No Regrets

yellow.
    And so, eight weeks after Greg Doss and Ray Clever had first interviewed Ruth Neslund about her missing husband, a phalanx of official cars turned down the dirt lane that led to her backyard. Sheep nibbling in the pastures ignored the convoy.
    Phillips, accompanied by Doss, Clever, and Caputo, was about to search for evidence that might prove that the old sea captain who had lived here had been dead for months—that he had never left home at all.
    All of it seemed surreal.
    The men located several green plastic garbage bins behind the red house. They were filled with burned and partially burned debris. When it was spread out on a screen and examined, they found a single spent .22-caliber cartridge and bagged and labeled it. The burned and partially burned material in the green garbage cans wasn’t unusual—only insulation, beer cans, blackened metal, glass jars, and some carpet.
    Nearby, they saw that a blue metal burn barrel contained still-burning coals. Without garbage pickup on the island, everyone along the rural roads had burn barrels. This one was new, its paint barely singed, far too new to hold the remains of a man who had disappeared eight months before. Still it made the hairs on the back of their necks prickle to think that it was possible that Rolf Neslundhad been disposed of in a similar barrel. But when they looked in, the glowing ashes looked to be only papers and normal garbage.
    The searchers spread out over the yard and into the pastureland beyond, their eyes focused on the ground as they looked for some sign of what might have been a grave. They found no suspicious dips or humps.
    Next, they moved into the residence and searched it meticulously. The search warrant had listed the specific evidence they were allowed to look for: bullet holes in the wall and/or bloodstains. Phillips tested a number of stains he found to see if they were blood. They weren’t.
    At some point, Joe Caputo sat with Ruth in her living room. He noted a book on her coffee table, a Reader’s Digest condensed edition. He read the title to himself
—To Catch a Killer: How to Get Away With Murder.
Ruth saw him glance at it, but said nothing.
    A Chevrolet station wagon parked outside was also tested for bloodstains. There were none.
    The search team spent two days going over the Neslund property, but in the end there was nothing at all in the homey house that could be construed as physical evidence in a murder: only a single bullet cartridge. That didn’t mean much out in the country. Ruth herself was known to be skilled with guns, and those Lopez residents who lived in the country sometimes fired rounds at dogs to scare them away from stalking sheep.
    Donald Phillips took sixteen photographs of the house which he had enlarged and later gave to Greg Doss.
    One lawman who asked to be anonymous said, “We have a suspect, we have a motive, we don’t have a body, but we think there was one here once.”
    Ruth Neslund was scornful and triumphant as shecrowed to friends that the detectives hadn’t found anything. Why should they? She assured them that she would never have hurt Rolf.
    She told several people that he was most likely “sitting in the Greek islands, waiting for all of this to blow over— and then he’ll come home.”
    But the months passed and seasons changed, and Rolf didn’t come home.

Eight
    The missing persons case, or, more likely, the possible homicide case, stalled.
    Just as the deputies had suspected, Charlie Silverman was hesitant to bring charges against anyone without more proof or information. And for good reason. Should someone be charged with murder, tried, and acquitted, that would be the end of it. New evidence wouldn’t matter because double jeopardy would attach. No one can be tried for a crime again after he has been found not guilty. It was better to wait, but it was galling for the sheriff’s deputies who believed that Ruth Neslund knew exactly where her husband was.
    Ruth’s supporters were steadfast, and they formed a circle of protection around her. She certainly wasn’t a pariah, and her life continued almost as usual. She was free to entertain her friends, to visit with them, to leave the island whenever she chose.
    With the case becalmed, and the sheriff’s investigators backing off—or so Ruth thought—she went about her business. She had already sold Rolf’s Mustang a few months after he disappeared. In June, she placed an ad in a local paper, the
Friday Harbor