights of the week, then disappearing on weekends, he would claim to be at a certain place, like a bar for example and then the wife would call only to find out that he wasn't there. It was a Sunday afternoon when I had tailed him from his home into the city, I thought I had him straight away when he pulled into the side of this house peering around like a rabbit peeking out of its den, looking guilty as anything, he rang the doorbell of the house, I got my camera ready to snap pictures of whoever was about to answer, assuming it would be his paramour, only it wasn't a woman at all, it was a man that he appeared to be rather friendly with, it wouldn't be the first time that I had discovered that the man or woman had yet to come out of the closet still so to speak, affairs didn't always happen with members of the opposite sex, but when I showed the wife the pictures she said that the man was a close friend of his. This all added up, given to my knowledge, all they had done was sat down and watched the dolphins game on TV, but I did see the friend drinking beer and talking to another woman who I suspected might have been the cheater, so I thought this was a dead lead. I carried on tailing the husband for about 3 weeks, aside from a handful of occasions where he would visit relatives or go drinking with work buddies. He would only go visit this friend on those days of the unexplained absences, from what I could tell from spying through a little crack in the curtains, the pair would drink and few beers, watch a game together, nothing remotely objectionable. I tried to explain to the guy's wife that it was all seemingly innocent and that I hadn't caught him doing anything remotely sleazy, but she wasn't buying it. She told me her husband had been acting weirder and weirder recently, that he had started saying some pretty gross things in his sleep as if he were talking to a lover or something when I told her I had come to a pretty solid conclusion one which didn't involve him cheating at all, and that I couldn't continue the investigation in good conscious, she offered me 50% extra to investigate for 2 more weeks, at the time I didn't want to take her money, it would be morally unsound for me to keep mining her for cash and it could end up ruining my good reputation in the process, but something about her please made me take pity on her, that and she didn't strike me as the paranoid type, she insisted that there was something to her suspicions and that she could keep paying me or she would try someone else and that about sealed it. I told her I would work the case for 2 more weeks but after that, she would be on her own. The next time I tailed him, it was a weeknight, one of which I had followed him from his downtown office job about to the residence where his friend was, I figured it would be another night of silence, watching sports on someone else's tv through a crack in the curtains, only this time, the guy didn't quite close them all the way so I had a much better view of the room that they were in, but after the man went into the living room to say hello, he shortly went into another part of the house, at least that's what I assume he did because he didn't appear in the living room for another 2 hours, and after this, I realized that all those other times I had been here, he was doing the same pattern of behavior of disappearing into another room for 2 hours, id assume he was watching tv with his buddy..but only, he wasn't, the buddy was talking to someone on speakerphone. I'd made a huge error of judgment, something weird was indeed going on in that house and it was something confirmed suspicious as the husband walked out of the house in a state of undress, his tie was off, his shirt was untucked and like something out of a bad movie, he'd forgotten to zip his fly back up. The next time I followed the husband to that house I brought what is known as a parabolic microphone that had an attached recorder, this was a special kind of mic that uses a satellite dish to collect soundwaves, they don't always produce the best audio even expensive ones like mine, but they can be very effective at eavesdropping on distant conversations, so when the husband arrived at the house I grabbed my mic and listened in for anything incriminating, this is when the plot started to thicken as they say, from what I could gather, the husband arrives, he and his buddy have a little small talk and then there is a cash amount exchanged, with the husband giving his buddy a sizeable amount of cash before heading off into another room. Again after a few hours the husband reappears sounding pretty well blissed out, the 2 guys make small talk again, and then the husband leaves. My first thought was that it was some type of drug situation, that the husband was using his friends place to do heroin or something along those lines, the only thing I could do to confirm my suspicions was to stake the place out and see who else came and went, that way I would know for certain that there was some sort of drug-type situation occurring or if it was something more insidious, low and behold, the house was receiving guests multiple times during all hours of the day and night. Each time there would be an exchange of cash before the visitor would head off into another room, but during one visit ii heard something that might have been my ticket of finally finding out what was going on in that house, one of the visitors tells the homeowner through a series of implications that they had a friend who was interested in stopping by to partake in their services the guy was offering, the homeowner tells him to pass on his address but not to use any cell phones, ever and then gives him a codeword to use to make sure it wasn't the cops.
Bingo.
I had my way in
All it would take was a look around the house to see what my client's husband was doing when he was over there, I thought it was something shameful, something sleazy, but I don't think I could've ever prepared myself for what I was about to find. I waited a couple of hours before I had made my move, making sure no one else was visiting and timing it right to make sure I wasn't suspicious, so I walked up to the house, rang the doorbell, and then gave the homeowner the story of having been referred by the previous visitor along with the codeword, he seems a little cautious at first but then lets me into the house, showing me into the tv room then asks for 300 dollars in cash before telling me to wait there while he got stuff ready for me. I'm still under the impression that this place was some sort of drug house and that maybe he was going to clean up some puke in another room, perhaps get some clean needles or something. My suspicions I had thought to be confirmed when he shortly entered back into the room asking if I was ready while taking off a pair of gloves. I follow him down a hallway and pick up the smell of cleaning products on the air around him, but when he showed me into the room where I assumed all the other visitors paid to be inside, my jaw almost hit the floor. The interior almost looked like a slaughterhouse, there was a huge animal cage with a lot of household animals and other pets inside, like cats, smaller breeds of dogs, guinea pigs, chickens, rodent-like creatures, and there must have been at least 20-30 different types of animals locked away in there, then in the center of the room there was a large wooden table, stained with blood and on it sat all types of kitchen tools and utensils, like I said I had assumed it was a drug house I had no idea that this is what I was, that my client had assumed her husband of cheating only to find out that he got off on killing small animals. Even during my time at the NYP, humans taking other human's lives were bad enough, but human beings taking the lives of small, innocent animals for what appeared to be some sort of twisted gratification, was something I have struggled to get out of my mind. I took some pictures of the interior of the room then immediately left the house to call the police, and as far as I know, the homeowner is facing charges for animal cruelty and going to serve time in prison, but this was before they made animal cruelty a federal offense so the guy won't be getting as much time as I'd like him to. I showed them pictures of the kill room to my client with a strong recommendation that she move out of the house and file for divorce as soon as possible. I explained that more often than not, people often graduate from hurting animals to hurting human beings at some point and I strongly suspected that her life would be in danger if she chose to stay with him.
