Practice to Deceive

friends had urged her to come forward. She was acquainted with Brenna Douglas and she was concerned that her ex-husband, Floyd Peckinpaugh* might somehow be involved in Russel’s murder.
    “I know that Floyd was angry with some company that didn’t pay him for a concrete job—and I’m pretty sure it was a telecom company. He was making threats, and he would sit in his truck making phone calls to that company. He owns a gun.”
    During Viola’s marriage to Floyd, she said he had lived a “secret life,” where he had affairs and did drugs. She was worried that Floyd might have shot Douglas because he was angry that Russ’s employer hadn’t paid him.
    When Plumberg checked with Russ’s coworkers at Tetra Tech, they said it was highly unlikely that he had been involved in any operations on Whidbey Island that dealt with concrete. It seemed a far reach to connect him to Floyd Peckinpaugh.
    This was one of the early leads that ended nowhere. And there were to be many of them.
    Another tip came to Mike Birchfield that same week. A man named Dirk Kenwell* brought a friend of his—Sandra Malle*—to the South Precinct. Sandra was concerned about an acquaintance who had recently moved to Whidbey Island. She explained that she had known Eddie Navarre* since the early eighties, and that he was a peculiar man with a criminal history, a heroin user, and possessed of a very nasty temper.
    Navarre currently sold orange juice franchises.
    Sandra was an artist on the island, and the last person she ever wanted to run into again was Navarre. When nearly two decades had passed, she didn’t expect to. He was part of a different world, a self-styled “hippie.” They had never been romantically involved and, as far as she knew, he’d never been very interested in women.
    Sandra was afraid of him and also sorry for him, as he appeared to be living in his van. She had invited him to stay with Kenwell and herself for a few nights. But they had to ask him to leave after the second night.
    “He got very pushy and we had no privacy.”
    Eddie Navarre became one of the first “persons of interest” in the probe of Russ Douglas’s murder. But the Island County investigators couldn’t interview him; he had disappeared.
    Russ Douglas had led a scattered, compartmentalized life. Very few of his friends knew one another, and few groups truly knew him. There were people who had worked for the city of Mukilteo with him, coworkers at Tetra Tech, members of Gold’s Gym, Fran Lester, his girlfriend in Tacoma, Brenna and her family, his family, even strangers who had met him in a bar or on the beach when he was surfing.
    The one constant that he talked about to almost everyone was his estranged wife, their constant arguments, and his back-and-forth feelings on whether he should go back home and try again.
    If she would have him.

C HAPTER T EN
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    O N JANUARY 26, 2004, Mike Birchfield received a phone call from a private investigator—John Blaine*—who had been hired by Farmers’ New World Life Insurance Company to do a follow-up on a claim made by Mrs. Brenna Douglas. Blaine wanted to set up a meeting.
    Birchfield agreed to talk with him, and told Blaine that he had asked Brenna about any insurance policies her late husband might have had.
    “She said the only one she was aware of was a policy that came with his job at Tetra Tech.”
    “What did Douglas do for a living?” the PI asked.
    “He was a zone manager for a company called Tetra Tech.”
    “Our application shows him as an unemployed hairdresser.”
    That application was made in the autumn of 2002. Birchfield found that Russ had worked for the city of Mukilteo at that time. He was, technically, also a hairdresser because he and Brenna were partners at Just B’s. Why he didn’t list his employment with the city of Mukilteo, too, was puzzling.
    The payoff value of this second policy was three hundred thousand dollars.
    Brenna Douglas had filed claims to release information regarding the claim on January 3, 2004—nine days after Russ’s death—and again on January 12.
    The insurance investigator traveled to Whidbey Island on February 4 to talk with Mike Birchfield and, he hoped, to Brenna. Blaine had phoned her and found her “evasive,” although she did agree to meet with him.
    Blaine asked the Island County detective about the way Russel Douglas had died, and how Brenna had reacted. Birchfield recalled how stoic she had been, and her apparent lack of shock or