Her name was Carla. They had met when he worked at a soft drink bottling plant in Illinois. By then he had two years invested in an engineering degree, and she had been in an art therapy program for a year. They were both employed in the bottling plant for the summer because they had relatives who worked there, and it was the sort of place that hired relatives.
Near the end of that summer he got a good look at her after work when she didn’t have her long hair stuffed into a hairnet, and her body was not rectangularized by the white coats they wore on the bottling line. She looked at him with her eyes no longer behind protective goggles, smiled, and said hi. After a second of contemplating her voice he realized that she was both women, the one he had worked with and this one. She had straight golden hair, bright blue eyes that looked better unprotected, and a lithe female body. He asked her to go out with him to dinner and a movie, and she agreed and kept agreeing.
After another summer in the bottling plant and another year in school they graduated and got married. The church was the one Carla had gone to as a kid, where she had her first Communion, then seldom entered except on Christmas Eve and Easter morning.
Her parents were not enthusiastic supporters of the marriage. They owned a new-and-used car lot in a southern suburb of Chicago and noticed right away that he didn’t own anything, and his parents didn’t appear to either. His parents were more supportive because they had been eager for him to grow up and move out of their house. He had always been sullen and solitary, and they didn’t like him much. He got a job at a company in Cincinnati that made valves and control systems for pipelines. Moving away from their families was a relief to him, but Carla seemed to dislike the lowering of her standard of living.
After a year of searching in vain for art therapist positions, Carla took a job with a company that sold medical supplies. Her territory included not only Cincinnati but a wider slice of southern Ohio. On Mondays she would put a small suitcase full of clothes in the trunk of her car along with another small suitcase full of samples, order sheets, and inventory lists, then drive off, to return on Wednesday. She would be off again on Thursday and return on Friday.
In her second year, he began to notice that her work schedule became erratic. She sometimes came home from work very late in the evening or even the morning after she was due. She began to be too tired to have sex with him, even when she was home for a couple of days at a time.
He was an engineer, a man accustomed to measuring and evaluating things mathematically. He decided to investigate Carla the same way. He had kept accurate records for tax purposes, so he used them. He plotted graphs comparing her monthly paychecks, which were partially based on sales commissions, with her checks from the previous year. He made another graph comparing the hours she was away at work with the hours the previous year. The results indicated that his subjective impression had been correct. She was away more, but selling less.
One morning he picked up her cell phone while she was in the shower, but found it now had a password. The next day he began to follow her when she left for work. He learned nothing whatever from that practice, so he began to leave his own job early on days when she was working out of the company office and visiting Cincinnati pharmacies. He’d sit in a rental car and wait for her to pass by when she left work. He followed her to a restaurant, but only found she was meeting a group of colleagues that included both men and women having drinks.
Her company’s next quarterly sales conference was to be in Cleveland. His study of her movements inspired him to go to the hotel in downtown Cleveland where her conference was held. He went to the front desk with a suitcase, showed them his identification, and asked for a second key card to her room, which he called “our room.” Since the name and address on his license matched her reservation, he got the card.
Later, during the string of afternoon meetings of the conference, he went into Carla’s room and installed three small digital cameras. Two were electric clocks with the cameras built in, which he put on the two nightstands. The third was a white circular box with a glowing red light that looked like a second smoke detector. He installed this on the ceiling above the bed. Then he went home to wait until the day the conference ended. Early that morning he went to the hotel and waited until he saw Carla walk across the lobby for breakfast accompanied by a man. Then he slipped into her room and retrieved the cameras.
When he saw what the cameras had recorded he sent copies to the e-mail addresses of her parents, four of her female friends, her employers, and another to himself. He sent the videos through a mail service in Moldova that existed to receive e-mails and send them on to their final recipients anonymously. He changed all the locks in the house. He collected all of Carla’s belongings, drove them to her parents’ house near Chicago, and left them in their driveway. Then he filed for divorce.
For the next week his phone received two or three dozen messages a day from Carla. At first she was all hurt and self-righteous innocence. Then apparently someone made her aware of the recordings he’d made in the hotel room. The next calls carried a freight of rage and professions of hatred, tirades that went on long enough to exhaust his interest. There were threats of arrest, which, after a few days, went away because some expert she or her attorneys had hired couldn’t trace the e-mails to him. Next there were detailed recitations of the things about him that had forced her to seek male companionship elsewhere. Finally there were threats that there were “real men” who had heard of his behavior and planned to beat or kill him.
He recorded all the phone messages, turned them over to his attorney, and in a day they stopped. He kept working and saving, living conservatively and quietly. But all the time he was preparing for a change.
In the divorce proceedings he refused to amend his filing to apply for simple dissolution of marriage, which was an option in Ohio. Instead he insisted on a divorce on the grounds of adultery. Since there were no children, both had been employed, and no other complications existed, the pair had to agree to a settlement in proportion to how much money the plaintiff and the respondent had brought into the marriage. He ended up with seventy-five percent.
For some reason Carla felt an irrational urge to end up with the house, either because her lawyer could get it appraised for less than it was worth, or because holding her ground made her feel she had won. He readily agreed, received payment for his share, and moved out. He quit his job in the water valve business and drove a U-Haul truck to California. He was confident that even if she kept her job after the recordings he’d circulated, she would not be able to afford the mortgage and in time would lose the house. That had been about five years ago.
This morning he thought it might be nice to kill her. They’d had no contact since the divorce, so while he would certainly be a suspect, he wouldn’t be the sort the police longed for—a husband who was a beneficiary of her insurance, a married boyfriend, a neighbor nobody liked.
He had to think carefully before he took on the project. Carla hated him when he left. And he was sure that over the past five years she would have had some hard times that she blamed on him, which kept the coals glowing.
But he was sure he could kill her without creating a new connection to her. Her family had originally been from Alabama and, like many Southern women, she was addicted to sweet tea. She used to keep a pitcher of it in the refrigerator. It was sweet enough to hide ethylene glycol. And there would be less difficulty if he left the opened jug of antifreeze in her garage. If the jug was gone, this was murder. If the jug was there, this might be suicide.