Practice to Deceive

her romance with him would run its course, but she was happy while it lasted. Indeed, she said, she was ultimately the one who sent him away weeks before Christmas.
    Fran said that she had met Russel in a cocktail lounge at the resort town of Ocean Shores on the Washington coast. She had been on vacation from her telecommunications job in Tacoma at TESINC and he was there to surf. He was sitting at the bar by himself, and Fran said she had approached him. They hit it off right away.
    “He told me he had children, but they weren’t with him that first weekend,” she added. “He told me that he was divorced. We were having dinner once after we’d been dating for six or eight weeks, and he confessed that he was still married—but that he’d moved out of his house in April 2003. I didn’t meet his kids until about three months ago.
    “We talked that first night until five in the morning. We came to have mutual trust for each other.”
    Once again, Mike Birchfield was asking the questions, while Mark Plumberg took copious notes.
    “Tell us about Russel,” Mike Birchfield asked.
    “He was very shy, very quiet,” Cynthia cut in.
    “But he was open to anything and everything,” Fran finished. “I guess maybe you’ve been to his apartment and seen some of his wild clothes?”
    Russel’s heritage was Scottish, and she recalled that she had told him once that her fantasy was having sex with a man wearing a kilt. Sure enough, the next week he had come to her place wearing a kilt.
    Still, most of Russel’s own fantasies were fairly tame, even unimaginative.
    “He wanted to be naked on the beach,” she said with a shrug. “That’s not really weird.”
    The sex toys in his apartment? Fran dismissed that with a shake of her head. “He and his wife had a business where they sold those things at home parties. And they were the ‘entertainment’ at some of those parties.”
    According to Fran, Russel didn’t have very good relationships with the women in his life. There were the problems with Brenna, of course, and he hadn’t gotten along with his own mother, Gail O’Neal. He told Fran that she was very strict when he was a child, and his early years weren’t happy.
    “He hasn’t even talked to his mother for a year.”
    That, of course, wasn’t true.
    Russ Douglas’s tendency to blame his mother for things she had no control over probably was behind that lie.
    And his perceived problems with his mother may have been why Russel was attracted to Fran. Fran had been both his lover and an older woman who told them that she had “loved him unconditionally.”
    “I think he loved me in the way he could—but not in the way I loved him. He could relax around me, and I loved him even though he had a ‘dark side.’ ”
    “What do you mean by that?” Birchfield asked.
    “Russ had a lot of anxiety and emotional pain. He thought people had betrayed him. He was trying to find himself.”
    “Was he stable?”
    “Russ? No—oh no—but he was trying. He was in therapy for depression. I knew he took some prescription drugs. It might have been Prozac.”
    Just as his father had said, the man Fran Lester was describing sounded bipolar, with the strongest pull toward depression. Indeed, Fran said she’d been stunned when she heard he was dead. Murdered.
    “Frankly, I thought it would have been a suicide. When I thought of his being killed, it was a shock.”
    Russ had been very careful to maintain his privacy when the two first met. He wouldn’t tell Fran his address or even consider giving her a key to his apartment. After a while, they saw each other “four or five” times a week, and exchanged keys.
    “After we broke up, I mailed his key back to him and he mailed the key to my house to me.”
    His lover characterized Douglas as very insecure.
    “He was afraid of most women,” she said. “He developed physically late in life. He was smart enough, but he was naive. People who think sex is a game are very naive.
    “Russel wasn’t really very good at anything,” Fran added with a sigh. “He couldn’t throw darts, dance, play the guitar, or surf. I guess his only real talent was that he had a lot of endurance in bed.”
    “But you told me he was insecure,” Mike Birchfield reminded her.
    “Well, he wasn’t insecure during sex.”
    He was not, however, as uninhibited as Brenna Douglas had suggested.
    “Did he ever try to get you into S and M?” Birchfield asked.
    “ No! He was very sensitive