Practice to Deceive

faced. It was not what it seemed to be; just when they pieced together part of the deadly foundation of a murder case, it would tear loose of another section. Their probe would involve Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, Texas, Alaska, and Mexico.
    And it would take years.

C HAPTER F OUR
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    T HE ONE PERSON A homicide investigator needs to interview the most is forever out of reach. The victim can no longer speak, and yet superior detectives find ways to know that person more thoroughly than anyone they know in life. They must weigh everything they learn about the dead, balancing what one witness says against what other witnesses assure them is the truth. At times, when the victim has lived an uncomplicated life, that can be a fairly simple exercise. With someone like Russel Douglas, the challenge from the beginning was overwhelming.
    Beyond losing their very lives, homicide victims lose their privacy. Their hopes, dreams, flaws, sins, accomplishments— everything —become public knowledge. In a sense, their very innards are spread out for public viewing to be picked over, criticized, and exploited. The media does that, of course, and detectives have to explore every facet of the dead person’s life if they hope to find who might have had a motive, opportunity, or means to destroy him—or her.
    Who was Russel Douglas? His semi-estranged wife had made him sound monstrous even as she learned he was dead—murdered.
    But that was only one person’s opinion. Russel did have friends, coworkers, even a lover who would speak positively about him.
    Mark Plumberg and Mike Birchfield had to examine physical evidence and study forensic results. They also had to seek out dozens of people whose paths had crossed Douglas’s.
    As they returned to 6665 Wahl Road the next morning, they found that daylight wasn’t going to reveal much. The gun simply wasn’t there, nor was there any other ballistic evidence. There were some tire marks in the soft dirt of the driveway that indicated that a vehicle had turned around near the cottage. But the details of the tires were blurred, not nearly distinctive enough to compare to exemplars of other tire imprints.
    By noon, Plumberg and Birchfield met Brenna Douglas in the South Precinct office for a second interview. She brought Russel’s “work computer,” a laptop, with her. They learned that he was employed by the Tetra Tech Corporation, near Redmond. He was a zone manager and was highly skilled with computers. Brenna said he was working toward his master’s degree in the University of Phoenix’s distance education program, and had an email account with the school, along with several other accounts.
    Indeed, he was within only a few credits before he got his MA.
    Mark Plumberg interviewed Brenna in one room, while Mike Birchfield talked to Russel’s sister, Holly Hunziker, in another.
    Plumberg asked Brenna if she had thought of anything since they last talked that might help the investigation. She mentioned that some of her clients at Just B’s had told her they had seen her husband a few times on the ferry as it docked at Whidbey.
    “That was odd, because during some of those times, he didn’t come to see me—or our children. I don’t know who he was meeting.”
    For some reason, Brenna had concluded that Russ might be having a homosexual affair with some man on the island.
    It wasn’t long before Brenna began talking again about Russel’s lifestyle. She was convinced he was into “swinging” and bizarre sexual exploration. She had seen his body piercings, and said he even had his nipples pierced.
    “He wanted to get more piercings, but I just could not deal with that!”
    She spoke in an oddly matter-of-fact manner. Nevertheless, she had let Russel back into her life in the past few weeks to see if he had changed. She didn’t really want him back, and she said she had discussed it with their very young children, and they didn’t want him living with them, either.
    “We were doing very well since he left us last May.”
    Mark Plumberg noticed how relaxed and comfortable the recent widow appeared to be. She sipped from a cup of coffee she’d brought with her. She was almost inappropriately animated as he talked to her.
    It seemed that she could not say enough bad things about the man who had been found dead less than twenty-four hours earlier. Brenna repeated that she thought he was having an affair with a man she named. Her suspicions had been fueled by