Chapter 2

It was a frosty, uncomfortable weekend between Laura and me. She'd come home in the wee hours of the morning and spent most of Saturday with a hangover so bad the slightest noise caused her pain. After suffering Laura's short temper for a time, Alyssa and I bailed out and went to the park and we didn't come home until after dinnertime. That didn't suit Laura very well at all. She lit into me when Alyssa and I got home, expressing her opinion, at length, of a husband and daughter who abandoned her.

I took it for a while but quickly got fed up. I told her she'd brought it on herself by going out on me and abandoning her daughter the night before. I said she would have to get used to the idea that Alyssa and I spent this afternoon alone, and probably would again, by ourselves and we'd had a fantastic time. Deal with it the best way she could, I said.

Whatever she did, I told her - without attempting to hide my irritation - deal with it civilly or shut the hell up. I'd never spoken to her that way and it took Laura by surprise. The shock, if nothing else, kept her quiet and attentive to Alyssa for the rest of the evening.

Detecting a thaw in her attitude later Saturday night, I initiated some tentative foreplay but Laura's stomach was still upset and we had to break off when she ran for the bathroom. I tried again Sunday night but Laura lay there like a log, completely unresponsive. Instead of continuing, I rolled away from her and lay there seething. After a while, I got up and went to take another shower, hoping the rushing water would sooth me and let me get some sleep. It was only marginally successful.

Monday morning, I left the house before Laura got up. It was a thing I rarely did, mostly because it forced Laura to get Alyssa up, dressed, fed, and off to daycare. My wife didn't like that. Unless she had everything all organized, it was a process guaranteeing she would be a half hour, or more, late to work. I wasn't in a mood to be terribly solicitous of Laura's wants and needs that morning.

Before I left, I went down into the basement, opened a cabinet that seemed to be nothing more than a place for miscellaneous tools, and flicked a switch that turned on a small piece of equipment that would record every land line phone conversation made from my house. A second switch activated a device that would intercept any cell phone calls made within a radius of 150 feet of the device's location. It wasn't strictly legal, but no one knew about it and I'd never use the information captured by the equipment in any legal setting.

Surveillance cameras already covered almost every room in the house. After I'd seen a documentary on A&E, or Discovery or something explaining how a murder had been solved with images found on a homeowner's interior spy cams, I had them installed all over my house. A secondary purpose was to monitor the movements and activities of any babysitters Laura and I brought into the house as well as the housekeeper who came in three times a week. We trusted the housekeeper and also the teenage girls we hired to watch our baby for a few hours on the nights on those occasions when Laura and I went out together, but "trust but verify" seemed a good policy to me. We hadn't, I reflected, had to hire a babysitter for too many months. I wasn't sure I was getting my money's worth from the expensive surveillance system.

I pulled inside the tall chain link fence surrounding the new campus and around to the business office on the far side of the complex. The fence, and the razor wire at the top had gone up when we got our first Department of Defense contract three years ago. After that, the DoD came back twice for additional small, but decidedly more profitable deals.

I pulled into the wide, clearly marked parking slot and shut the engine off. I sat there, unmoving, while I tried to make a decision. My guts kept telling me Laura had some outside interest but my brain countered, saying I had no actual proof. A racing pulse and a quick inhalation weren't enough to be sure. I'd seen a flash of guilt in her eyes but she could be feeling bad about something else only vaguely connected with what I'd asked her. I hoped so anyway.

The logo on the wall in front of my Navigator was unexpectedly obscured and it brought me out of my stupor. I lifted my chin in greeting to Phil Sanders, one of the first people I'd hired. Opening the door, I tossed him a quick "Hello" and busied myself getting my palm pilot and briefcase from the rear seat. Instead of going inside immediately, I looked at the brilliantly colored logo.

MA Industries. That's me... Mark Archer. At 34, I was CEO and president of a privately held little corporation that had started out as a small tool-manufacturing company twelve years ago. We had found a niche making "tilt and pan" motor mounts for home security cameras. Working hard to sell ourselves, we found a number of private investigation companies who had a need for quality surveillance equipment. Over the years, we gradually built up a solid base of customers who came to trust us to provide high quality, remotely controlled mounts.

Eight years ago, we bought out a small company that made some excellent color cameras with an impressive optical zoom feature. The whole thing, including a powerful transmitter and separate receiver that could connect to an ordinary TV, was smaller than a woman's lipstick case. Now my little corporation had the whole package and we began marketing our products all over the state and had plans to begin selling them on the Internet.

After that, we absorbed a couple of private investigation agencies and combined them into a division we named "Information and Surveillance Associates." In a year, we had branch offices in three other cities. Overall, MA Industries was doing quite well, though we maintained a comfortably low profile.

In my office, I signed the papers my secretary/office manager put in front of me without bothering to review them. This was the "routine activity" stack and they didn't really need my attention, but they did need my signature. I've gotten into the habit of teasing her by calling her "Radar" every so often and did so now. She always responded tartly with an admonition for "Colonel Potter" to pay attention to what he was doing.

Maggie was the glue that kept our business office together. When she was on vacation, the place didn't run nearly as smoothly and I dreaded the day she would come to tell me she was retiring. To stave off that day as long as possible, I paid her as well as each of the three company vice-presidents. She knew that... they didn't.

"Maggie," I said when she brought me in the first mug of coffee for the day. "Maggie, would you please have Carl Winters come see me?"

"Sure," she replied promptly. She looked at me curiously. "Can I say why?" she asked. I shook my head, but reconsidered almost immediately. I felt a need to say something in partial explanation. Maggie was a second mother to me and had been since we started out in a renovated warehouse back in the old days.

"Just tell him I need to become a customer of his," I said slowly, not looking at Maggie. She didn't say anything for a moment.

"Aw, darn it all," she said softly. "I'm so sorry, Mark." She sniffed softly, bit her lips, and left quickly. I stared after her, wondering what she knew or perhaps had divined. Carl headed up our combined surveillance and private investigations division and Maggie had read something into my request to see him as a customer. That she had accepted my need without question was unsettling.

"What's up, Mark?" Carl asked, coming in my office door. I motioned him to close the heavy oak door. I sat, looking at nothing in particular, while he took his first sip of tea from the big mug Maggie had brewing for him when he arrived.

"Carl--" I started to explain, but I had to stop to clear my throat. It was hard to swallow. The tightness there was matched by stomach muscles so tense they hurt.

"Carl, I need... I'm afraid Laura is getting into something that she'll regret," I said slowly. I was trying to carefully choose my words, not wanting to tell him I suspected she was seeing a man behind my back.

"Ah, shit, Mark," he responded dejectedly. "Damn, I'm sorry to hear that," he said. We both took a deep breath. Carl sat the mug on the corner of my desk and stared at his fingernails without speaking. I didn't know what to say either.

"Well--" he said after an uncomfortable silence. "Well, we've got everything we need to... find out for sure. I can get a few temps to come in and replace some of our guys to free them up for a concentrated effort. Can you give me an idea of Laura's work schedule, her cell phone number, computer logins, credit card numbers... stuff like that?"

I nodded. I started to object to having in-house personnel work the case instead of bringing in outsiders for that purpose but quickly realized Carl wanted to have the best people possible working the issue. Sighing, I bent to the side of my desk and pulled my brief case closer. I'd spent most of Sunday copying account numbers and some of the other information I knew he'd need from documents Laura and I had in our files.

I had Carl set me up in the accounting as a paying customer of Information and Surveillance Associates. I'd pay that branch of my firm from my personal checking account. It was a little thing but it would keep any auditors happy.

We discussed ways and means of putting tails on my wife to see where she went, who she went with, and what they did when they got there. I felt guilty, and that was foolish. The hurt from this last weekend, combined with what I'd realized Friday night had been a steadily intensifying alienation from Laura's affection, made this a necessity. There were things I needed to know.

Frankly, if Laura was doing nothing to harm the marriage, she'd never know what I was doing and maybe I'd find a way to suggest we go to a marriage counselor to resolve whatever "issues" she was laboring under. If she was doing something a married woman shouldn't do--well, that was something I desperately needed to know.

By noon, Carl's guys and gals had gotten into Laura's Lexus at the office building downtown where she worked. It wasn't difficult. My name was on the title too, so I gave them my key. They installed a sound powered microphone under the driver's seat. The signal from the tiny transmitter could be heard anywhere within a 1-mile radius. The mike itself was sensitive enough to pick up a soft whisper inside the well-soundproofed car. A GPS transmitter was put in a hidden corner of the trunk and began to immediately broadcast the vehicle's location accurate to within a few feet.

Carl had seven of his best people working the case and had dedicated five vehicles to the project. All of the cars and vans were rentals he'd had gone over by our own in-house mechanics to ensure they wouldn't die when needed most. One additional girl, a free-lancer with excellent credentials applied for a job in Laura's accounting firm and expected to start the next week. Carl told me to sit back and let him take care of everything. There were operating procedures already in place to handle things like this and it was best I stay out of it for the present. That depressed me even more. If Laura was cheating on our marriage, it was such a tawdry, mundane thing that there already were standard procedures to deal with it.

He also told me I had a choice. If they found out of an impending "tryst," they could try to break it up if my purpose was to do so... or we could hold off and get quantities of pictures and video for a divorce trial. I opted for interrupting any assignation they found out about. I didn't have to think about it. I wanted my wife back. He nodded, and asked me to try and not upset Laura in her routine. When we got to a decision point, he'd let me know.

Instead, I let him know a cusp had already come and gone. That night I called him from the basement after listening to the recordings from the cell phone intercept. The information so gathered wasn't legal but we weren't expecting to use it in court. Carl answered on the second ring.

"Carl?" I asked. My voice was thick with emotion and he picked up on it immediately.

"Oh, geeze," he said. "What's happened?" The concern he felt was evident. I took a deep breath and held it for a moment to get control of myself.

"You know the cell phone and land line intercepts I had you install when we built the house?" I asked.

"Yeah... uh, sorry we couldn't get over there today and set up the remote monitoring equipment, but--"

"Oh, I know, Carl... there's only 26 hours in a day, right? Don't think anything about it. Anyway, Carl, I have a recorded conversation between Laura and some guy called "Brian" about 7:00 PM." I drew in a ragged lungful of air and continued. "You'll be able to hear it yourself tomorrow, I guess... but "Brian" talked of "fucking Laura's brains out... AGAIN soon," to quote the son of a bitch."

I wanted to cry, but I wouldn't let the tears form. I couldn't stop the ball of ice from forming in the pit of my stomach. My body felt wooden, as if I were surrounded by massive layers of cotton that deadened every sensation. My chest hurt; I couldn't breath. Laura was having sex with some other guy and I didn't know why. I couldn't think of any reason I'd given her for going outside the marriage for sex and I didn't know why she would betray me and our daughter this way. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat.