Chapter 3

The rest of that week and the next two were quiet around our home. Laura had cancelled all but Friday's night out on the town and Carl's agents confirmed the ladies went out to a couple of clubs and danced a while with pretty much anyone who asked. Everyone went straight home afterward. Brian was a good little boy and stayed home with his wife and children. I read a report that suggested Brian's wife wasn't all that thrilled to have him home and she'd been very vocal while wondering about his sudden change of habit.

I was surprised the effect of the investigators questioning the girls in the little group was so short, but I guess there had to be an element of arrogance in Laura and Brian's attitude toward me. After all, they'd been going strong for so long. Whatever it was, barely three weeks after the investigators contacted the Friday night partiers, cell phone intercepts began to become more numerous and more explicit. The pair of cheating spouses had decided everything had blown over and they decided that I had concluded there was nothing going on.

During this period, I'd almost moved completely into the spare bedroom. I could barely stand to kiss Laura on the cheek when I came home in the evening and there was no way I was going to have sex with her. She hinted several times that she was amenable to some hot sex but I ignored her.

I read Alyssa every book in her little library and I bought more to go through with her. After I perfected a harsh sounding, dry cough, Laura didn't question why I was sleeping away from her. Laura never suggested that I shouldn't be around the baby with a cough like that though. Anyway, Carl and his crew noted the cell phone conversations between the two late at night had increased dramatically.

On Wednesday of the third week, Laura and Brian arranged to meet at their normal cheap motel. Carl had everyone chomping at the bit to get the goods on the adulterers and Pete, my attorney, had me primed and ready as how to act. I had Mandy, a 16-year-old girl from down the street ready to baby sit Alyssa that night.

"Laura," I said, "please don't go out tonight." I was standing in the living room as she was walking out the door. "Please, Laura," I pleaded. I wasn't play-acting. I really didn't want her to meet that son of a bitch out there and fuck him.

"Mark!" Laura snapped at me. Realizing she couldn't leave with me without attempting to placate me, her face softened.

"Look... nothing is going on, Mark. I'm just going out for a few drinks and maybe a little dancing. That's all," she said with a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth expression. She came back to hug me and earnestly look me in the eyes, trying to convince me I was wrong about something I knew for a fact she was going to do.

"Laura," I said impulsively. "I know you're meeting someone tonight, but you can't possibly mean as much to him as you do to Alyssa and me. Please, baby, don't go." Laura pulled back and released me. She was suddenly suspicious. She wondered what I knew.

"What the hell are you talking about?" she asked indignantly. I had to give it to her. She had developed into a fine actress.

"I just know," I insisted. "I know you're cheating on me with someone. You're cheating on me and you're cheating on Alyssa and... it's not fair to either one of us," I protested. She relaxed a trifle. Her reasoning was clearly that if I didn't blurt out a name, all I had was suspicions.

"I am not cheating on you," she said firmly. "I'm getting a little tired of all these accusations and it's about time to stop," she admonished me. "You keep it up, damn you, and I might just go get some strange man to take care of my needs to show you!" I had to look away. I'd have blown everything if she'd seen the sudden rage in my eyes.

"Laura--" I said brokenly. It wasn't difficult. The fury I was feeling was making it hard for me to speak.

"Not another Goddamned word," she said forcefully. "I have never, I am not now, and I never will screw another man other than you! There! Does that satisfy you?" Angrily, she turned and walked to the door, pulling on a light jacket over her shoulders. I could see her breasts jiggle--she wasn't wearing a bra and I couldn't see any panty lines on her miniskirt.

"Laura," I said a little more calmly. "If you ever cheat on me, that ends the marriage. You know that, right? We talked about cheating and what it does to marriages when Georgia and Sam broke up last year, remember?" For a moment, Laura's hand didn't move on the doorknob.

"I told you," she said. Her voice was controlled, but I detected a condescending note in it. "I swear to you, I don't want any man but you... and I never will," she said.

"Now I'm late and I've got to go," she said firmly. Without even looking back at me, she opened the door and left.

Twenty minutes later, I joined Carl and three of his best in the room next to where Brian and Laura would soon be. A little spooked by my protests this evening as well as the suspicious questioning of Laura's girlfriends in weeks past, Brian and Laura were apparently driving around at random, trying to see if anyone was following them. The GPS devices told us that.

Actually, there was no one behind either of them. Carl had known of the reservation at the motel a minute or two after it was made because the desk clerk had been paid a couple hundred dollars to call when it happened. Since we knew where they'd wind up, there was no reason to track them. It could have been done though. If we hadn't known their destination, Carl would have used half a dozen cars to keep pace on parallel streets with Laura and her friend. With the GPS instruments installed in both of their cars, neither of the two would ever have seen their followers.

After I'd been there a short time, Laura and Brian drove up almost simultaneously to the motel in their cars and parked in front of room 113. The motel had exterior entrances to all the rooms and the pair of "lovers" had only to get out of their vehicles and walk a couple of paces to the door. Neither of them noticed the dark van across the street. They had no idea a high-end digital camera was taping their every move. Laura and Brian wrapped their arms around each other and kissed each other deeply while rubbing their bodies all over each other.

Carl was watching me closely. He knew I wanted nothing more than to burst out the door and start wrecking havoc.

"Mark," he said quietly. "It's going to get a lot worse before it's over... are you sure you can stand this?" I sat back down on one of the double beds and licked suddenly dry lips.

"Do you have anything to drink?" I asked. He misunderstood and shook his head.

"No, but I think you should take this Valium," he said, offering me a tiny yellow tablet.

"It'll help calm your nerves," he said gently. I accepted it and then got a soft drink from the cooler that he had, in fact, brought with him.

Carl had managed to get one high-end digital camera into the room, hiding it in the air conditioning vent. It was full color, had a full range of motion through an arc of 160 degrees from side to side and 85 degrees up and down. On top of that, it had a 25X zoom that would isolate one hair in the nostrils of any one of these two... not that Carl expected any need for that kind of detail.

Once the duo went inside, the action started almost immediately. Laura had not worn any bra or panties, as I had suspected, and was out of her dress in seconds. Brian wasn't far behind.

When they fell on the bed, we turned all the lights in our room off and two of Carl's men went out into the night. In addition to the camera in the air conditioning vent, Carl had brought two fiber-optic "snake cameras" with him. One was slipped under the door to Laura's room and the other over the top of the door. The cameras were less than a quarter-inch in diameter and just a couple inches long. They slid easily through the gaps between door and frame, leaving the transmitter and antenna outside.

Once the cameras were positioned where the men wanted them, they taped the transmitters to the outside wall. In the darkness, the dark-colored spy devices were undetectable from more than a couple feet away. To enhance this, the guys unscrewed the only outside light close enough to illuminate the area before they came back inside. The receivers were already plugged into the monitors and recording equipment and we settled back for the show. The theory was that what one camera missed, the other two would certainly catch.

It wasn't much of a show, actually. There was no foreplay, no tenderness, and no affection at all. Brian just slipped on a yellowish colored condom, mounted my slut of a wife in the missionary position and proceeded to fuck away. I watched her face closely for a moment. I wasn't sure if it was pain or ecstasy causing the wrinkles on her forehead.

"Damn," I said after watching for a minute or two. "That SOB isn't any bigger than me... hell, his dick isn't anywhere near as big as I am," I protested. "What the fuck?"

It was true. Laura had been in a heat to measure me when we first got married and had used a ruler on me a number of times. She came up with a figure of 7 inches and a "smidgen," as she said. She'd been pleased to discover most of the other wives in the neighborhood were happy with six or less inches of man inside them. Laura figured out from her girlfriends that my size was on the high end of average. She began calling out to me, demanding to be fucked by my "big cock" when we made love. We hadn't done any of that lately. I guessed I knew why... but then again, I really didn't.

Brian was obviously near the low end of "average" and he had to work hard to give Laura any kind of stimulation. Not only that, the bastard had the technique of a hog rutting in a barnyard. What the hell was Laura going to this guy for?

My pride was partially redeemed a little later happily. I caught Sherrie, one of Carl's agents, looking at my crotch a little while later. She glanced up at the TV monitors and shook her head. She smiled--I thought I detected a little speculation in her eyes. We both looked away. She worked for me and I wasn't about to mess around in my own back yard, as they say. She was cute, though. Maybe she wouldn't always work for me. There was an opening coming up for a bedmate soon.

After a while, I left. There was nothing more to see. Brian and Laura would go at it for a time, rest, and do it again. There was no imagination in Brian's fucking. They went at it in only the missionary and rear entry positions. Laura refused to let him cum in her mouth... in fact only took him in her mouth for a few moments... and when Brian tried to massage her anus, she slapped his hand away. It was depressing. Just what did Laura see in this bozo and why was she throwing away six years of marriage to fuck him?

The two adulterers didn't meet for a week and they were both more than a little upset with a world that kept them apart. It seemed their schedules just weren't meshing very well, for a change, and they didn't know what to do about it.

One day "Kathy" came to Laura with a proposal that she and Laura go to Las Vegas for the next weekend. The investigating crew had an extensive dossier on Kathy now. They'd found a mountain of information about her. Kathy, it appeared, was an extremely spiteful woman. Friends knew her as bitter and alienated from her parents and siblings by earlier infidelities.

In a phone call neither knew was monitored by Carl's crew, Kathy expanded on her earlier suggestion. She wanted Laura to tell me that Kathy had won two free tickets to Vegas in a call-in contest on the radio and had invited Laura to go along. It was clear to everyone hearing the tape of the phone call that Kathy was proposing that only she and Laura take a trip to "Sin City." Simply put, the purpose was to get laid as often as possible. She told Laura she'd bought two-dozen condoms and intended to use every one of them.

Laura was won over quickly, but she threw a monkey wrench into Kathy's plans by immediately calling Brian and inviting him along. Kathy sounded unhappy to hear Brian would be joining them there when she heard about it in a later phone call. She made no protest though. I gathered Brian had to pay his own way. He didn't seem to appreciate that much, judging by the snippy nature of his last phone call before departing. I couldn't help but think what a cheap bastard he was. He actually thought Laura should pay for his trip out there so he could screw her. Incredible!

Pete, my lawyer, told me he was adding Kathy to his list of people to serve with subpoenas. She was well aware, and had been for a long time, that both Laura and Brian were married. By enticing Laura to spend the weekend in Vegas, she was acting as a facilitator in the whole nasty mess. Pete didn't think she had any money he could get out of her, he didn't even think the lawsuit would go very far in the civil courts, but he was going to put the fear of God into her, he said. She would never, never ever, consider helping wreck anyone else's marriage when he was through with her.

We discussed whether to stop this thing with just the footage from the motel or wait until the planned Vegas trip. I was inclined to end the intrigue, the lying, and the deceit right now and just initiate divorce proceedings on Laura immediately. Pete thought we should give them a little more rope to hang themselves, as he put it. The trip outside the state, with all the attendant lies and misrepresentations, would seal their fate. The impact would be especially strong if Laura showed a particularly egregious lack of respect for her marriage vows.

Lawyers talk funny. What he really wanted was to see her way over the line in word or deed. As it happened, he got both.

The investigators were in the same casino-hotel where Kathy, Brian, and Laura were staying. They were in one of the two towers while Carl and five of his minions were in a room in the other tower where there was a direct line of sight down into the cheating trio's room. It had cost us five hundred dollars for the room clerk to assign Laura a room on this side of the building and one that could easily be viewed from where Carl was. Carl's operative said those five bills disappeared off the counter faster than the eye could follow. A few second's work on the reservation computer console was all the clerk had to do. He probably thought it was the easiest money he'd ever earned in his life.