When Your Surveillance Subject Turns Up Deceased

The week before Christmas, I was hired to find a guy who’d absconded from a drug-addled history with the state of Idaho. Database searches had been leading nowhere for my client, so I was called to surveil the man’s last known address, corroborate his absenteeism, and canvas the neighborhood for leads. This type of case, “finding somebody,” is frequent — and always interesting to me, since the premise of the casework is both literal and existential: Where does a man go, after deciding to leave?

In 1990s’ movies and novels that affected my aesthetic, men and women flee an existence in search of either peace or adventure, escaping either violence or its cinematic opposite, boredom. The road between here and salvation is usually a lonely desert full of creeps and sex addicts, with the promise of an ocean on the other side. In my experience as a private investigator, the storyline for fugitives from place or lifestyle hasn’t much changed.

It was thirty-two degrees an hour before sunrise when I parked my vehicle in an upscale neighborhood of townhomes, cut the engine and set my surveillance camera on a monopod gripped to the dashboard. For three hours, I stared at a two-inch monitor and watched the stars fade away, the sky turn dirty blue, the frost on rooftops sparkle like methamphetamine across the coffee tables of my subject’s last thirty years.

Field work tells you what it wants you to do. The client has a hunch, but strategies can change quickly when boots hit the ground. The neighborhood seemed magazine quality, too polished for my subject to be living in, too ornamental for his particular brand of darkness to be comforted by. I knew this because I was similar inside.

Intuition is a valuable investment property; the earlier you buy into it, the richer you get. My ghost brain was telling me that my subject had never hung his clothes in the home I’d been surveilling, only used it as a mailing address, numbers to put on a Cash for Car Title application, a black hole for creditor demands. Of the hundreds of people I’ve investigated, nearly half had a mailbox to Nowhere.

I briefly and unfruitfully canvassed the neighborhood, then returned to my base and immediately ran a death records search.

What I discovered was that the subject, a white male in his sixties, had recently perished in a small motel room in coastal California, having crossed the desert and found his ocean, alas—and yet alone. The cause of death was suicide by gunshot wound to the head.

The death certificate even had the room number of the motel, which I Google-Imaged: Outside, a rectangular swimming pool sparkled with the same pastel undertones of green and blue that have accompanied all swimming pools, forever. Palm trees stood guard, the pool in the shape of a grave for the lost, who leave us.

I have always wanted to run to the ocean. There’s a landlocked inversion in my head sometimes, not mental illness but like woodsmoke or smog that settles into the eyes a few times each winter. The story goes that seaside there is balance, the burn drifting away, the smell of saltwater as thick as cotton candy in the air. Everything, even loneliness, just melts on your tongue. And yet always the question is both literal and existential: Where does a man go, after deciding to leave?

When diving, how deep is the pool?