“So everyone knew they were being videoed. The camera wasn’t hidden.”
Felicia shook her head.
“The DVDs are gone,” I said.
Her eyes widened. “What?”
“I think that’s what someone was after. Those DVDs.”
“Christ on a taco,” she said.
“That worries you?”
“Not me. Not personally. When we split up, Adam gave me any video he had of me, of us, either alone or with others.”
“How do you know he didn’t hold something back? Didn’t make copies?”
“Because I just know. Adam, for all his faults, was a more or less honest guy. At least with me. If he said he gave me everything, he did. And he never put anything online, never did computer files. He knew that kind of stuff always got hacked or sent by mistake. He liked hard copies, no pun intended.”
“And you destroyed them? The discs he gave you?”
“I did.”
“You’re sure?”
She scowled. “I told you.”
“Because I’m trying to recover those DVDs, or be assured that they’re no longer in existence.”
“Who for? No, wait, you already mentioned Lucy.”
I nodded.
“She wants them?”
“She’d be happy knowing that they’ve been destroyed. She doesn’t have to get them back. But we need to know who took them to get that kind of assurance.”
Felicia softened. “Sure. Look, I’m telling you the truth. Adam gave me any discs from our time together and I smashed them into a million pieces. They went out in the trash years ago.”
“Who else was on them?”
I was thinking that if the couples participating in the lifestyle with Adam and Felicia were still taking part with Adam and Miriam, I’d have some likely suspects where the missing DVDs were concerned.
Felicia shook her head. “I know what you must be thinking, and I don’t think it’s going to help. There were two other couples we saw back then. One moved to Paris around that time — she got transferred — and I don’t think they ever came back. And the other couple, there was kind of a big falling-out because she was the one Adam saw on the side.”
“On the side.”
“Yeah. Any discs from back then that featured those people also featured me, so they’d have been the ones Adam gave me.”
“When you were married to Adam, did he ever trust another couple enough that he’d give them a key to the house?”
She nodded. “The ones who moved to France. Adam gave him a key. In case we were away, it was someone who could check the house, if he didn’t want to trouble Lucy.”
“Do you know who Adam and Miriam were involved with more recently?”
“How would I know that?”
“Because you and Adam still talked. At least through e-mails.”
Her eyes widened for half a second. “It’s true, but I don’t think Miriam knew. She’d have been pissed.”
“I saw your exchange from yesterday. You said someone needed time to think something through. What was that about?”
“Jesus, you really are a detective. I was talking about Miriam. They were having some ups and downs.”
“The same kind you were having? Another woman?”
“He didn’t get too specific, but probably. Maybe that’s why he took her to the movies. Trying to smooth things over. Christ, maybe he took her to the drive-in to rekindle some of what they used to have, and they ended up dead.”
“You think Adam was interested in starting up a relationship with you again?”
She nearly choked on the wine. “Hardly. Been there, done that.”
I looked at the closed bedroom door, held it for two beats. “And you’ve moved on, anyway.”
Felicia followed my gaze, smiled. “I’ve moved on more times than I can count.” She put the glass to her lips and tipped it back.
“Had you and Adam always kept in touch since the divorce?”
She shrugged. “We stayed friends.”
“Did he give you money?”
The look she gave me suggested I’d just asked how much she weighed. “Money?”
“Beyond whatever settlement you had when you divorced.”
“It was a lump sum. But—” She paused for more wine. “But occasionally, when I needed a little help, he’d be there for me. He just didn’t want Miriam to know.”
“Did the two of you continue to be intimate?”
She grinned. “That is so charming. Intimate. You mean, were we still fucking?”
“Yes.”
She pursed her lips provocatively, then retracted them, perhaps realizing that whatever hookups she and her ex had had, there would be no more. “There was the occasional itch,” she conceded. “But mostly, he just liked to talk.”
Her expression turned sorrowful. “He felt I was one of the few people who understood him. Who knew that even if he behaved badly, he wasn’t a bad person.” She sniffed. “He was just a big boy, is what he was. I mean, he had problems. Some people would probably want to label him, say he had some sort of sexual addiction problem. You ask me, he just always wanted to be nineteen. I think he missed his bad-boy biker days.”
“What’d he do back then?”
“You don’t know?”
“No,” I said.
“He ran girls. Prostitution. Made a lot of money out of it, too. He’s always liked the ladies, one way or another.”
“I didn’t know.”
Despite whatever sorrow she was feeling, she managed a smile.
“It was how me met,” she said. “Adam wasn’t the only one who reinvented himself.”
Twenty-one
The lecture hall, which could accommodate more than a hundred students, currently held no more than thirty. This was a summer class, so attendance was a fraction of what it would have been through the school year. When Professor Peter Blackmore entered, the students were getting settled into their seats, opening their laptops on the teardrop-shaped fold-down tables, or putting out their smartphones and setting them to record. Blackmore didn’t see one student getting out a pen and paper.
There was a time, ten years ago, when he would have walked in with a briefcase jammed with student essays, half a dozen books, and a copy of his speech. But today he’d arrived with nothing but a digital tablet in his pocket. He’d e-mailed his lecture on Melville and psychological determinism to himself, and once he reached the lectern, he’d open the file and, using his index finger, glide his way through the talk. He might not have the most up-to-date phone, or know how to text, but when it came to delivering a lecture, he was totally twenty-first century.
“If everyone could take a seat...,” he said.
A handful of students continued chatting. The odds were none of them was talking about Melville, or psychological determinism, or anything else academic for that matter. It was more likely they were making plans for later. Where they’d meet for a drink. Who wanted to go in on a pizza order. Sharing gossip. Who was sleeping with whom.
He was thinking he shouldn’t have told the detective about Georgina.
“Okay, I trust everyone’s well into Moby-Dick,” Blackmore said. “Or at the very least, the CliffsNotes version.”
Some nervous laughter rippled through the hall.
He reached into the deep pocket of his jacket, brought out the tablet. Hit the button at the bottom, slid his finger across the screen to unlock it.
“Just one second here,” Blackmore said.
He knew Clive Duncomb would be pissed if he knew he’d talked to Angus Carlson. Duncomb liked to handle problems on his own. Not just his problems, but the problems of those close to him.
Duncomb didn’t like dealing with the local police. He considered them a bunch of hicks. A Promise Falls detective, Duncomb liked to say, couldn’t find his own ass in a snowstorm.