Suspicion Ch 04

We both got up early Monday morning, ready to return to work and the real world. Quick showers, and then getting Jason and Christi up and ready for school. Just a normal Monday morning. I did notice Kathy grabbing a tampon from her bag and taking it with her into the bathroom. My guess was that Karl wasn't going to get lucky this Wednesday, which didn't disappoint me. Kathy wasn't enthused about sex during her period — in fact she was often a bit cranky. And there wasn't a 'free time' on the schedule until the following Tuesday evening. Too bad.

I had a busy Monday planned, although it wasn't for my job. In fact, I was taking another half-day off. If the weekend had been the foundation of The Plan, Monday was the beginning of the strategic offensive. I spent the first couple of hours in the morning getting my crew going, made sure they were clear about what needed to be done, and then retreated to my office.

The first task, back in my office, was to call my lawyer and tell him to put the divorce on hold. I explained that Kathy and I were going to try and reconcile, and wanted to stop the process at least temporarily. He could pass that information on to Kathy's lawyer as well.

Next on the agenda, was to get on the CableNex (the local cable TV station where Kathy worked,) web site, looking for a name. Specifically, I was looking for the name of an old high school friend worked at CableNex as a secretary in the purchasing department.

I called up Jill Jones, who had been a year behind me at school. She didn't seem too surprised when she heard my name. When she answered the phone she was almost whispering.

"Paul, is that you?" she asked.

"Sure is Jill." I replied.

"You know, don't you." came her response. It was phrased as a question, but it wasn't a question.

"Yup. Could we meet for lunch someplace where we won't run into Kathy?" I asked, "I don't want her to know that we're talking."

"Sure, Paul. I understand." she told me, and gave me the location of a small Tex/Mex restaurant that was about a ten minute drive away from the CableNex offices.

When I entered "Pablo's Place", it was dark and cool. The host approached me, and looked at me as he asked,

"Mr. Paul?"

I nodded in assent, and he took me into a rather secluded room where Jill Jones was waiting for me. When I came to the table, Jill stood up and gave me a friendly hug and a buzz on my cheek before we sat down.

Jill was a cute little blond, a little chubby now, who had been a J.V. Cheerleader when I was a senior. She'd married one of the stars of the football team, after he had graduated from the Police Academy with his Law Enforcement certificate. They'd settled down and had a passel of kids — five or six, as I recalled. He was still working for the Sheriff's office.

We ordered lunch and as we ate, we exchanged the kind of news and gossip that old friends, who hadn't seen each other for awhile, would. When we finished and push our plates out of the way, it was time for the serious discussion.

Jill looked at me with a kind of sad look on her face.

"Paul, I've heard that Kathy is supposed to be having an affair. I understood that you had kicked her out of the house, and that she had gotten an apartment, but its been really quiet other than that. No one has a clue who it is, or if they do, they won't say."

"I know who it is Jill," I explained, "and that is part of the bad news. You work for the Manager of Purchasing, don't you?"

"Yes. Is that important?" Jill asked, a quizzical look on her face.

"I'll let you judge. Does the name K.G. Construction mean anything to you?" I replied.

Jill drew in a deep breath.

"He is a new vendor, doing work for us." she said, her eyes closing a little.

"Kathy's affair is with Karl Gerring, the K.G. in K.G. Construction. He is apparently an old boy friend of hers, and they have been having an affair for quite a while," I fudged a bit there, making it sound as if the affair had preceded the bid for work.

Jill was clearly shocked.

"Oh, my. That is NOT good. You know that from the purchasing perspective, that represents a terrible conflict of interest. CableNex could be in big trouble if this got out. Kathy should have recused herself from the consideration of his company. This is a big ethics issue. At a minimum..." she was going on, until I stopped her.

"I understand that, Jill. Now, am I correct that your boss had been hoping to get the job that Kathy is now in?" I think that Kathy suggested that to me once." came my next question.

Jill looked at me with a sudden reappraisal in her eyes.

"Umm.. Paul, you are a devious one aren't you!" she smiled an evil little smile as she said it.

"Jill, I love my wife, and we are trying to reconcile and put our marriage back together, and I'm willing to do a lot to make it happen. My question to you is: would you and your boss be willing to feed me some inside information on the sly, if it would very likely result in Kathy's position being open again — soon?"

Jill laughed out loud.

"Yes, I believe that my boss would be very interested in insuring that CableNex is being operated in an ethical manner, by ethical people," her cynical view of company politics apparent, "I'll have a very quiet talk with her this afternoon."

That issue settled, we settled on how and when we would communicate so that the information that I was going to need would not be traced back either to me, or to Jill and her boss. A conspiracy had formed. I made my pitch and the sale; I had recruited a couple of 'inside' agents to help me with The Plan.

Back in my office at work, I called Kathy and reminded her of her commitment to schedule time with Bill Wattler, the marriage counselor. I gave his phone number and she assured me that she would set up an appointment as soon as we were off the phone.

Not long after that, Sanjay, the Java wizard who ran the Equity Corp web site came into my office.

"Hey, Paul. What is going on? Your department need some very fine programming on the site? Just remember: you have to get me exciting content first, and, I'm sorry to say, maintenance is very necessary, but usually very dull and mundane!" he said, laughing. It was a bit of a joke between us, that the Maintenance department was too boring for the web site.

"Sanjay, my brilliant friend! I have a non-work related question to ask you, since you are renown far and wide, high and low, for your great computer skills and loose morals. Would you deign to lower yourself to answer some questions from one of your humble followers," I was laughing as I said it, but I knew that Sanjay actually LOVED the praise, and pretty much believed his own press.

"OK, Paul, but the shit is getting pretty deep in here," he laughed again, "so spill the beans, what do you need?"

I explained my goals, some of which required some (as he called it, 'elementary level') programming, and some of it was understanding how to cover one's tracks over the web. I didn't have to fool the NSA FBI or CIA, mind you, and what I was doing was completely legal, so it wouldn't be that difficult, it turns out.

Sanjay told me that he would put together a Java script to do what I wanted in the next couple of days, and that I could easily attach it to any email that I wanted to send.

Viva The Plan!

The last thing on my plate for Monday afternoon involved a pretty sketchy character who I had discovered by stopping in a local porn shop and if they knew anyone with certain skills. It turned out that they did, and I was on my way to visit his 'office', if you could call it that.

Mitch Levine was a real creep. He specialized in doing 'special' custom porn. Anything you wanted, he could do — but it was all fake. He was a photoshop guru, who supposedly taught classes at some local 'art' school. But his real money came from putting together phony photos of really kinky sex stuff. I wondered how often his 'work' had been used for blackmail. And now, he was going to do some photos for me.

I had picked out five of the shots of Kathy and I having sex at her apartment, including one of Kathy giving me the blow job, and four others in various stages of when we were actually having intercourse. There was one thing in common with all of the photos: you couldn't see enough of Kathy's face to recognize her just by her face, but in all of them, a man who knew her body would be completely sure that it was Kathy. The second feature of the photos was that I had already gone in to photoshop myself and blacked out my face. Those were precautions against ol' Mitch boy putting my face on the 'net at some porno site. I had been told he wouldn't do that (unless I wanted him to — fat chance,) but I wasn't taking any chances.

"Mitch," I explained, sitting on one of the most uncomfortable chairs I'd ever tried, "What I want you to do is pretty straightforward — I want you to replace the man in these photos with a young black stud. It doesn't have to pass a close analysis, but it needs to be good enough to fool someone who knows this woman."

Mitch kind of chortled.

"Fuck me; this is really blah — no imagination. Oh well, its your money." he said, looking me over at the same time. "Your wife gonna git off seeing herself pronged by a 'brother' instead of you, huh?"

Oh, Mitch thought he was so clever. I let him believe what he wanted to believe.

"Well... I guess its pretty tame by your standards, but after 20 years we have to put a spark into the good times every now and then," I said with a grin, "Anyway, it was her idea. But if it gets her off..."

"Yea, sure. I mean, most men got dirty minds, ya know, but women — they got us beat 10 ways to Friday for porn. Most of the best stuff I do is for some broad or another," Mitch concluded, figuring he had it all thought out.

"Alright, $150 now, and $150 when you pick them up. Gimme about a week. OK, five hardcopies, and the originals on disk. You want JPEG or TIFF's? Your old lady will love 'em. You guys will be banging all night!" were Mitch's final words of wisdom.

We shook hands and I left.

I was SO glad to get away from Mitch and get home. I needed to wash my hands.

Since I was going to be home early, I stopped and picked up a couple of rib eye steaks, a container of potato salad, and one of those salad 'kits' that comes with nuts, eggs, cheese and dressing all in one pack. I was home about the same time that the bus let Jason and Christi off at the corner by our house.

I got the troublemakers settled, gave them some milk and snacks, and then on to their homework. In the meantime, I went out and started the charcoal burning in the grill.

When Kathy arrived home, she was surprised to find dinner almost ready. She walked out back where I was busy watching the steaks, keeping an open beer available to spray them down it they started to flame — a great excuse, right? Anyway, Kathy came up and kissed me.

"Wow! It looks great, honey. When do we eat?" she asked.

"Oh, give me another, five minutes or so. Everything else is ready inside." I replied.

"I saw when I came through. Oh, by the way, I was able to schedule an appointment with Bill Wattler for tomorrow afternoon. I'm taking a couple of PTO hours. He said to schedule two hours for this first meeting." she explained.

"Great," I leaned over and kissed her again, "I glad you're willing to give marriage counseling a try."

"And Paul, my lawyer called to tell me that you had stopped the divorce. Thank you. I know it gets old, but I still need to tell you: I'm sorry that I've hurt you so, and I still love you. More now than ever," she finished, another of her completely emotional and self-contradictory statements.

Surprisingly, it didn't hurt me as much to hear that kind of nonsense now, because I knew that I was taking action, not just listening to words.

Shortly afterwards we went in, and called the kids to dinner. The rest of the evening was a typical school/work night — finish homework, play some video games, talk with friends on the phone, clean up and get ready for bed. I knew that especially the first day of her period, Kathy would be exhausted, and sure enough, she was off to bed pretty early, although after sitting for awhile kissing and cuddling with me. It was somewhat strange to me, that now, when Kathy thought that I was allowing her to share herself between Karl and me, I was getting some of the best sex and affection that I'd had in years. How sad.

After everyone was tucked away in bed, I finally had the private time to go to my home office and log on to the computer. I logged on to an anonymous email site, to check for information. It was one of the things that Sanjay, (bless his slightly crooked soul,) had taught me — how to set up a mail system that would bounce my emails through several servers, for example, maybe one in Hong Kong, another in Bulgaria, and another in the U.K., and changing I.D.'s each time, before sending it to its final destination. Not a foolproof system, but you would need specialized software and a clever hacker to trace the emails back to their origin. And in this case, no one would bother.

That evening when I logged on, up came an email with a copy of Kathy's calender for the following day, showing PTO from 2:00 to 4:00, the reason listed as 'Medical appointment: Bill Wattler'. Following that was a single name: Butler & Sons, Inc. That email confirmed two things for me; that Kathy had indeed set up her counseling appointment, and second, that my insider was following through providing me with the information needed for The Plan.

Tuesday, I was back at work for the full day. Nothing exciting. At the end of the day, a joke arrived in my email, only it wasn't really a joke, it was a confirmation. Kathy had been at work all day, lunch with some other employees, no changes to her calendar, she had left at 2:00 for her appointment.

Kathy, in fact arrived home that night in a very thoughtful mood. When she kissed me, it was perhaps with less passion than it had been for the past couple of days, but with a gentle intensity. She hugged me close, seeming to want to feel as much of my body against hers as we could manage.

When I asked if she'd made her appointment, she told me yes, but then I didn't ask her any more about it, and she didn't volunteer.

She continued in a somewhat subdued way all evening. It was like she was suddenly looking around her and seeing things for the first time. She was hugging and holding and kissing the kids so much that night, that Jason finally told her,

"Mom, lay off. I got to finish my homework if I want to play any video games tonight!"

That actually got a smile and a laugh out of her, and she gave them some room until they went to bed. A little later, Kathy told me that she wanted to go to bed, and asked if I could join her, at least for awhile.

"Paul, you know that tomorrow after work, I'm going back to my apartment. OK?" she stated, using our euphemism for her stepping out with Karl.

"Sure, that's what's on the schedule." I told her as I lay there beside her.

"I wanted to ask you something tonight." she looked at me in the darkened room, "You know last Friday when you used your tongue on my 'backside' — you know, my ass. I really got off on that. The next time that we have a couple of hours without Jason and Christi in the house, would you put your cock in there and have sex in my butt? I've always wanted to try that, but I was always afraid before to ask you. I thought that you would think that I was some kind of slut. But after you licked me there, I thought, well, if he will put his tongue up there, why not his penis! I want to share that with you."

I was astounded, That would be another first in our marriage, her virgin anus. I had to kiss her.

"Sweetie, you can count on it." I told her, with another kiss for emphasis.

That night, despite her period, I used the lube on my fingers again, and caressing her clitoris, gave Kathy a nice orgasm, not spectacular like Friday's and Saturday's, but good. In return, I think to ease the fact that tomorrow night was 'free time', Kathy sucked on me again, but this time to completion, and I came in her mouth. She swallowed it all, but brushed her teeth afterwords, and we kissed and she went to sleep.

I got back out of bed again and booted up the computer, and signed on to one of my special email accounts. The email I composed was going around the world several times before it was going to land on the CEO's desk of Butler & Sons, the company that had lost the contract with CableNex to K.G. Construction. The email read like this:

CEO, Butler & Sons Services,

Did you ever wonder how you were sandbagged on the CableNex contract? Did you ever wonder how an unknown company, new to the area, with limited resources was chosen over Butler & Sons? I can't tell you directly, but I could point you in the right direction to find out. I don't want any money, I just don't think how K.G. got the business is right.

If you want to know more, and are willing to dig up the proof yourself independently (it's available out there,) let me know. I can't be involved, I would lose my job over this, but it's just not right.

Just call me Ethos, the WhistleBlower

The attack was initiated now, even if only I knew about it.