Chapter 2

I was paying a late evening visit to Terri's office to photocopy some of Joel's forged accounting files when I saw the notice on the company bulletin board in the copier room. I had made a copy of Terri's office key some time ago and knew when the coast was very likely to be clear, with no one likely to see or remember my visits. After I idly read the notice, suddenly the final steps of my revenge plan came immediately into sharp focus. It was an appalling and audacious plan, and if it went all wrong I was going to be hanging out trapped on a limb with no hope for escape. But it just seemed so right.

The notice was for a memorial service for one of the head accountants of the firm who had died the previous day in a hit and run automobile accident. I recognized her name, Betty Mitchell - she was the accounting manager that supervised Joel's company account and she had personally prepared the annual Profit and Loss statements and other reports that went to the other partners. Her accounts were honest — garbage in, garbage out — as they say. It was not her fault that Joel and Terri had provided her with grossly inaccurate forged documents with which to work from.

Her death was chalked up to be a tragic and unfortunate accident according to all of the news reports. The car that had struck her had been stolen less than an hour earlier by several young teenagers, who panicked and abandoned the wrecked car at the scene of the accident. Nothing sinister, just bad luck ... she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, with the right materials in the just the right hands, an entirely less innocent explanation could be created. And I had just the right materials at hand to do so.

I finished making photocopies of a large collection of Betty's original source financial documents, particularly invoices and expenses that I knew to be fraudulent. I then paid a late visit to our office and found with little effort the matching 'original' untainted documents in Joel's secret files, stashed away in a back room, and I made several sets of photocopies. Together I shoved these sets of 'before and after' documents into a large manila mailing envelope, giving the printed return address of the accounting firm, and I neatly addressed the package to the senior member of Joel's silent partnership. I couldn't resist writing on the back of the envelope, "To be mailed and opened in the event of my death — Betty" in a neatly printed but anonymous block style hand.

This would certainly open a very nasty can of worms, but this was only the first phase of my overall master plan.

Phase Two was much simpler to enact. Using my clone, I texted Joel's superlative top broker and instructed him to 'shoot the moon' and liquidate everything and go all-in on a highly recommended, can't miss stock he had messaged Joel about earlier that day. I messaged Joel's 2^nd broker to instruct him to also immediately liquidate his holdings but then transfer the entire account funds into a new off-shore bank account that I had just established. The 3^rd, and poorest performing broker was instructed to also shoot the moon and 'go short' on the same can't miss stock that the 1^st broker was picking to skyrocket.

Phase Three came next and went equally smoothly. I texted Joel's bookie and placed a large number of wildly random bets for the next week's assortment of races, mostly on long-shots that had no chance of paying out. On the odd chance that one of two of the nags actually came through I instructed the tout to hold all of the winnings and place them all on a certain, ill-favored horse that was running at a major national race the following Sunday.

Phase Four was also rather simple, I sent an email to VIP Guest Relations at Joel's casino saying that I would be arriving sometime this coming weekend and asked for a suite reservation and the full availability of my approved casino credit limit. They replied back nearly instantly with my confirmation.

Phase Five handled the more mundane facets of my scorched earth campaign. I wasn't too worried about what to do with my house or our other marital assets. The house was fully mortgaged up in both of our names and with the downturn in the housing market we had little or no equity built up. Our joint accounts were equally meager and didn't require any adjusting. In fact, I took special pains to make sure that our recent banking transactions all fell within normal parameters. There was sure to be some sort of investigation and I didn't want there to be the slightest red flag that I was preparing any sort of getaway of my own. The overseas bank account had been set up under a false identity (also courtesy of Oscar the Grouch) via a public computer at the library, using numerous proxies to completely obscure my Internet trail.

Phase Six was equally mundane, but quite necessary. I next prepared email packets complete with attached saved photos of a very candid and pornographic nature to be mailed out to the other three husbands that Joel had cuckolded with his affairs. I didn't want to mail them just yet, but I had the messages prepared and ready to go at a moments notice.

Now it was just time for cleanup. My work computer that I had used to download the material from the cloned Blackberry I gave a complete and thorough security wipe. Then I bounced the original hard drive onto the cement floor forty or fifty times before it took a final swim to the bottom of a local lake.

I left Terri's laptop completely untouched. I was certain that there would be incriminating emails and other documents on it, but I had more than enough of that available from other sources. No fingerprints of mine had ever touched that machine. I hoped that this would help keep my butt safe.

I kept an especially sharp and vigilant eye on Joel's incoming messages for the next two days and only had to intercept and delete two messages that might have gotten him alarmed or concerned.

Friday, just after lunch, I transmitted a tailored Blackberry virus I had obtained from Oscar unto Joel's actual Blackberry and listened with delight when Joel later discovered that his cell phone was kaput. I kindly offered to take it for him to the repair shop and assured him that everything could be restored, in about a week or so. Hehe.

My final act for setting up this drama was arranging a business trip of my own to take place starting the next Monday. It really wasn't too hard to manufacture a good legitimate reason to leave town and I'd earlier made the phone calls to arrange it. One of our largest old clients is in Carson City, Nevada and they had been having some slight software problems with the security computer suite and had been wanting me to come out there for a day or two to handle the problem. It would be an easy fix, but it was also one that I could exaggerate about the seriousness of for a few days, if I needed more time away from home to let the smoke settle.

If anything, Terri was delighted to hear that I would be going on a short road trip. "You don't get out of town and get to have fun very often." She remarked. Nor did she object in the slightest when I mentioned that I'd leave Saturday afternoon, as getting a Sunday flight to Carson City was pretty much impossible at this late notice. This probably suited her plans fine, I was sure that she'd use the opportunity to hook up with Joel while I was gone. She was certainly having a few regrets, but her torrid affair with Joel hadn't seemed to have cooled off very much. Again, I'm sure now that she was blinded by the money ... millions of dollars that would soon be in her wild spending fingers!

We had a great 'goodbye' fuck on Saturday morning. It was an old fashioned gentle lovemaking, the kind we used to share together in the happier early years of our marriage, and for a minute I thought that she had developed a bout of conscience and perhaps was even ready to confess. Something inside her seemed to have clicked, as if she now realized what exactly she was losing with her affair with Joel. Maybe if I had stayed a few minutes longer she would have come clean with me. Maybe we could have worked it out, maybe not. We'll never know.

She kissed me lovingly goodbye at the airport passenger drop-off and I never saw her again.

The trip to Carson City went off without a hitch and I picked up my rental car for the short drive to Reno. Oscar the Grouch had provided me with a new top notch (but expensive) fake ID in my pocket under the name of Joel Woodlake and within minutes of my arrival I had the casino eating out my hands, eager to let me dig as big a hole for myself as I could manage.

I was amazed at how few hoops I actually had to jump through to collect my credit advance. I was expecting loads of paperwork, a set of fingerprints or even a retina scan, but all I had to do was smile and show my ID and give my reservation and casino account number and sign an illegible scrawl to the receipt they put in front of me. I wore one of Joel's old USC college jackets, a wig that matched his hair color and covered it with a ball cap and a pair of Joel's aviator sunglasses. I did my best to keep my face out of the security camera when I collected my first $50,000 in chips, but it was apparent they either didn't care much about security here or they didn't want to take the risk of offending one of their VIP high rollers.

I blew through that first stack of chips like a drunken sailor on shore leave before the breakfast buffet was set up in the restaurant, and toddled off of bed a broke but happy man with a pair of $1000 high class hookers under my arms when I went off to bed. They were worth every cent of Joel's money — I'll remember that night for a very long time. Naturally they cleaned out my room before they tiptoed out early the next morning of every cent that I had in cash left over from last night, but that was entirely to be expected. My personal money, ID, etc I had carefully left locked up in my rental car, and I'd hidden the car key under a sofa pillow.

Sunday morning I signed for my next $50,000 pile of chips and started to cautiously play much more conservatively in order to try and break nearly even. I made a big show of being seen spending money like a drunken sailor on shore leave, but I tried to play smart to keep my losses small. After lunch I grabbed myself another brace of high class paid ass and screwed their asses, giving them a nice $500 chip bonus each for the nice lez show they put on to get us all warmed up for a second round of fun. Then I signed for another $50,000 but I played smart with that money too, being seen as a high-roller, but quietly stashing away at least half of these chips too.

That evening I collected the final $50,000 in casino play money and stashed all of these chips away for cashing in later, using my real identity. I resisted the urge to cashed in my total haul of a little over $132,000 in chips under my own name and I settled for just collecting $7000 in petty cash. This was small enough to avoid IRS reporting and I got out of Reno with my head still attached to my body.

I had a lot of the casinos money in chips still waiting to be cashed in, but I could return in a few weeks to handle this. I wanted enough time to pass so that some overly clever cashier manager didn't suddenly remember me as impersonating Joel weeks or months earlier. To be safer, I'd also have to cash these out in small amounts, preferably less than 10k at a time. Inconvenient, but definitely the safest way to collect the money. The stolen $125,000 was much more in fact than I had anticipated getting, and Joel was now on the hook for the full $200,000. I was pretty sure that they would want it back pronto ... especially since Joel had never officially checked out of his suite and had appeared to skip out.