Caren Chancey had just settled into a bath with a crossword puzzle when she realized she didn’t have a pen. Her lover’s briefcase was leaning against the tub, so Chancey reached into it. But, instead of a pen, she pulled out a couple of Hallmark cards. The cards, covered in pastel colors and sentimental mush, were of the lovey-dovey variety. Chancey slipped the cards back into her lover’s satchel and returned to her soak, happily wondering when she would receive the love letters.

Several days passed and the cards never arrived. So, in the grand tradition of suspicious spouses everywhere, Chancey started to snoop. She rifled through her lover’s credit-card receipts and found charges for bouquets of flowers and dinners at romantic restaurants. She reviewed her girlfriend’s phone records and discovered calls placed in the middle of the night to a strange number. After a week of sleuthing, Chancey gathered all the evidence against her girlfriend and laid it out neatly on a table. She highlighted the incriminating details in yellow so that they would scream out at her lover when she returned home from work.

Chancey’s girlfriend had made two very stupid mistakes. The first was to have an affair. The second was to think that she could hide it from Chancey, a private investigator who makes her living outfoxing the morally corrupt.

Chancey, 34, owns a private investigation firm in northern Virginia and is no one’s idea of a hard-boiled detective. She does not speak in the tough vernacular of the grizzled guys who overpopulate her field. (Chancey refused this reporter’s repeated attempts to bait her into using the words “broad,” “dame” or “private dick.”) And, on stakeouts, she often disguises herself to look like a teenage boy.

But with a name like Caren Chancey, which could have been ripped out of the pages of Mickey Spillane, what choice did she have but to become a private investigator?

Chancey’s fate was sealed when she was just 5. She and her little pals would spend hours peeking into windows, watching neighbors watch television.

“I never grew out of it,” she says.

Fast-forward about 25 years. Chancey is standing in the middle of a crack house. There are rats hanging from cages on the ceiling. Every room is packed with people who are doing drugs or having sex. Something smells really bad. She is in the house to protect two attorneys who have to get a statement from one of the junkies. When they walked into the place two hours ago, no one was happy to see them.

Chancey has come a long way from peeping on middle-class malaise.

“Those are the types of situations where you don’t realize your life was in danger until you walk in your front door, pour yourself a glass of scotch, and sit on the couch in the dark because your lover is sleeping,” she says. “That’s when you’re like, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ and you think about going to massage school. But then the next day the phone rings and someone’s been accused of rape and you get in your car and go.”

Since becoming a P.I. in 1998, Chancey has spent many hours tracking the twisted antics of the sick and desperate. These are people who don’t like to answer questions. They don’t like to be followed. And they don’t like anyone digging in their garbage.

“One of the most dangerous things we do is go through trash in the middle of the night,” she says. Dumpsters carry a treasure trove of detritus from the badly behaved. It’s where Chancey finds evidence against adulterers (used condoms), “reformed” junkies (hypodermic needles), child molesters (porn) and fraud (financial records).

Danger comes when Chancey’s clients can’t keep their mouths shut. Let’s say that a husband hires Chancey because he suspects his wife has been cheating on him. Back at home, the husband drops several not-so-subtle hints that he’s on to his wife. The wife becomes paranoid, and, unfortunately for Chancey, the paranoid do not sleep.

One night, Chancey was digging through a garbage can behind a house. Suddenly, she heard a threatening voice behind her. “What are you doing?” It was the woman Chancey had been hired to investigate. The woman had a history of violent offenses, so Chancey reached for her gun, realized she had left it on the dashboard of her car, hit the woman hard and ran away.

“I probably would have just hit her with the butt of [the gun],” says Chancey, who has never pulled a gun on anyone. “It’s almost like the Old West. Everyone has a gun. And not just the bad guys. People who are protecting their property have guns.”

The fact that she’s a woman in a profession heavily dominated by men has helped her out of a few jams. “I would have gotten my ass beaten in more situations if I’d been a man,” she says.

When she does find herself in a nasty situation, Chancey says she can’t count on the cops to bail her out. Cops don’t like P.I.s, and the feeling is mutual. “It’s a cats-and-dogs type of thing,” says Chancey. Police relish the opportunity to blow a P.I.’s cover, so Chancey will feign sickness or heartache if police catch her wandering across someone’s yard at 3 a.m. or planted in her car on a residential street in midafternoon.

“I’ll tell them that I just broke up with my boyfriend and I’ll start crying,” she says. “I’ll faint and then I’ll wake up and say, ‘Where am I?’ Anything to distract them.”

There are times when cops make dangerous situations even scarier. Not long ago, Chancey found herself alone in a small room with a serial killer. He was accused of a gruesome murder at a convenience store, and Chancey was hired to check out his alibi. Shortly after she entered the room, the killer turned the tables on her à la Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. He attempted to rattle Chancey by asking her questions about her private life. As the conversation became increasingly creepy, a cop walked in and asked Chancey for her Social Security number. The killer licked his chops as he waited for Chancey to tell the cop her number.

“I look at [the cop] and then I look at the [serial killer]. And I say, ‘Can I give it to you later?’”

In many cases, though, the most dangerous part of the job is the deadly boredom associated with a typical stakeout. Chancey will track a person’s every move until she gets the evidence her client demands. This can mean spending 48 hours cooped up in a car — practicing foreign accents to keep herself awake — just to get a few minutes’ film of an adulterous couple leaving a seedy hotel.

On her very first case, Chancey investigated a man who told his wife he was going on a ski weekend with his buddies. To make the ruse believable, he said he had to bring the couple’s grill on the trip. Chancey followed the man to the local dump and videotaped him as he tossed the grill into the dump before he headed to his lover’s home.

“It’s amazing the excuses people will come up with to get out of the house,” says Chancey. “People shirk all kinds of responsibilities to be with a lover. They tell amazing lies.”

Dealing with liars, cheaters and thieves each day has taken its toll on Chancey.

“Seeing people’s lives falling apart. Watching people make grave mistakes. Losing homes, children, money. It’s interesting at first, but it quickly gets very sad,” she says.

But there are bright spots. For example, she gets to wear disguises.

“I have wigs, plural,” she says.

And there are other rewards. Chancey has located missing people, prevented employers from making bad hires, and has found evidence that has proven her clients’ innocence. One of her most difficult — and rewarding — cases involved investigating a preteen who had accused his father of hitting him.

“It’s not easy to follow a 12-year-old boy,” she says. “They don’t drive cars. They jump over brooks, run between houses …”

The boy showed up at school with a gash on his neck. The kid said his father, a foreign diplomat, did it, and his dad was arrested. The father suspected that his son was getting beaten by bullies, but was too scared to admit it. Chancey followed the kid for several days. She watched as he stole a bike and hid it near his house. And she even videotaped him as he received numerous beatings from the neighborhood bullies.

“I took [the boy] to McDonald’s and bought him a milkshake,” she says. “At first he denied [the beatings], but then I told him about the bike. His eyes got huge and he said, ‘You know everything, don’t you?’”

When she called the boy’s father to tell him the news, she added, “Oh, by the way, there’s a stolen bike next to your house.”

Chancey has started to cut back on stakeouts and surveillance missions.

“I’ve paid my dues sitting in cars for 24 hours and watching people have sex through windows.”

These days most of her sleuthing can be done from her office. The Internet has been a boon to Chancey, who uses special Web databases to do everything from performing criminal background checks to determining whether the woman a client met on an online dating site is a psychopath.

“Caren rocks,” says Deborah Olin, a Virginia attorney who specializes in family law with a focus on gay and lesbian issues. Olin and her partner, Kathleen Bell, first used Chancey to find a woman who was skipping out on a court appearance.

“She was trying to avoid us and she was doing a very good job of it. We had been looking for her for years. I was on the phone with Caren for 15 minutes, and she located her.”

On another case, a husband suspected his wife of carrying on an Internet love affair with a guy named Mike.

“From the e-mail, I discovered that Mike liked a certain sports team,” Chancey says. “I did a search, found message boards, followed the e-trail and found out who Mike was without even knowing his e-mail address. He was married, too. Both their lives fell apart all because of an e-mail he signed ‘Mike.’”


New Undies? She might be having an affair

Has your lover recently joined a gym? Gotten a new haircut? Bought exciting new underwear? If you answered yes to these questions, your lover may be having an affair.

“New underwear is a major sign,” says Chancey. “We’re creatures of habit. So if they do anything out of the norm, keep your eye on them.”

In her six years as a private investigator, Chancey has been hired by dozens of people who suspect that their lovers are cheating on them. And, in each case, she’s had to report that their suspicions were correct.

“Have I ever been able to tell them good news?” she asked. “Never! Never! [Suspicious spouses] have a 100 percent accuracy rate.”

So, if you think your girlfriend is cheating, you’re probably right.

Chancey says that the best way to tell if your lover is cheating on you is to check her first cell phone call of the day and her last call at night, and see if the calls are to the same number. Most cheaters call their lovers as soon as they wake up and just before they go to bed.

If you want to catch your girlfriend in the act, simply tell her you’re going away for the weekend alone.

“To speed things up, I’ll ask [a client] to arrange to go out of town,” says Chancey. In most cases, the cheater will have her mistress in the marital bed before her girlfriend pulls out of the driveway.

When Chancey tells clients that she has found evidence of adultery, their reaction is always the same.

“The initial reaction is always, ‘Aha! I knew it! See, I’m not an idiot!’” she says. “They’re almost happy. Then, after it sinks in, they say, ‘Oh, my God!’”


Fun Facts About Private Dicks

1: It’s perfectly legal for P.I.s to look into someone’s windows as long as the drapes or blinds are open.

2: P.I.s are not bound by the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits police from making illegal searches and seizures. This means that P.I.s can dig through a person’s trash without a search warrant, and cops can’t.

3: If you’re on a stakeout and a nosy neighbor threatens to call the cops, point at them and scream, “Pervert!” “People walk away so fast,” says Chancey. “And they won’t come back again.”

4: When staking out a love nest, use the two-hour rule. “Someone at some time decided that you’ve had enough time to have sex if you are in a room together for two hours,” says Chancey. If they’re in the room for less than two hours, they might just be playing Monopoly.

5: You can use your disguises when performing off-duty undercover work, too — wink, wink. “Well, my girlfriend has mentioned it, but it hasn’t happened yet,” says Chancey.

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