Krista Pavey has a black eye.
The bruise peeks out from beneath a careful layer of makeup applied as a disguise, framed by hoops in Pavey’s ears and a nose ring. Is it from a surveillance job gone wrong, an unfaithful husband catching a glint of a camera lens from across a seedy motel parking lot at 4:00am? Or did a client-turned-stalker, on the prowl for months, finally carry out threats conveyed in hundreds of maniacal texts? No. Pavey, AKA SpyGirl, 53, is armed—learning to carry a weapon was part of the private detective training she completed 13 years ago—but the shiner is unrelated to her job. It’s from botox.
A girl’s got to keep up appearances.
It’s a typical day, calls and emails from home through the morning, then downtown at lunchtime to an office near Cain’s Ballroom, and if you want to know exactly where you can sleuth that out for yourself, pal. By design, the office has a noir vibe: a couple of codes to get into a cavernous foyer, precipitous stairs up to another code door, then a dusky hallway to a room with walls on the brown side of maroon, two candles flickering, a couch, and a desk with a magnifying glass laid out as decoration, but no Meerschaum pipe. There are framed quotes—“Well-behaved Women Rarely Make History,” “Nevertheless, She Persisted”— and shelved books: The Art of War for Women, The Gift of Fear, Fight Like a Girl and Win. For creature comforts, the room has a small flat screen TV, a coffee maker, a microwave and minifridge, and, portentously in a corner, several crystal flasks filled with amber liquors that Pavey is happy to offer to casual visitors, along with a ball of sphere ice.
Her work fills 53 Black & Red notebooks, but only a few lay open on the desk for the day’s efforts, glowing under an old-timey Edison bulb.
All morning she’s been getting texts from an actor on a popular Netflix show whose likeness has been stolen for a catfishing scheme. A 76-year-old woman believes she’s in a relationship with the man—she’s not—and now the actor, the real actor, is trying to set things right. Only a small portion of Pavey’s business these days is uncovering these schemes, but it’s enough that she’s developed a script for how to break the news.
For these cases, Pavey charges less than her usual rate, with a surcharge if it’s dangerous, even though it’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re solving a catfish case or are a part of one. Once, Pavey found the likeness of a catfisher in a random Swedish catalog. Most victims get suspicious after they’ve been bilked out of around $20,000, but sometimes it’s more. One guy lost his home and his business, and was living out of his truck until his catfisher convinced him to sell that, too.