Practice to Deceive

his life,” she said. “He was a grown man and he was still complaining that he had a miserable childhood. He felt he had missed out on so much in his life, and he looked for someone he could hold responsible.”
    When her ex-husband, Jim Douglas, left Whidbey Island and moved to Alaska, Gail and her second husband—Bob O’Neal—raised her two sons.
    * * *
    N OW, AS HE CONTINUED talking with Brenna Douglas, Mark Plumberg saw that if Russ intended to hide anything from his wife, he hadn’t done a very good job of it. Brenna knew all of the passwords on his email accounts. And she said she checked on them regularly.
    Once more, Mark Plumberg asked for the names of Russel’s friends—someone the detective could talk to.
    She shook her head. She didn’t know of any friends who might know much about him. She was quite sure he’d been trying to get into a swingers’ club at an island restaurant.
    “I know they meet on Saturday nights and it’s called a ‘key club.’ ”
    That sounded like something out of the seventies.
    Detective Plumberg looked straight into Brenna’s eyes and held her gaze. She didn’t look away.
    “I’m going to have to ask you some tough questions,” he began.
    Instantly, she became very still and her body was rigid as she folded her hands in her lap.
    “Does anyone in your family have any reason to kill Russel?”
    “No.”
    “Did you have any reason to kill him?”
    “No,” she answered in a flat voice.
    Plumberg moved on to other questions, and she seemed to know he was getting ready to close the interview. Now, where she had been tense, her voice tight, Brenna relaxed, returning to her former casual mien.
    The detective didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know her—not yet—or anyone she might be close to, either someone she wanted to protect or who might possibly know hidden things about her.
    He closed his notepad and smiled. “You can call me anytime if you remember anything—or if you have questions or need to talk to me.”

C HAPTER F IVE
----
    M IKE BIRCHFIELD TALKED TO Douglas’s sister, Holly Hunziker. She seemed to have been close to Brenna, and she recalled that Brenna had phoned her on the twenty-sixth and asked to bring a birthday present to her. Her niece and nephew had sung “Happy Birthday” to Holly over the phone. Her sister-in-law usually made a point to recognize her birthday, Holly said, because it came hard on the heels of Christmas Day. But this year, it hadn’t worked out as Holly wasn’t going to be home.
    Holly’s opinion of her brother was surprisingly negative. She spoke of the verbal and psychological abuse he had heaped on Brenna, and about the sexual scenarios he also forced on her. Holly, too, mentioned that Russel had had affairs with both women and men.
    “He had weird ideas when it came to sex, and he was always trying to get Brenna to join in.”
    What Holly was saying was much like the information Brenna had given the two detectives the night before, and Birchfield asked Holly if she had firsthand knowledge of her brother’s erotic obsessions, and she admitted that she didn’t; she only knew what Brenna had told her.
    She recalled hearing that a few years earlier, Russel and Brenna had a business for a while where they gave “parties” in other people’s homes where they sold sex toys. Brenna had told her that they had to put on a show, demonstrating the bizarre condoms, bondage items, and phallic substitutes and she hated it. They had soon quit that business.
    Despite Brenna’s apparent distaste for her husband’s alleged proclivities, Holly said Brenna was very jealous. She had tried to keep tabs on him and who he was seeing. She particularly resented Fran, the older woman he was supposed to be dating during their estrangement.
    Mike Birchfield studied Holly. “I have to tell you that I find it strange that all I’ve been hearing about Russel is mostly negative—and he hasn’t been dead more than two days.”
    “Holly looked sheepish,” he wrote in his follow-up report later, “but she didn’t say anything.”
    The Island County investigators knew how Russel Douglas had died, but they were a long way from knowing why. Although his widow and his own sister had said virtually nothing positive about him, what they described didn’t seem bad enough to mark him for murder. And murders without a motive are not easy to solve.
    The Island County investigators learned that Russ and Brenna had dated since