"Okay why don't you explain to me the situation you got so far, the case you're working on, and then we'll see where you go from there?"

  "Well, it's not that complicated. A couple of diviners are missing. My friend, guy who taught me sorcery, is also a diviner and is therefore worried. These are acquaintances of his, see. When he tried his own sorcery to find out where they were, he was unable to do so, which, as you may know, means..."

  "I know. You don't need to explain. So why don't you tell me your thought process a little bit here? What were you going to do to investigate for your client?"

  "I thought I'd go take a look in their apartments. Either I'd find a body or paw through their stuff till I found out where they went."

  "And that's when you discovered the incredible power of the doorman." Donnie shook his head. "What you don't understand is that by doing that, now you are known to the doorman. You can't come and say you're an insurance investigator. You can't come and say you're a long-lost relative."

  "Well, yeah, but Donnie, you gotta understand. Usually when I do something like that, someone comes around and they attack me and they turn out to be a vampire or zombie or kidnap me or they’re a snake-eyed assassin. Some sort of supernatural entity will reveal themselves and I'll play a central role in their plans so they cannot kill me."

  "Congratulations on your interesting life but, you know, not every case is going to turn out to be some sort of magic. Sometimes it's going to be a jealous girlfriend or a mobster looking for ransom. Boring shit like that happens all the time."

  Sam considered the pace at which she’d been involved in supernatural shenanigans going on in the city, which was quickened by the presence of the Spirit of the City in her life. She was explicitly asked to investigate these issues and solve them.

  In one way or another the supernatural was affecting everyone in the city's life. The Spirit herself was proof of that. Everyone in the city had some story of a ghost, or some encounter with a zombie, or an angry diviner who cursed their family. It was as natural as the seasons or the rain.

  "Well, what would you have done given the situation? Let's start there," said Sam.

  "Ugh, well, listen. There's no such thing as an investigation that starts on the scene, especially a missing person. You haven't even told me the names of these people, which means that to you it's a crime scene that you're going to check out. You're going to wait for some boogeyman to jump out at you and tell you their whole secret plot.

  "But that's not how any of this works. You understand? Investigation starts at the desk. You build a file. You build a profile. Do you understand? You list their address, their known acquaintances, their boyfriend, their girlfriend, their mother, their father, their sisters, their brothers - every detail that you can get about them. Where do they work? Who are their associates at work? Who's the owner of their workplace? What's that guy’s address? Who are their associates? Most of these records are available to you in City Hall."

  "Once you have a proper dossier assembled and you have on paper enough knowledge about these individuals to begin your investigation, then you can go and look for physical evidence, something that contradicts or confirms what you already know about them.

  "Say for example you find out from an acquaintance of theirs that they absolutely love shellfish. They're nuts for crabs. They'll go crazy for oysters but then somebody else tells you they don't like them. They're allergic. Now you have a contradiction, don't you? That's just an example but it shows the type of thing that you're looking for. That actually came up in an investigation for me."

  "Oh yeah? What happened?"

  "Guy's girlfriend says he's allergic to shellfish. I go talk to his business partner. He drops that the guy absolutely loves shellfish and he couldn't get enough of it. Yeah well, come to find out, the partner was slipping crabs into his soup to cause an allergic reaction and take over control of the business. Killed him with a little crab in the soup."

  "Damn, that's terrible."

  "Nah, they were both assholes. My point is every case starts on paper. It doesn't matter if you're looking into the biggest demon vampire zombie you ever talked to in your life. You have a folder for each case that has a picture of them, their address, and every fact you can think of about them. That is your heartbeat. That is the center of your universe because everything you do needs to be documented in there."

  "Okay, that seems pretty straightforward," Sam said. She knew she was supposed to keep careful records but she had a good memory so she never bothered. For her, most cases did end with a vampire trying to sacrifice her or beating up a cult.

  "No, I think you still don't understand. Because what's going to happen is when you have every fact available to you in that document, in that folder, you're going to pull that out, when you're on the toilet, when it's late at night and you can't sleep, when you're having a cigar. You're going to pull it out. You stare at it for hours and then the answer is going to come to you.

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  "But it can only come to you if you go over it and over it and over it again. It's gonna strike like lightning."

  "You said City Hall but what am I looking for? Are they just gonna give me the records?" Sam asked.

  "Okay, well, for a private investigator it is a little bit tricky. Some records, they're public. You can look at the city directory. R.L. Polk & Company, they put out the city directory, which has everybody's name and address in the city. Sometimes they'll have their employer in addition. There's an address reverse lookup so if you know somebody's address you can see who else lives there. Marriage records, death records, these sort of things, these are public.

  "For anything else you're gonna need to be friendly with the clerks. You understand? You find one sympathetic clerk and go when you know they're working. You'll be able to get anything you want. You can bribe them with money; you can bring them roses; you can bring them cake, whatever it is that's going to get them on your side. That's what you got to do."

  "Okay, I think I can go make friends with some clerks."

  "I don't know, I gotta tell you. You don't strike me as, you know, what's the word? Friendly. It's going to be a little bit more of a challenge for you to establish the kind of rapport that you need. You got any friends or anybody that works with you who is a little more personable?"

  "I'll send my receptionist."

  "You can do that. You can tell the clerks you're an insurance investigator and then they'll get used to seeing you. You can tell them that you’re a debt collector and then they'll expect a little money under the table to get you whatever you want. You could be real friendly with them, like I said. There's different ways. If you don't want to send your receptionist, there's different ways."

  "Alright, once you've established your folder and you have on paper all of your contacts, all of your goals, everybody that you can find who is associated with the individual in question. Once you have that then you physically go, but you don't go to their last known location. You've already established they're probably missing, right?"

  "Yeah, like I said, when the sorcerer asked, he got no answer, which means somebody's hiding something."

  Sam was skeptical at first, spending so much gold on a teacher, especially when she thought she could figure it out herself. After just a few minutes talking with Donnie, she realized how much more she had to learn and how far off base she was. She was surprised she was getting any clients at all. If it weren't for the Spirit of the City sponsoring her, she might have been forced to hang up her hat as an investigator already.

  "With diviners you can never tell. They may be working for somebody that wants to keep what they're doing secret. There may be two of them working on either the same client or two separate clients that at the same time just happen to want secrecy. Don't ever rule out the simplest explanation. It's almost always right. But I’m going to explain the rest of what you do when you’re ready to do it. But you don’t start at their last location. You start at their mom’s house."

  "I have a question," said Sam.

  "Go ahead."

  "What do I do about the damn doorman?"

  "I was gettin' there Sam. You don't gotta worry. What you gotta understand is now you've made yourself known to this doorman and whatever story you came up with is something that you're gonna have to go with. I believe you said that you told him you were a friend and you were just looking to surprise him or something like that. It was a stupid story. It was a stupid idea and you have to have these things planned out in advance.

  "You can't just walk up when you see that there's a doorman and whatever comes out of your mouth comes out. You gotta have a plan. You gotta know that there's a doorman in the first place. You understand? You gotta go and look at the location and incorporate that into your folder and then come back. Come up with a plan and then go into the building.

  "Now in this case, in order to gain access physically to the building, what you're going to end up having to do is make friends with the doorman. You're going to have to leave a bottle of wine and you're going to have to say, 'Hey, when Mr. Huffman comes back, why don't you give him this bottle of wine for me?' Then in another couple of days, when Mr. Huffman doesn't come back, you drop by again and say, 'Listen, I haven't heard from my friend; I'm getting a little worried. Would you mind going up to check on apartment 14B?' Then what's gonna happen is the doorman is not gonna want to do that. He's gonna just send you up and then you're gonna be able to do your investigation. You got me?"

  "I get you."

  "But listen, there's still steps before that. Building got a mailman, right? Let me tell you something: every single mailman in this city is as dirty as the dirtiest city soldier you ever seen. They'll take money, they'll take liquor, they'll take devil dust, and they'll give you the mail.

  "All right, actually, I think that's enough for now. There's gonna be plenty of homework for you to do already and we got a lot of time. It's gonna take at least a year of apprenticeship before I feel like you're ready to go out on your own at this point, based on how little you understand. At least I'm hoping you can ask questions.

  "If we do manage to tie up somebody and beat the shit out of them, I hope your skills as an interrogator will come in handy then. I got to be honest though that almost never happens.

  "You got so much to learn. You got to learn proper infiltration. You got to learn proper stealth. You need to learn.

  "We're going to start from the ground up with you. We're going to pretend you've never had any training whatsoever because, from my perspective, you have not. It's going to take at least a year to get you competent and then we'll see where you go from there. We'll see what kind of private eye you can be. So you're gonna go. You're gonna create a dossier. When you have a full dossier, when you have every detail of these two missing folks and every little blank line of that folder filled in, then you come back to me and then we'll go out into the field and we'll see what we can find about them, all right? Sound good?"

  "Sounds good, Donnie, I do appreciate your help."

  "Well don't think nothing of it. You're paying me, right."

  "Yeah, but I can already tell this is gonna be fun."

  Donnie looked out the window before replying.

  "Yeah, everything but the stakeouts; somehow my ass always manages to go numb."