Practice to Deceive

evening of December 28, Plumberg and Birchfield executed a search warrant on Russel Douglas’s apartment in Renton. The now-dead man had left a radio on, and the sound of soft jazz in the background made their visit a little eerie.
    The place was sparsely furnished. It was little more than a studio unit, but it did have one bedroom and one bathroom on the second floor of a building with many apartments. It looked like a temporary place where a man might live while he tried to salvage a marriage gone sour—or while he was making plans for a divorce. A bachelor’s apartment in every sense of the term.
    The investigators found a surfboard in its carrying case leaning against a bedroom wall, so Russ obviously hadn’t gone surfing. According to Brenna, Russel had told her that he had a number of errands to run that day after Christmas. One of them was apparently a present for her; she thought it might be a tablecloth she wanted.
    His closet was stuffed with clothing, books, and various papers. There was also a .22 rifle there, and two plastic garbage bags with adult sex toys—nothing very shocking or different than a lot of men had. Outside of those objects, the two detectives found nothing that smacked of pornography or sexual perversion.
    There were two computer cases, but when they looked inside, neither had a computer in it. Among the myriad papers, they found a number of notes that appeared to be in Douglas’s handwriting. An initial glance at them showed they were introspective, written by a man who asked himself questions about how he should be managing his life, a man wondering how he could achieve happiness.
    Mark Plumberg set those aside to study in depth later; they might let him understand who Russel Douglas had been.
    The next morning, Plumberg attended Russel Douglas’s postmortem examination. Dr. Daniel Selove, a forensic pathologist who often travels around Washington State to do autopsies in sparsely populated counties, performed this after-death exploration while Island County Coroner Dr. Robert Bishop stood by.
    There were no surprises. Douglas had died of that single bullet fired into the bridge of his nose, and the slug had plowed into his head, forcing out a large amount of brain matter that dangled grotesquely from his forehead.
    He would have died instantly. When the bullet was removed, Plumberg logged it into evidence, along with plastic bags that held hair and nail clippings, a loose hair from the victim’s lower lip, and anal and oral swabs.
    Even the fragment of blue plastic from his broken sunglasses was saved. If the hair on his lip wasn’t his, it would only be probable evidence. Unless its follicle is attached to a hair, it is impossible to tell anything beyond class and characteristics.
    Plumberg was aware once again that it would surely take a motive or, he hoped, a match to the bullet casing and slug to the gun that fired it. And that gun seemed to be as lost as if it had been flung into Puget Sound.
    Perhaps it had been.
    Douglas’s clothing was bagged and sent to the Washington State Police lab to be tested by criminalists. They found semen on the victim’s underwear, but DNA results weeks later indicated the fluid was his own.
    On New Year’s Eve 2003 Mark Plumberg took the slug and the shell casing, labeled C-1, to Evan Thompson at the Seattle Police Department’s Crime Lab. If possible, they needed to know what brand of gun might have fired it. If they ever found the gun, that could be a vital link between the murder and the murderer. Less likely, the shooter’s DNA might be on the casing, but Plumberg would take the casing to the Washington State Police Lab in Marysville, Washington, to test for that only after Thompson examined the bullet and casing.
    The Seattle criminalist saw immediately that the missing gun was definitely a cheap .380 automatic weapon. The brand of guns that came to his mind were possibly a Llama, a Grendel, or a Bersa.
    Immediately after the tests, Mark Plumberg took possession of the bullet/slug and casing again.
    * * *
    N ICOLE LUA AND HER friend Janet Hall were interviewed for a second time. The women who had first noticed the yellow Tracker on their late-afternoon walk the day after Christmas had told Mike Birchfield that they hadn’t seen that either of its doors were open at that time.
    On reflection, they now told Plumberg they believed that they had seen the driver’s door open. If their recall was accurate, that would mean that the