Linwood Barclay - Far From True

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.”

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.

Blackmore wasn’t sure he took as dim a view of the local force. Not that he’d had many dealings with them, but he wasn’t aware of any examples of gross incompetence. It wasn’t as though a professor of English literature had much reason to interact with the police.

There’d certainly been plenty of them on campus after Duncomb shot and killed that student who was going around attacking young women.

Didn’t seem to bother Duncomb at all to blow that kid’s brains out.

Sure, Blackmore thought, you could argue Duncomb did the right thing, but you’d think he’d feel something afterward. Taking another person’s life? But the guy carried on as though ending a young man’s life was just another day at the office.

Maybe, Blackmore thought, he shouldn’t be all that surprised, considering Duncomb’s background. Or his wife, Liz’s, for that matter. The details had trickled out over the last few years. How Duncomb had been working vice for the Boston PD when he met Elizabeth Palmer. He’d been gathering evidence on the escort business she ran, hoping to round her up in a sting, but he was the one who ended up being drawn into her net.

But the Boston cops hadn’t been the only ones looking at Liz. There was the IRS, for one. Duncomb, sabotaging his own department’s investigation, helped Liz destroy evidence. Records were shredded and burned. People were paid off. Duncomb quit, married Liz — motivated not just by love but by the two of them never having to testify against each other — and moved to Promise Falls when he got his security chief gig.

Was it a stretch to think a man like that might take extreme measures?

“Professor?”

“Hmm?”

It was a girl in the front row. Trish, or Tricia, something like that.

“Is something wrong?”

He realized he’d been standing there, saying nothing, off in his own world for the better part of fifteen seconds. Maybe longer. He wasn’t sure.

“Sorry,” he said. “I really am the absentminded professor, aren’t I?”

A few chuckles. Most of them, he realized, had probably never heard of the movie. A reference lost to the generations.

“Okay,” he said, resting the tablet on the lectern. The speech magically appeared. He’d bumped up the font size so he could read without having to wear his glasses.

Seconds before coming into the lecture hall, he had tried again to reach Georgina. He’d called home and her cell. No answers. He’d put in a call to the law office where she worked, just in case she’d shown up. No luck there, either.