Linda Manion, like a crime-scene photographer, is recording each part of the gruesome sight on her tiny digital camera.

"Ah," she says, shaking her head and pointing to her discovery. "See, there's no filling on this piece."

A perfectly good blueberry-filled doughnut had been slaughtered in the name of quality assurance. Manion is not a doughnut assassin but a contracted inspector of sorts for Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corp. She is one of hundreds of moms, businesspeople and students who travel to stores, restaurants and even real estate agencies to make sure customers get the quality and service that the parent companies want.

More often, these "mystery shoppers" - consumer versions of James Bond - are using high-tech gadgets, such as tiny digital cameras and video streaming, to covertly detect how clean stores' restrooms are and how evenly the local doughnut shop inserts jelly into its treats.

Manion, an eight-year veteran, had snatched the innocent pastry from its comfy spot in the box and expertly ripped it into four equal pieces, as she's done so many times before.

She points to the piece that's all flesh and no filling. "That's surprising," she says. "Usually they're dead-on."

Other crimes she discovered on this Krispy Kreme mission: the doors guarding the outside trash bins were left ajar, a roll of paper towels in the ladies' room was out of its dispenser and the parking lot was freckled with chewing-gum spots. "But I'm not sure what you do about that," she said of that last find.

It's her job to take pictures, make observations and return to her mobile command center - in this case, a maroon minivan. She hooks up her laptop on the floor in the back, connects the tiny camera and downloads the photos. When she gets home, she'll enter the rest of her evaluations onto a store-specific Internet site, designed by Pacific Research Group, the company that hired her to shop at Krispy Kreme.

Back at Pacific Research Group's Los Angeles headquarters, founder Anthony Chery - the mystery shoppers' gadget-meister, like Bond's Q - designed software so that the shoppers can quickly download their observations into a report for the companies. The result: full-color accounts that land on store managers' desks in 48 hours. Those reports could take up to two weeks in the past, he said.

Though the concept of mystery shopping has been around since the 1800s, when companies such as J.C. Penney pioneered the concept, Pacific Research is one of only a few companies that have taken the service digital and nearly instant.

Chery, a former aerospace engineer, developed the computer-based approach after a chance meeting with an executive from a West Coast gas station company. The executive was frustrated because station managers weren't taking mystery shopping reports seriously, mostly because there were questions as to whether the "shoppers" even showed up to inspect the sites.

Starting with a chain of 300 gas stations in the Northwest, Pacific Research shoppers took snapshots and detailed observations. The full reports arrived at stations days later and managers saw for themselves.

"It turns out, the next time the mystery shoppers went through, those stores had the highest scores in the nation," said Darren Magot, Pacific Research's vice president of sales. "They went from the lowest to the highest in a few months."

Krispy Kreme, the Winston-Salem, N.C.-based doughnut phenomenon, has used Pacific Research's process for two years to keep its stores on the ball.

"What we're going for is to tell a story to our managers," said Steve Anderson, Krispy Kreme's customer-experience department director. "When an inspector saw something negative, we wanted to have a picture that backed up those comments."

Peter Thorwarth, president of BMA Inc., outside of Philadelphia, said the Internet has given shoppers more legitimacy in the minds of client companies.

"The Web site prevents shoppers from putting in 'He is nice,' or anything too short or too vague," he said. "It's vastly improved the operation."

It also calls attention to poor service more quickly.

"All of us have been inside a fast-food restaurant that had horrible service and wished we could bring that message to the manager," said Magot, from Pacific Research. "We're just excited about allowing managers to move to the other side of the counter and see what customers see."

Even if that means gutting an innocent doughnut.

On the Net:

www.pacificresearchgroup.com

www.mysteryshop.org