Terri Russell is a pistol-packing private eye and a grandmother of six.

She’s the owner of Russell Investigations, an all-woman, licensed private investigation firm based out of her home in a wooded, rural area near Lake City.

The tools of her trade — walkie-talkies, binoculars, a camera and various high-tech gizmos — line the shelves of her small office.

“I’m always packing a pistol,’’ Russell said. “Some people just don’t like to get busted, especially in workman’s compensation cases.’’

If there’s another company quite like hers in the area, she hasn’t heard about it, Russell said.

Her co-workers are two women from Knoxville who want to remain in the background. “They don’t want people knowing they’re investigators,’’ she said.

As a P.I., Russell is trained to ferret out facts by combing through courthouse documents, work records and the Internet, and tracking down leads.

She’s snooped on cheating spouses, filming them as they smooch with their paramours in public and then going into a motel room together.

She’s videotaped people who have filed workers’ compensation insurance claims for bad backs as they lift heavy items and climb ladders.

She’s shadowed a man and his son on a vacation out West for an ex-wife who suspected child abuse but was proven wrong. “I followed him for eight days, and he never saw me,’’ Russell said.

Now she’s working on a case where police have ruled a slaying an accident while the victim’s parents insist it was murder.

If there’s a key quality for a good private eye, it’s patience, Russell said.

“You’ve got to like what you do,” she said. “You can’t sit on an eight-hour surveillance and not like what you’re doing.”

She relishes the workers’ comp cases the most, she said. Hired by lawyers who are retained by companies, she gets the goods on people trying to defraud the system.

“For somebody to fraudulently hurt their company, it hurts all of us,’’ she said of those scams.

Russell, 46, is a former restaurant owner and manager. As the years started to take their toll, she decided it was time for a career change.

“At my age, who wants to be on their feet 14, 16 hours a day?”

She graduated with a degree in criminal justice from Lincoln Memorial University and hung out her private eye shingle last December.

Most of the people she follows and films “are usually doing things they shouldn’t be doing,” she said.

But Russell has also tracked down missing people. One client was a woman who hadn’t seen her daughter since she was 5 years old.

“She’s 16 now,’’ Russell said. “We found her working at a Wendy’s in Knoxville.”