The Fleetwood mansion was awash in unlawful sexual activity.

Little Jack was in his bathroom shower thinking lewd thoughts about Leah Flores, Andrea Urlan and Blue Monday, while soaping his favorite body part with one hand far more rapidly than necessary to clean it. He wouldn’t allow himself to think of his mother engaged in sex with Blue Monday out of respect for her privacy, and he was positive his father never did things like that with anyone. Well...maybe once.

Little Jack didn’t have the know-how, the connections or the guts to view any of the porno programs in circulation featuring the exotic trio his dad had made famous. But he’d heard plenty about them. He knew what they looked like from T-window talk shows and news coverage he’d seen of them. Plus, he had a great imagination. Had he seen the programs the talk was about, he would have been disappointed.

The butler’s apprentice, a middle-aged Bulgarian immigrant named Yuri, with marginal English skills, was in his servant’s quarters over the garage downloading a forbidden X Channel program. The master of the house knew only that he was willing to do more work for substantially less pay than anyone else on his current staff. It never occurred to the attorney general that he had taken the job at the mansion as safe cover for his real occupation. Consequently, it never occurred to him that many traffickers in illicit sexual programs were similarly employed in other households, like the governor’s and the CEO’s of global corporations with privacy licenses as secure as his own.

Jack Sr. and Kimberly were naked and sweaty, doing something on their bed that could not be legally described in detail; something that would get them arrested if an officer of the law happened to catch them in the act. They were flagrantly and joyously violating section 12, paragraph 5 of the Michigan Sodomy Act. They were also violating section 9, paragraph 1 of the Obscenity Act. When they were through, they planned to violate paragraph 2.

In other words, they were performing illegal sex acts on each other, recording their activity on computer disk and planning to watch it in their bedroom T-window.

Jack Fleetwood was a new man; a virile, imaginative and adventurous lover with a brand new appreciation for his wife’s sexuality. There seemed to be no end to the things they could do to give each other sensual pleasure. He was already looking forward to the editing of the disk that would turn their activities of the week into an orgy of a half dozen couples. My God, he thought, riding the wave of an all-body orgasm, how did I ever live so long without this!

Kimberly was riding her own little orgasm, thinking her own thoughts of pleasure and adventure—and Blue Monday. Jack was with her body, but in her heart and mind she was with Blue. The only other way she could enjoy having sex with her husband was to consciously use him for her pleasure like a hollow VRP. He knew she was enjoying herself but he didn’t know why.

Making love was a different proposition. It was something she enjoyed only with the man she loved. She didn’t love Jack. When he made love to her or when she pretended to make love to him, the images she once had of herself and Blue as a whore and her pimp, came in handy. She played her part with the cold, simulated ardor of a hooker entertaining a regular customer she couldn’t afford to loose. That’s how she always thought of herself at those times; as a whore; as Blue Monday’s whore. That’s how she had to think to detach herself from what she was doing with a man she despised.

When all their naked mattress-thrashing was finished and their labored breathing had returned to normal, they lay back under the white satin covers, shoulder to shoulder, telling each other how good it was.

Jack sighed contentedly, "Wait till I show you what I learned today," he said with a wink.

He was referring to the ELFing tricks he’d picked up in the course of the Monday investigation. For a while, Kimberly had been encouraged by the moral conflict she saw her husband wrestling with in the contradiction between his prosecution of Blue and his use of the man’s work to enhance his own sex life. A better man would have admitted the contradiction and changed his hypocritical ways. Jack admitted nothing. He changed his philosophy.

That was the new reality Kimberly had to adjust to. But to make the adjustment she had to get a better understanding of it. On the surface, it seemed completely arbitrary, but she knew that Jack’s mind didn’t work that way.

"Darling," she cooed, turning on her side to rub her inner thigh against the top of his, with her hand on his course, harry, chest. "If I ask you something about the Monday case, will you promise not to get mad."

Turning to face his lovely bride, with her natural blue eyes, peaches and cream complexion and natural golden locks falling sexily over one eye, he had to smile. "How could I get mad at anything you asked?" he said, brushing back the errant strands of hair and kissing her on her cute little nose.

It would have been easier for Kimberly if he’d gotten defensive. "Well...I don’t know how to put this, but don’t you think we’re being hypocritical about this?"

Jack still didn’t get defensive. He laughed.

Kimberly tried to laugh along with him but she couldn’t keep it up.

"Forgive me," he said, stroking her hair, "I thought you were going to say something serious."

She pulled back a little. "Don’t you think it’s serious to have somebody emasculated for doing the same things we like so much."

This time Jack’s chortle got her so upset she wanted to smash his face in. He stopped just in time.

"I was wondering when you’d say something like that," he said. "To be honest, I worried about that, too until I realized it was an apples and oranges comparison. What we do, we do for ourselves because we enjoy it. We don’t sell it. We don’t make money from it."

"Money?" Kimberly pulled her hand away from Jack’s chest and eased her thigh off of his. "Is that the difference? You make money from sex. The whole criminal justice system does. And most of the people involved enjoy their work, too."

Jack threw the covers back and hopped out of bed in a huff, "How the hell can you—"

It wasn’t easy to pursue the argument with his wife staring angrily at his genitals. He stalked over to a glass panel near the bathroom door, opened it with the touch of a button and snatched a silk, mauve and black-striped robe off of a polished silver peg. In the time it took for him to throw on the robe and tie the sash with his back to the bed, he calmed down.

Turning slowly to face Kimberly, who was sitting up with her back against the headboard and the sheet over her lap, he cleared his throat. "Let’s be mature about this," he said.

Kimberly, who hadn’t yet cooled down as much as her husband had, said, "I thought I was being mature. I thought you weren’t."

Jack looked puzzled. He stood where he was, keeping a formal distance from the bed. "Sometimes I don’t think I know you anymore. How can you possibly compare us to Monday, not to mention that absurd crack of yours about the criminal justice system making money off of sex?"

"Jack, whether you’re getting paid to sell it or suppress it, you’re making money off of it. What else can you call it when people make carriers out of writing laws and enforcing laws that govern other people’s sex lives?"

"Hell, that’s like saying morticians make money from death and doctor’s make money from injury and disease...I mean, it’s like saying they’re on the same moral plain as the people who cause it."

"Isn’t death natural?" said Kimberly. Isn’t it natural that people will sometimes get sick or get hurt? Didn’t God design things that way?"

"That’s my point. What kind of society would it be if there was no one to bury the dead, to heal the injured and cure the sick—or control the criminal. Crime is also natural. God gave us all the free will to obey His laws or to flout them. But He also gave Caesar the power to make law. If you let people do anything they want to satisfy their lusts you have barbarism. No one would be safe from anybody else. That’s why you have a criminal justice system."

"So, is Caesar always right? Is a man or a woman a criminal because Caesar doesn’t have the same idea of a good time that they do?"

Jack started pacing. "It’s not a matter of tastes or opinion; it’s a matter of natural law and perversion."

"Don’t stand there giving me the Clarence Thomas defense of government suppression."

Jack’s jaw dropped. To speak ill of Justice Thomas to an American Party office-holder was analogous to speaking ill of the apostle Paul to a Catholic priest. To question the validity of the Party’s natural law doctrine was the same as questioning the divine inspiration for the Bible. And to ascribe the doctrine to Thomas, who merely applied it as a judge, was an outrageous distortion of the facts which could have only been used to confound the issue not to clarify it. Jack wasn’t biting.

"All right," he said, throwing up his hands. "If you want to sit there talking nonsense, there’s nothing I can do about it."

He sauntered over to the bed and sat down on it, with one leg up and his body turned toward his wife. Speaking very slowly and softly, he said, "But I want you to answer me this: The American people are on my side in the Monday case by nearly two to one. Why do you think that is?"

"Because," said Kimberly without hesitation, "the Party and the media have given people who agree with you permission to say what they think without penalty. They have defined the American people so narrowly that most of them are bound to agree with you and those who don’t are afraid to say so."

Jack shook his head, "No, darling. That’s liberal propaganda. The truth is, most people want to see Blue Monday Gidarbed for good reason. They’re afraid of him. They’re afraid of what he stands for."

He held up his finger to make a point, then put the finger to his lips and got to his feet again. He paced the floor, his bearing pregnant with significant words to come.

He stopped.

"I’ve given this a lot of thought," he said, looking away from Kimberly with both hands stuffed in his pockets, "and I want you to hear me out...What you and I do together in this room. What we’ve been doing for the past couple of months, goes no farther than that. I’m your husband. You’re my wife. We’re a contained social unit."

"Yes," said Kimberly with an upward inflection, in answer to the look he gave her to ask if she was following him.

He continued. "We don’t impose our sexual—appetites, on other people and nothing we do is going to spread disease or weaken the structure of the family. But when unmarried people want to do the things we do it’s a perversion than can only lead to tragedy if it’s encouraged or ignored. There is a proper way for men and women to have sex, preferably on their wedding night, and most people understand that intuitively. For those who don’t, sexual deviance can become the only way they learn to express their sexuality. That goes against nature and their own best interests."

"So, said Kimberly, in whose best interest was it for Glen and Jill Kaiser’s son to impregnate a 14-year-old girl? Or didn’t you hear about that?"

"I heard about it," said Jack. "It just goes to prove what I’ve been saying about people like Monday pushing sex, breaking up homes and influencing children. The Kaiser’s boy is a perfect example of what pornography can do to a normal, healthy young man. What the hell are a couple of hormone-driven kids who aren’t even old enough to get married and raise a family doing having sex?"

"Maybe hormones had something to do with it."

Jack turned his head to his wife, who was now sitting cross-legged on top of the covers. Her arms were folded under her breasts in the classic pose of someone who is not receptive to what’s being said. But she was looking at him, with an open expression on her face that said she might be, despite her last irresponsible crack.

Jack ran his fingers straight back through his hair, then tuned to face his wife squarely. "Don’t tell anybody this. Not even Jill or your other friend."

"Shelly."

"Shelly. Don’t tell them. Monday has been supplying sexual services to wives of very important people. Wives, daughter’s, sisters, mothers, favorite aunts..."

He could tell by Kimberly’s face that she was shaken by the news.

"You can’t hide it." He said "It’s a shocking thing. When we stumbled onto the names, we didn’t know what to make of them. There were names like Samantha Gidarb, and Mary Macky. The Gidarbs have a daughter named Samantha. The prosecutor's wife is named Mary. We even found a Kimberly Fleetwood."

Kimberly felt faint.

Jack chuckled. "That’s where they went wrong. Whoever planted those names went too far. They had the first lady of the United States, the wives of senators and the daughter of a Supreme Court justice. They had two women who were dead when Monday started his business. We couldn’t do a thing with a contaminated list like that. How could you even begin to separate the names that belonged there from the ones that didn’t? We know of only two for sure who do belong. That’s because they came to us to try to get us to drop the charges—hang the consequences to their families. He’s a smooth-talking son-of-a-bitch. He’s even got children turning against parents. You wouldn’t believe some of the things Little Jack has said to me."

Kimberly was still trying to push her heart back in place from where it shot up and got stuck in her throat, so it wasn’t easy for her to talk.

"See!" said Jack, "it’s different when it hits home, isn’t it?"

The color, which had drained from Kimberly’s cheeks, returned with a rush. "Yes," she said, "but not the way you think."

Now Jack was shaken. "Oh?"

Kimberly had spoken without thinking, goaded by the image of women with more courage than she had to tell the truth about their relationship with Blue. But the truth was, her relationship was different. What had started as a remote erotic fantasy game to buzz her button by, had blossomed into an intimate friendship which had become much more than that almost overnight. The time might come when she’d have to confess all, but this wasn’t necessarily it. At any rate, she had put herself on the hook, and to wriggle her way off, she decided that she could tell the truth without saying what was foremost on her mind.

"Little Jack has talked to me about you, too," she said.

Only when Jack Sr.’s face reflected the kind of relief one would expect in a man whose head had just been lifted from a chopping block, did the meaning of his distress become evident. He knows! thought Kimberly. The bastard knows!

It was also evident that he didn’t want to admit to himself that he knew anything. She now understood that aspect of his character well; that part of him she had always disliked, which plugged into American Party politics so well. His capacity to lie to himself and the world was boundless. The trick was to follow a trail of evidence or logic or both, only as far as it went to confirm whatever he wanted confirmed and to veer away from any line of thought which might lead to an unwanted conclusion. Jill did that. Perhaps everyone did with one issue or another that cut too close to the bone.

She had been guilty of it her entire adult life. It was what stood in the way of seeing what kind of man her husband truly was at the core—what kind of man he had to be to seek and perhaps to win, the Party’s nomination for President of the United States. Oh, how she hated him, and herself for ever having loved him—for ever having felt torn between him and Blue.

"What did he say?" asked Jack

Kimberly had to retrace her thoughts to get back to what she was going to say about their son.

"He told me you were a good guy deep down."

"That’s not what he told me," puffed Jack. "He told me I was mixed up with crazy people. He said I was crazy, that I was prosecuting the wrong guy. He said I should be concentrating on the Brown Belt Strangler instead of that goddamned Blue Monday creep."

"Well? Shouldn’t you?"

"Don’t be silly," he said, removing his hands from his pockets. "The Brown Belt Strangler has absolutely—" He crossed his hands in front of his chest, then slung them down to his sides like an umpire calling a sliding base-runner out, when he said, "nothing to do with the Monday case." If the citizens of those communities—in Detroit—where the murders are taking place, had the social responsibility to run a time scan on one of the murder scenes, he’d be out of business. It’s that simple. The state can’t devote its resources to solving every local crime that pops up. My job is to uphold the laws of the State of Michigan; to serve the taxpayers of Michigan, not just the people of Detroit."

Kimberly snorted, "That sounds like one of your campaign speeches."

Jack ignored her, "Our son had to understand that Monday is a threat to every family in the state—and the country. Macky is a hell of a prosecutor and he tells me he’s got the jury he wants for conviction. We have to set an example with Monday, and I promised the boy that we would."

"Did you think you could impress Little Jack with that crap?"

Jack balled one of hands into a fist and pointed with the other at his defiant wife, "You never used to talk to me like this. I’m going to be the next President of the United States! You’re going to be the First Lady!"

Kimberly unfolded her legs and swung them over the side the bed, with her bare back facing her husband. Standing and walking purposely around the foot of the bed, she stood face to harry chest with him.

Bending her head back to look him in the eye, she said, very softly, "Fuck you Jack," and sauntered off to the bathroom, swaying her bare bottom as saucily as she knew how.

Jack stood frozen with dismay until the primitive part of his brain set loose a rage that hurtled him toward his wife, grabbing her by one arm and spinning her around. She put up no resistance, allowing him to get a painful grip on both of her slender upper arms and to glare at her.

She glared back.

"You fucking slut!" he hissed.

Kimberly smiled coldly. "Why Jack, darling. You never used to talk to me like that."