Denial -- The River In Their Heads.

While waiting the ferry to arrive, I called another investigator, let's call him Jim, about the physical and legal realities of placing a monitoring device on a home computer. My potential client, the wife, wanted get her husband's email password without his knowing it.

The husband and wife share the same internet/phone service provider and often share the same computers.
He is having an affair and denying it.
The secretive lovers ex-changed emails and she wanted to see all of them. She found some tucked into corners of his car and his pocket. She was obsessed with finding them all.

She'd broken into his email account twice. I told her it was illegal and she didn't care. He caught her each time. The first time she made an excuse. The second time, she said she just had to see for herself the affair was over. He convinced her it was. He changed to a new password. And opened another email account with another secret password.

What she wanted to do next was put a camera in a position where it could capture his finger tips moving over a keyboard - thereby capturing the password as it is being typed.

"That too is not legal," I told her.

"In fact," I add, "It's a Federal Offense. Washington is a two party consent state. You can not monitor any electronic signals, phone signals, do wiretapping, makes tapes or videos without both party's consent. If it goes to trial, his attorney, The FBI and Homeland Security can come down on your for that. Or worse... me."

So my friend, Jim, the investigator I was talking to, agreed that I did the right thing by saying no. He too would have passed on that case, despite the economy.
We were about to say goodbye when he said, "You got time for a quick story?"

"You bet," I told him.It was, after all, Friday in the Ferry line.

"My sister in law...." he began, "She was at a company picnic with her husband. The husband, who's 45, disappeared for a while. The wife went looking or him and found him having sex with this 22 year old female secretary on top of a picnic table."

"Wow" I said , starting to laugh. I couldn't help myself.
You two choices after a week of stress. I choose laughter.
"It gets better" he said.
"So she caught him and her. And I 'm not sure what happened in-between. But now, six months later, there is an.... arrangement" he said.

He explained it like this:

The husband and the wife agreed to stay married.
The only condition was that he gets to spend every other weekend with his girlfriend.
Meantime, the wife agreed the husband could sleep in the same bed with the girlfriend but he could not have sex with her.
"The husband agreed!" my friend Jim exclaimed laughing heartily.
"Are you kidding me?" I asked him. "And she actually, truly believes him? That they aren't doing it?"
Jim laughed louder. "Yep, she still believes him."

And it went on from there.
Jim and I swapped stories of domestic denials like trading cards until the Ferry approached and I played the last card.

"So I had this client once," I told him. "And she found out her husband was having an affair when he confessed it to her after she found these pictures of them together.
She said her husband said even though he paid for this girl's hotel room, her diamond necklace, all her meals.... and they stayed naked in the same bed.... they had no sex, because "she wouldn't let him."

I asked that client the same thing I asked Bob earlier.
"Are you kidding me?"
No kidding.
The wife actually believed her husband when he admitted they slept naked in the bed together every night...
and they never had sex.
She believed him.
We were still chuckling when Jim's cell battery died about the same time the Ferry landed...
so I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. No need really.
The stories will just pick up where they left off when we next talk.