Working as an investigator was never in my plans. I never saw myself driving along the coast in red sports car wearing sunglasses at sunset. I had never aspired to be a “P.I.” and never dreamed of sneaking around industrial centers or apartment complexes at night. I had always been disinterested in embezzlers, scammers and con artists. I had never cared about who was cheating on whom.

I never saw any romance in being a private investigator, and after 20 years in the business, I can tell you that pouring through pounds of financial records, examining stacks of court dockets, taking pictures of people eating dinner together and swimming through databases hour after hour is anything but romantic.

Since my days as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army, fact-finding missions have seemed to find their way to me, whether I wanted the assignments or not. I was told that the qualities that make a good infantry officer also make a good investigator: patience, focus, diligence, planning and being flexible. So instead of leading my troops on some foreign mission, doing what I had been trained to do, I often found myself in a boring courtroom or at an intelligence briefing presenting my findings, flipping charts and reading witness testimony aloud.