Who Is Raphael Garza?

FRIDAY MAY 29th

It was late Friday afternoon after everyone else had gone home except for my boss, Cam Penney, and me, Walt Martin. Cam had asked me to stop by and talk to him before I left for the weekend.

"Do you have anything pressing going on next week?" Cam asked.

"No, just finishing up a couple of reports and closing out the Blanchard project," I said. "Why?"

"I got a call that there is a seat available for the Gladstone Process software training, starting Monday," Cam said. "Would it be a problem for you to fly out to San Jose in time to start class on Monday morning?"

I had been trying to get into the GP class for six months, and I hadn't been able to get scheduled for a seat in the class until October.

"Shouldn't be a problem," I said.

"Good, because I already told him we would take the seat." Cam handed me a printout with information about the class and where I should stay while I was there.

"You'll have to make your own travel arrangements."

"I'll do that tonight when I get home," I said. "If the class starts Monday, why are you are just telling me about it now?"

"Sorry about the short notice. I got the call around three o'clock this afternoon, and this is the first chance I had to talk to you about it."

"Is Kathy going to be pissed at me for sending you away on such short notice?"

"No, she'll be okay. She knows I have been waiting to get into this class for quite a while."

"Tell her I am sorry anyway."

"I will, and if she gets angry I'll give her your home phone number."

"That's fine, I can take the heat," Cam said. "Have a good trip, and I'll see you in a week."

At home, I told my wife, Kathy, about the sudden availability of a seat in the GP class.

"It's awfully short notice, but it's good that you were able to get into an earlier class," Kathy said. "I'm not crazy about you being away for a week."

"This won't interfere with any plans you had for next week, will it?" I asked.

"No. It will be lonely here without you, but I'll survive," Kathy said. "Maybe while you're gone I'll spend a couple of evenings volunteering at the nursing home."

"Just watch out for Old George. He always thinks you're flirting with him."

"I am flirting with him, but I never thought you noticed."

"Don't let his age fool you. He would jump your bones in a heartbeat if you gave him half a chance."

"A girl can always hope, can't she? Anyway, at ninety-five years old, I don't think Old George would be up to the challenge," Kathy said with a mock look of disappointment on her face.

I had planned to spend part of Saturday on the Raritan River in my kayak, but had to change my plans because I had too many small jobs to do around the house before I flew off to San Jose on Sunday. I had just finished mowing the lawn and edging along the sidewalk and driveway, and I was putting the edger away in the garage when I heard the phone ring. I stepped into the kitchen just in time to see Kathy pick up the phone, so I went back outside to hose off the lawn mower.

I was just finishing up when Kathy came outside.

"Guess who that was?" Kathy said. I just shook my head and looked at her. "It was Marge Robinson."

"I never would have guessed that," I said. "What did Marge want?"

"She asked if we could come over to their house Monday evening for a cookout."

"You're kidding. When did you two become friends again?"

Marge and Kathy had been friends until six months earlier when Kathy got a promotion to a supervisory position and immediately made some territory changes for the accounts that reported to her. Marge apparently had wanted that promotion. Since then, the two had spoken very little, and Marge had made some nasty comments to coworkers about Kathy.

"As far as I knew we hadn't, but maybe she is trying to offer and olive branch," Kathy said.

"Well, I can't go, I'll be in California. Are you going?"

"I think I will. If Marge wants to bury the hatchet, I am all for that. I know she was upset about not getting the promotion, and I guess taking it out on me was her way of dealing with her disappointment."

"You're such a soft touch. You just can't stand to see anyone suffering, even if that person is treating you badly," I said. "Well, maybe Marge finally realized that it's not your fault that she didn't get that promotion."

"Maybe. Are you finished out here?"

"All done. You got a cold beer for your sweaty husband?"

"I've got a cold beer and a hot body for my husband, as soon as he gets out of the shower."

TUESDAY JUNE 2nd, 2:00 PM PACIFIC TIME

"We have a lot to cover this afternoon, so try to be back from the break in ten minutes," announced John Odem, the Gladstone class manager. I was at the Gladstone Training Center in San Jose, California, for a class on the new business application Boswell Products, my employer, had installed on our computer system earlier that year.

Monday's session had been boring. We spent most of the morning on introductions, orientation and filling out forms. We didn't get started on the real subject matter until Tuesday morning, but the instructors were good and kept things flowing and interesting.

As I walked into the student lounge, I thought that it was going to be an interesting week. If only I had known how interesting it would turn out, I would not have been quite so excited about that prospect.

GTC provided both coffee and WI-FI in the student break area, so when John announced the afternoon coffee break at two o'clock, I, like most of the other students in the class, headed for the break area to log onto my computer to check email.

When my laptop came up, I logged onto my company email account. There were ten notes in my inbox. Most of the emails were notes to members of my project team, but I was always on the copy list. One note was a request from Cam for some data he needed Wednesday morning. I planned to send Cam what he requested when I got back to my hotel that evening. I then opened my personal email account to see if my wife had sent me a note. The only note in my inbox was from an email ID named WTF, and the subject line read, "What is Your Wife Doing?"

I didn't recognize the sender's email address, so I assumed that it must be junk mail and was about to delete the note, but something stopped me. I guess my curiosity got the best of me because I opened the note. The body of the note contained two lines. The first line said, "Tune in at 7:00 PM tonight." The second line was a hyperlink to a web page titled 'whatisyouwifedoing.' There was nothing else on the page.

I think it must have been the fact that my email address was the only one on the note that made me believe that it wasn't spam and kept me from deleting it.

TUESDAY 6:50 PM PACIFIC TIME

After class, I went back to my hotel, which was right next door to the GTC. I didn't stop in the bar with the other students staying there because I wanted to go up to my room and call Kathy, and then answer Cam's email before going out to eat.

I called our home phone, and after five rings our recorder picked up. "You have reached Kathy and Walt Martin, sorry we can't come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name, number and a short message we'll return your call as soon as possible."

"Kathy, it's me. Call me when you get home. Love you," I said and closed my phone. I looked at my watch and noted that it was 6:50 PM. That meant that it was 9:50 back home in Princeton, New Jersey. I wondered where Kathy would be at that hour. When I talked to her Monday evening, she told me that she didn't have any plans Tuesday. She called me in the morning before she left for work but she didn't say anything about going out that night. For her to not be home by nearly ten o'clock on a Tuesday night worried me.

I turned my laptop on, and while it was booting up, I called Kathy's cell phone. Her cell immediately rolled over to voicemail, so I left her another message to call me. It was not like Kathy to not answer her cell phone and for her to not be home at that hour on a work night was unusual.

Kathy supervises an audit team at Princeton Accounting Associates (PAS). Her team audits banks all over southern New Jersey and parts of eastern Pennsylvania. Most of her accounts were close enough to home that she seldom had to travel overnight for work. I wondered if some problem might have come up at her job that required Kathy to go out of town suddenly, but if that was the case, why didn't she call me or send me an email to let me know?

When my computer came up, I opened my personal email account hoping to find a note from Kathy, but the only new note in the inbox was another note from WTF. The subject line on this note read, "Do not ignore this note, Mr. Martin."

I was at the point where I didn't know whether I should be worried or angry that I couldn't get in touch with Kathy, and to top that off I had this strange email. I didn't want to start calling people back home and get them upset, so I decided that I would wait until morning, and if I didn't hear from Kathy by then, I would start making some phone calls.

I was about to open my Boswell Products email account to answer Cam's question, but I froze when I looked at the subject line of the first junk mail note I hadn't deleted earlier. "What is Your Wife Doing?"

My stomach suddenly felt like I was sailing in a small boat in rough weather. I opened the note and clicked on the hyperlink. The web page that came up had a video media box and one line of text. The text read, "The show begins at 7:00 PM." In the middle of the video media box was a timer counting down from three minutes seventeen seconds.

I could feel the tension in my body increase with each second as I watched the time dwindling away on the counter. I didn't know what I expected, but somehow I knew it wouldn't be good. Was it just a coincidence that I didn't know where my wife was the same day I got a note directing me to a website called "What is your wife doing?" I hoped it was a coincidence, but I didn't believe it.

Two minutes four seconds. Was Kathy in danger? If she was, how could I help her? What could I do? I could call someone but whom? The Police? What could I tell them?

One minute twenty-two seconds. Was this something that Kathy planned as a surprise for me? Maybe she was going to be on the video telling me how much she loved me.

Fourteen seconds. "Oh God, I think I am going to be sick."

TUESDAY 7:00 PM PACIFIC TIME

The counter flipped over to all zeros and then disappeared. The video screen came alive, but I could not identify what it was that I saw on the screen. It looked as though the camera was moving around and not focusing on anything. I could hear what sounded like people talking, music playing and other background noises but the video picture was jumping around too much for me to see anything clearly.

It took me about a minute to figure out that I was looking at the inside of a bar. It appeared that the camera was somehow attached or pinned to someone. The reason that the picture was jumping around was that the person wearing the camera was adjusting it. Finally, the camera settled down, and the picture became less jumpy, and I could see people standing around talking and drinking. The interior of the bar in the video was not familiar to me.

At first, I couldn't tell if the person wearing the camera was a man or a woman, nor could I tell if he or she was sitting or standing. That is until he pointed the camera at his very masculine watch. The time was 12:02.

"There you are." The man spoke. His accent was Spanish, more likely from Spain than Latin America.

Just then, Kathy, my wife of twelve years appeared on the screen. She was dressed in a knee-length flower print dress; she looked good, not too sexy but very attractive.

"What the fuck?" I said out loud, as my stomach was beginning to go into full revolt and my heart was beating so hard it hurt.

The man took Kathy's right hand and brought it up to his lips and kissed it. "I am so glad that you decided to come, Kathy. You have no idea how much this means to me."

"It was not an easy decision for me, Raphael, but I am here," Kathy said. She smiled, but she appeared to be nervous.

"Would you like to have a drink at the bar first or would you prefer we go straight into the dining room?"

"Why don't we go eat?" Kathy said. "I'll have a glass of wine with my lunch.

For the next hour, I watched Kathy as the two of them talked and ate. As near as I could tell from their conversation, this wasn't their first meeting. They seemed to be friends, but it didn't appear that they had ever been intimate. I could not remember ever hearing Kathy speak of anyone named Raphael, and I certainly didn't know anyone that talked with an accent like his. I could not see his face, so I couldn't be certain that I didn't know him but he apparently knew me. Otherwise, why would he have sent me the link to the website showing this video, and how would he know my email address?

It didn't appear that Kathy was aware of the video camera that Raphael was wearing, but I couldn't be sure of that. I wondered if she had any idea that I was viewing her secret lunch date over the Internet. If she didn't know, I wondered how she was going to feel about it when she found out.

The quality of the audio and the video was very good. The picture did jump a little whenever Raphael moved, but the image was sharp. I could clearly see Kathy's face and her changing expressions. In spite of all of the background noise in the restaurant, I could hear most of the conversation between my wife and the asshole with her. I listened carefully to everything that Kathy said to him, but I could not pick up any hint as to why she was with him or where they were. Did she intend to have an affair with him? I couldn't tell, but I was sure that Raphael intended to seduce my wife.

The more I listened to Raphael, the more I believed that he was a smarmy bastard that was out to cause me pain and destroy my marriage. Whatever his game was, he was very good at it. He knew just the right compliments to pay Kathy. Not too many and never obvious. He managed to make her blush several times. There was no sexual innuendo, nothing to make Kathy uncomfortable and yet I could see that he was getting to her. He asked Kathy a lot question about herself, which she seemed comfortable answering. She talked about her job, what books she was reading, what her favorite movies were, etc. The creep never asked Kathy about me, and she didn't mention me. Whenever Kathy asked him personal questions, he would say something like, "I'd rather not talk about that," and Kathy would say she was sorry, or that she understood and then change the subject.

During their conversation, the dickhead would drop in little comments designed to make Kathy feel good and to draw her into his web. When they first sat down at their table, he said, "When I saw you walking into the bar my heart felt lighter." Later the slime ball reached across the table, held Kathy's hands and said, "Your eyes... they are so kind; it's what I remembered most about you from our first meeting." Then, when they had finished eating and were just finishing their wine, he said, "You have a glow about you, like an angel. It's as if you were sent to lift me from my despair. No man has had a more beautiful angel."

I have to admit that he was right about Kathy having a glow about her but my reaction to it was much different than his. It made me want to throw my laptop through the fucking window.

Kathy never seemed to be able to respond verbally to these compliments. She would just smile, and her cheeks would flush. When he commented about her being "like an angel," Kathy's eyes filled with tears.

To me, his accent made him sound like a character in a cheap movie. He could have played the part of a smooth-talking gigolo, trying to seduce an old rich widow. I knew that he was a fake. He was just too smooth. Why couldn't Kathy see that, too?

When they finished the meal and paid the bill, they got up from the table; I didn't know what would happen next. My heart was pounding as I waited, expecting to hear Raphael suggest that they get a room or go to his house or his apartment.

"Isabel loved museums, I hope you don't mind," he said.

'That's fine Raphael; I also love museums."

I thought, "Museums? Were they going to a museum? How should I feel about that?"

Kathy turned and started to walk away from the table and then the video screen went black. A moment later, the picture was back. This time the video showed the interior of a room. The furniture looked plush, and the artwork on the walls looked expensive. The room seemed to be empty.

The scene didn't change for a few minutes, and then I heard a door open followed by voices. I heard the tapeworms voice first because he seemed to be doing all of the talking.

"It was wonderful having you accompany me through the museum. It made the experience so much more enjoyable for me," the maggot said as they came into the room.

Kathy was the first to appear on the screen. When the fecal eating weasel came into view, he managed to keep his back to the camera.

"As I told you before, Isabel loved museums. Going to the museum together was something that was very special to us. I think Isabel would have liked you very much."

Isabel? Who the fuck was Isabel, and how did she figure into Raphael's plot?

"I think I would have liked her, too," Kathy said.

"Kathryn, please sit down, and I'll get us a drink. What would you like?"

"I'd love a glass of red wine if you have it."

"Oh, yes. I have a very nice Cabernet I think you'll enjoy."

"That sounds good," Kathy said.

I wondered if Raphael might try to slip something into Kathy's wine. The idea that he could do that and I wouldn't be able to stop him was making me crazy.

Raphael crossed the room and walked directly toward the camera. He made no attempt to hide his face. He stopped and looked directly into the camera, and it seemed as though he was looking right at me. Then he smiled, and there was no Spanish accent when he whispered so that Kathy couldn't hear him, "Sorry we were late."

Raphael looked to be just under six feet tall. He had a thin body with dark hair, dark eyes, and a thick mustache. The smile on his face looked sinister rather than friendly. I had hoped that if I saw him, I would recognize him but after looking closely at his face, I still had no idea who he was. My anger was such that I could feel the heat in my eyes as I stared at the asshole's face on my computer screen.

The slimy bastard took the two glasses of wine he had just poured and returned to the sofa and sat next to Kathy. He handed a glass to Kathy and then made a toast to her.

"To my beautiful angel, I only wish we had more time we could spend together."

Kathy didn't say anything right away. She just sipped her wine and smiled at him.

After another moment she said, "I am glad that I can spend this time with you, but this is all I can do. I hope you understand."

"I do understand. I could not dare to ask for more than you have already given or promised to me. I will be forever in your debt," he said.

The sofa that Kathy and the sewer dweller were sitting on was across the room from the camera location. The video I was watching not only showed the two of them, but it also showed a good portion of the room. I was studying the room trying to find something that would help me figure out where Kathy was, or to help me identify Raphael. I was staring at the screen so intently that my eyes were beginning to burn, but I could find nothing that helped me. Then something happened that made my skin crawl. The camera began a slow zoom in on Kathy. It took about five seconds for Kathy's face to completely fill the screen. Her face was in profile, as she was looking at the creep sitting next to her. The camera then began to pan slowly down over Kathy's chest and down to her legs. The picture on the screen was a close-up of the gap between Kathy's knees. The view was not very revealing. Kathy's knees were too close together to show anything, but I didn't think that looking up her skirt was the purpose of the shot. It was a message, and I got it. The hair on my neck bristled as I realized that Raphael, the sleazy son of a bitch, wasn't working alone. There was at least one other person involved, and that person was working the camera.