out singed with ire. “You want me to watch my wife having sex with another man?”
“I want you to watch,” was all Uretsky said.
A chill ripped up my spine.
Could he know?
The video quality looked surprisingly good—not grainy or jerky. I watched Drew stumble and trip while unbuttoning his pants on his way to the shower. The video captured Ruby closing the bathroom door and turning off the room lights, just as we had planned. Although the camera lacked motion capability, it was in fact low-light sensitive, such that I could make out the floral pattern on the bed covering before Andrew emerged from the bathroom, dressed only in a towel.
“Why are you making me watch this?” I asked, making sure I sounded shaky and wounded.
A figure stepped into the camera’s view. She wore a sheath dress from the Gap and did a perfect job keeping her back to the camera. I studied the footage closely. In the limited lighting Ruby and Jenna were virtually indistinguishable. I watched Jenna take a drink of water from a bottle set atop the night table, and then the video stopped playing.
“I hit pause, in case you were wondering,” Uretsky said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Just remember that moment,” Uretsky said. “Let’s continue.” The video playback resumed. I watched Andrew and Jenna kissing, my pulse pounding with what proved to be unwarranted anxiety that Jenna had shown her face to the camera. Andrew’s hands fumbled greedily all over Jenna’s body. Inevitably, those same hands slid up and underneath Jenna’s dress. He probed Jenna’s flesh in all the places that would have driven me to rage had he been touching my wife instead of a professional. Jenna didn’t speak as she maneuvered Andrew over to the bed. Andrew let his towel drop from his waist, flashing the camera with a full frontal assault of his fleshy midsection and tumescent penis. He got himself prone on the bed. Jenna took another sip of water, hiked her dress up waist high, and straddled Andrew’s back.
Uretsky paused the playback once again.
“Did you see that?” he asked. “Are you with me, John?”
“I see that my wife is about to give a strange man a massage,” I said.
Uretsky sighed, as if disappointed. “Let’s keep watching.”
The video resumed. The bathroom door opened a bit on its own, exposing a wider sliver of light that better lit the room. The light provided a clearer view of the action as well. I didn’t time it with a stopwatch, but if pressed, I’d guess the massage lasted around five seconds at most. Andrew flipped over onto his back. Jenna reached across the bed and took another drink of water while Andrew fumbled to put on a condom. Jenna lowered herself down onto Andrew with her dress and heels still on. I heard a soft moan escape from her throat. She arched her back when his thrusting began.
The video stopped playing.
“Did you see it?” Uretsky asked.
“See what?”
“She took three drinks from that water bottle. Three times she reached for the bottle and drank. Three.”
“So? My wife was thirsty.”
“Your wife is right handed,” Uretsky said. “Maybe if she drank with her left hand once, I would have believed it. But three times? No, that’s not what right-handed people do. They drink with their right hands.”
An intense wave of apprehension swept through me, as though I’d been caught in a sudden and raging blizzard, trapped on the side of a mountain. My breathing tightened. My hammering heart thundered in my ears. Ruby reached out to steady me, but her eyes were affright as well.
“I figured out what you’d done, and I followed that whore you hired to her home. Too bad for her she lives alone.”
“What have you done?” I said. My dark voice came out just above a whisper.
“I’ll show you,” Uretsky said. “Watch your laptop.”
Uretsky, who still had control over my computer, loaded up a new Web page in the browser window. The page was blank except for the words “Now I know everything.”
“Ready?” Uretsky said. “Keep watching. It’s a slide show of sorts.” An image faded into view beneath those words. It showed Jenna lying on her back on a beige-colored carpet, her face frozen in a silent scream. Ruby screamed, too. A feeling of nausea overcame me as the room began to spin. The image of Jenna faded—one picture blending into another—and up came an image of Uretsky’s bloody pruning shears.
“No. No. No,” I said, hiding my face in my hands.
I looked up just in time to