Chapter 1
There were many reasons why I hated cheating spouse cases. First of all, surveillance of any kind is boring. My idea of fun is not sitting in a damn Ford for six hours outside someone’s house, surviving on crispy M&Ms and Coke Zero, watching them sit and watch TV or phone their mums. As much as I love M&Ms, a cooked dinner would be better right about now.
Secondly, these cases never had a happy ending. Either the paranoid spouse who hired me was right, and it all ends in tears, or the spouse I’m following often finds out they’ve been tailed for a week despite being totally innocent, and it all ends in tears.
Never let it be said that I’m a bad PI. If I’m tailing someone, there’s not a chance in hell they know about it. They’re not knowing about it is what pays my damn bills. But a paranoid husband often begets a paranoid wife, and these paranoid wives often check their joint bank account statements and find my name. Considering those statements say either “CL Investigations” or just “Caitlin Lawson” – a quick google search would then reveal all.
There was always a fallout of some kind. Sometimes I even got to see it with my own eyes. I’ve come to collect final payments, only to be faced with couples screaming at each other on their front lawns. Lamps have been thrown, T-shirt’s have been cut, and once time a golf club was securely lodged in the front window of the husband’s prized Lamborghini… It was in fact, quite hilarious, but I did my very best to keep a straight face while Stan quickly and shakily wrote me a cheque. I didn’t often take cheques, but in that one instance – mostly for my own wellbeing – I was willing to make an acceptation.
My last reason for hating those cases? A big part of them involved me watching and taking photos of other people having sex. Unlike the movies, the sex was rarely passionate and scalding to watch, but awkward and clunky. In my experience, I found, people having affairs only had two settings when it came to sex:
There was the “guilt quicky” in which one, usually both, parties looked like they wanted the ground to open up and swallow them whole so that they can get out making the horrible yet somehow inevitable decision to bump uglies. They moved quickly, rarely made eye contact and usually kept as much clothing on as they could the whole time.
The second setting was my favourite.
The “We’re having an affair so it must look illicit and dirty” crowd were always ready to put on a show. Their submerged guilt emerged in a flurry of limbs and faked moans. The showier it looked, the better. They slammed each other against walls, doors, tables and one unfortunate time, a radiator. These were the ones who, when they were caught, showed no remorse. They never got any attention, they were unloved, it was a cry for help. Blah, blah, blah…
So yes, cheating spouse cases were pretty much the worst. But yet there I was, sitting outside of the apartment that Laura Parker had been renting for three months, because the worst still paid the bills.
Since her husband Derek hired me, I’d found out that she’d not only rented herself a secret apartment, but she’d opened up a secret bank account and had been funnelling money into it for over a year.
She come to the cute little place on Beechum street at least three nights a week, giving Derek excuses about working late or visiting a friend. Every one of these excuses were a lie, of that I had absolute proof. The one thing that I had yet to find was any proof of an affair of any kind.
So far my tailing of her had revealed no speedy guilt sex, no theatrical over-the-top sex, absolutely nothing. She would watch TV, paint a little, and cook herself nice dinners. She did all of this alone, and she seemed quite content while she was chilling in her soon-to-be bachelorette pad.
The woman wanted out, that much was obvious, but there was zero proof to show that there was anyone waiting for her at the other side of her very well planned out exit.
This left me with a moral dilemma involved; Derek Parker hired me to find out if his wife was being unfaithful. That was all there was to it. The fact that she was planning to leave him was unrelated to her faithfulness, which, as far as I could tell, was very much intact. As he was my client, usually I would feel very much obligated to give him the heads up on what was to come, but it’s my job to observe things, and what I’d been seeing didn’t quite add up.
At that moment, Laura came out of her apartment building to nip across to the post box opposite her building, just like she’d done twice already that week. Before she left the front door, she looked left to right multiple times. Her eyes were wide and she froze for a moment to listen, in case anyone was close by.
She darted to the post box and back as if her ass were on fire and she slammed the door quick as a whip when she made it through, nearly catching her own hand in the process. In less than thirty seconds, she was back in her flat and I saw the curtains twitch as she checked the street outside her building, clearly looking for any potential threats. I knew from watching her all week that her two deadbolts on her front door would be locked tight.
This wasn’t a woman who was preparing for a messy divorce. This was a woman who was preparing for Armageddon.
All the signs pointed to one very obvious conclusion. Derek was a bad guy.
