Chapter 1: The Tail
Del idly scrolled through the game screen on his phone, finally landing on solitaire. He glanced up through the windshield, then started flipping cards. He was lucky and unearthed two kings immediately. He made further headway and moved several cards into place in the tableau, revealing an ace in the process. Finally he began flipping the cards in the hand. He looked up through the windshield again. “Shit!”
Del’s target, a trim, elegant woman with her dirty blonde hair in a ponytail, was exiting the building. The odd, dark-haired young man was with her. Del put his phone away, started the gray Prius and watched intently. She opened the passenger door of the Honda Civic and the young man slid into the seat. The woman entered the driver’s side and Del heard the engine start. His eyes were already checking behind his own car to pick out potential openings in the traffic.
This case had worried Del from the start. It began with a seemingly typical outraged husband looking for evidence that his wife was cheating. He paid the advance fee without complaint. But Del’s investigation was not proceeding in the usual way. He’d had his doubts about this case from the initial meeting, where Del flat out challenged his prospective client.
“Mr. Barnett, what exactly leads you to believe your wife is having an affair with this man?”
“Why else would she see him a couple of times a week, and drive him off somewhere? Frankly, she’s no longer the woman I married. She’s become cold, irritable, looking for any excuse to spend time working. Often we’re hardly on speaking terms.”
“How did you find out about her activities with this man?”
Hal Barnett snorted. “That’s the pisser. She told me about him.”
“Told you what, exactly?”
“That she had a new patient and had to drive him somewhere a couple of times a week. Usually she sees her patients only once a week, so I immediately got suspicious. But the real giveaway was that she had to drive him, because he couldn’t come to her office.”
“And your wife is a therapist?”
“Yeah. Her office is downtown here in that old bank building.”
“But she doesn’t see the new patient there?”
“Right. She drives him somewhere else to fuck, obviously. Otherwise the people in her office would hear them.”
Del thought that maybe it wasn’t at all that obvious. Barnett’s story sounded all fucked up to him.
He quickly learned from his surveillance that Mrs. Barnett met the young man at her office and then they drove to the other place. Barnett had that all wrong, and it didn’t look at all like a liaison. Why would anyone see a lover at a scheduled time during a workday, and also tell her husband about him? But given Barnett’s simplistic mind and cocksure attitude it didn’t surprise him at all that his wife’s attitude toward him had changed over time.
Del verified that the wife, Elena Barnett, was a legitimate licensed therapist. Her online reviews indicated she was good at her profession. Why would she jeopardize her reputation over a stupid affair? Del had the nagging feeling that something wasn’t at all right about this case.
It took him a couple of days to track the young man down. His name was Leo Caldwell, and he was only 22. Elena Barnett was six years older. Caldwell worked at a shoe store a couple of miles away from his apartment. Del noted that he could get to work on the bus. He obviously didn’t have his own car. Caldwell also took the bus to Elena Barnett's office, which negated Hal Barnett's assertions.
He had observed the woman and young man four times now, but they didn’t spend any time at the typical trysting spots – Sybaris, cheap hotels, or the guy’s apartment. Instead they went from her office to a small office building converted from a rambling house, located twenty minutes away in a nearby suburb. Del had managed several photographs of them together, but saw no PDAs or signs of even casual attachment. And they were only together for at most a couple of hours in the morning, twice a week.
Del had cased out the other building tenants of course – two lawyers, a dentist, a piano studio, and another therapist. This made no sense if there was an actual affair going on between these two. All he had was lousy circumstantial evidence, which no competent family court judge would give a single fuck about. Yes, Elena Barnett spent time with Caldwell every week. But Del had already guessed that their regular visits had something to do with the other therapist.
Del was tailing the Honda from a few cars behind. He knew this route by now and was certain they were again heading to the converted office building. He easily hung a few cars back on the busier streets, but was careful to drop farther back once they turned onto a side street and pulled up to the office building. Del parked half a block away and watched the pair walk into the building. He sighed, got out of his car with his tablet and walked to the coffee shop around the corner to get some work done.
