Practice to Deceive

occurred to Mark Plumberg that Peggy was following a story line that was very like what Brenna had told him back on December 28.
    “Do you have any personal knowledge of his activities?”
    “Well, I’ve personally seen him in a kilt,” she said. “And once at a meeting at the salon he told me he would like to ‘party’ with me. The way he said it, it really had sexual undertones.”
    Asked if she knew anything about Russel and a “swinging lifestyle” in Las Vegas, she laughed.
    “He’d probably be more likely to find that on Whidbey Island than he would in Vegas.”
    She mentioned rumors she’d heard about spots on the island—clubs and gyms—where that could have happened.
    Peggy said she would call if she thought of anything more about Russ that might have led to his murder. She didn’t seem at all concerned that she had been contacted by detectives investigating a murder. In fact she spoke with great confidence.
    More tips continued to come into the sheriff’s detectives, but Peggy Sue Thomas remained on the “interview again” list.

C HAPTER T WELVE
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    I N LATE DECEMBER 2003, Mark Plumberg couldn’t know that he would one day become the lead investigator in the most intense—and frustrating—homicide probe he has ever known. Almost a decade later, he still wakes in the darkest hours of the night and thinks about it.
    In June 2004, he revisited the Russel Douglas murder investigation from scratch, reading over the stacks of follow-up reports and statements he and Mike Birchfield had gathered.
    After he had reinterviewed Sandra Malle, the glass artisan in Freeland, Plumberg’s chosen person of interest was Eddie Navarre. Almost everything Sandra Malle said about the juice entrepreneur made him a very plausible suspect.
    Mark Plumberg listened carefully as she added more about Navarre. She had known him in the eighties in Sarasota, Florida. She worked in a health food store at the time, and he had been into nutrition, even though he had always been overweight. At that time, they had been casual friends—“hanging out and partying” together.
    “He used heroin,” Sandra said. “He also used to hang out at health clubs and he picked up prostitutes.”
    “Was he homosexual or bisexual?”
    “I wasn’t aware of that, but I wouldn’t put it past him. I stopped hanging around with him because of his temper. It was scary and we suspected that he sometimes carried guns.”
    Sandra Malle didn’t know how Navarre had found her in 2003, all the way across the country and after such a long time. She guessed that he might have known that she moved to the Seattle area, but was mystified how he could have found her on Whidbey Island.
    “My phone number isn’t listed,” she said. “I sometimes advertise in the local papers here, but I haven’t since early autumn. And then I didn’t use my name—only my glass business name.”
    “Did he know any of your friends on the island?”
    She shook her head. She had talked with the small circle of friends who knew where she lived and none of them had ever heard of Navarre.
    “I just don’t know. He told me he drove by my house many times. He even used the term ‘stalked’ when he talked about finding me. He said he had to be convinced that I lived here before he knocked on my door. I remember he said that I had ‘no idea’ what he went through to find me.”
    Eddie Navarre had always told stories about his life that Sandra doubted. After Christmas 2003, he explained that he had come up the West Coast from California, looking for someplace to live that was “laid back,” where there would be “no hassles.”
    He told her he had been living with an older woman in California who was “in the movie business.”
    She could not tell Mark Plumberg any details on crimes Navarre might have committed, but she did know that he’d had “minor brushes” with police. That didn’t matter; he had already obtained Eddie Navarre’s rap sheet.
    “So you moved out here and you hadn’t heard from him before?”
    “Not until November. He called me out of the blue on Thanksgiving—this last Thanksgiving. I talked to him for a while, but I made sure he knew I wasn’t interested in seeing or hearing from him again.”
    Sandra thought she had succeeded in blowing Navarre off.
    At that time, he lived a good distance away in Redmond (the town where Russel Douglas had worked for Tetra Tech), and then in a penthouse suite in a hotel in Lynnwood,