Lyin' Eyes Ch. 02

"I took Laura to the airport for that," I said slowly, "and this guy was there too, getting on the same plane...I can remember it clear as a bell!"

"Okay," Carl said confidently. "I'll have my folks keep on looking for another nexus, but I think we'll find that that "seminar" was the beginning of this whole mess...too many things are pointing toward it." I nodded. I'm not a man who believes in coincidences either. Carl checked his note pad.

"That's it for now, boss," he said. "We got the credit card issuers to email us digital copies of all the activity for the past year...it helps that you and Laura have joint accounts on all of them. Oh...that reminds me...we'll be looking at your bank records later today also, to see if there's anything there. I'll let you know what we find out, okay?"

I was impressed by the volume and depth of information that had already been accumulated. They'd only been working on the case for parts of two days.

"How did you get all that without my authorization?" I asked. I wondered if I really shouldn't pitch a fit with the banks and phone companies about releasing private information so easily. Carl grinned.

"You authorized all of it," he said. I let my eyebrows rise questioningly. He chuckled.

"Boss, you got no idea what you're signing when Maggie puts a stack of paperwork in front of you huh?" I had to smile and nod. The grin dropped from my face. I used to say I trusted Maggie almost as much as I did my wife. Now Maggie had the top slot.

"Okay, okay," I said, raising my hands in surrender. "Go forth and do battle with the bad guys...and girls," I told him.

********

By Thursday, Carl and his team had accumulated a massive pile of information about my wife and her new sex partner. Two investigators had been dispatched to Chicago and they'd already turned up a half dozen people at the company hosting the seminars who remembered Laura and Brian as being very close. One of the desk clerks, a witness to most of their high jinks, had thought they were married to each other before he noticed their different surnames.

Another three or four people at the hotel where Laura and Brian stayed recalled them as frequent visitors to the lounge where they imbibed considerable quantities of liquor. Apparently, they would stumble to the elevator and up to one room or the other in the early hours of the morning. The lounge manager had had to ask them to tone down their risqué behavior on two occasions.

Carl's two investigators said they were negotiating with the hotel management to see if the security camera tapes from that period were still available and whether they might be obtained for a "reasonable fee." Carl told me with a grin that was a euphemism for an under the table transfer of tapes for greenbacks. I nodded. I'd understood that from his tone of voice.

His freelance operative had been called in for a temporary assignment in Laura's office--much earlier than expected--and she was already reporting that Brian and Laura were an "item" around the office. Apparently, their mutual boss knew about it too and he'd admonished them several times to keep their "affair" out of the workplace. Laura, it was said, had already lost a merit increase on her salary because of a poor performance report based on her conduct. I marked that in my memory. My attorney would be interested in hearing of a firm that didn't do much of anything to stop clear violations of the morals clauses written into their employees' contracts.

The freelancer was working in the payroll section and had already obtained copies of Laura and Mr. Collier's pay records, along with time and attendance information. It appeared the dynamic duo was taking off one or two afternoons a week for a rendezvous. Credit card data Carl obtained from our bank showed where. It seemed Brian Collier was a cheapskate too, because Laura paid for most of the rooms at an economy motel on the outskirts of town. To me, that signified what a cheap, tasteless little affair this was. They couldn't even get together in a decent downtown hotel.

The little group of girl friends that Laura said she was meeting when she went out at night was composed primarily of single and recently divorced women obviously on the prowl for men. Laura had sworn them to secrecy but all of them--except for a woman by the name of Kathy--were talking fast and giving lots of details to Carl's investigators. A hundred dollars was all it took for most of them to give dates, places, and even approximate times when Laura and Brian would hook up as if by accident. Lately, even that fiction had been discarded. Most of the girls hadn't seen Laura in two months.

Kathy called Laura almost immediately and told her about being questioned by a strange man about Laura's involvement with the group. She maintained to Laura that she hadn't spilled the beans even a little bit. Kathy was fit to be tied. She thought it was unreasonable, spiteful, and mean for me to be checking up on her good friend Laura. She was right when she assumed it was me. I was the logical person to suspect of course. Kathy had plenty of experience in such matters.

A still incomplete background check on Kathy showed she had been divorced twice, once because she caught her husband screwing his secretary and the second time because her new husband caught her with the plumber. For the past few years, Kathy had wandered from man to man. On two occasions, she was named as a correspondent in divorce cases where she went out of her way to seduce the husbands. Somehow, this woman had gotten into the same group as my wife in spite of the fact she didn't even work in the same business building as the others. It seemed Kathy was, at least to some extent, encouraging the affair simply because she could.

We also knew that, so far, the $100 bribes were holding with the other women because Carl had cloned Laura's cell phone. The other girls responded to Laura's panicked calls with assurances much like Kathy had given her. That they would actually give her up never occurred to Laura. So, all Laura actually knew was that someone was asking questions but all of her "friends" were protecting her secret...she thought.

I was again astonished at the quantity and quality of the information Carl's operation had developed in so short a time. Of course, Brian and Laura were rank amateurs and Carl was the quintessential professional. Brian and Laura didn't have a chance.