Practice to Deceive

just above freezing during the night. Many of the homes in their neighborhood had already turned on their Christmas lights, and beams and shards of color sliced through the rain and fog. As always, the day after Christmas didn’t seem nearly as joyful as the day before Christmas.
    As the two women cut across the thickly forested property at 6665 Wahl Road, Nicole noticed a bright yellow SUV parked in a small cleared space at right angles to the dirt driveway leading back to a cabin. She knew that her neighbors who lived there—the Black family—had gone to Costa Rica for the Christmas holiday, and she was a little surprised to see a strange vehicle there. It was an idle curiosity, however, since nothing seemed to be amiss, and there was a light on in the cottage kitchen. The Blacks sometimes invited friends to stay at their vacation spot.
    The two women didn’t walk near the yellow car. When they headed back from the beachfront, it was four thirty and full dark during this week of the shortest days of the year. Now they could see that the yellow Tracker was still there, and its pale dome light was on. Caution told them not to walk closer to a strange car in the dark on their own. If the car had a mechanical problem or was out of gas, the driver had probably called for help or walked up Wahl Road toward town.
    They decided they would look for it the next day—if it was still there. If it was, they would call the Island County Sheriff’s Office and ask that a deputy check it out.
    Before they did that, however, someone else noticed the yellow car that was almost hidden by the fir trees beside the long driveway. On the early Saturday afternoon of December 27, 2003, Joseph Doucette, who was a schoolteacher in Bellingham, Washington, left one of the cabins on the Blacks’ property with his sons to take a walk.
    One of the Blacks’ sons was Doucette’s pupil, and the teacher, his wife, their two sons, and her sister had happily accepted an invitation to spend Christmas in the cozy cabin.
    With all the excitement of Christmas and the somewhat close quarters of a cottage, the little boys were bouncing off the walls. Doucette rounded them up and they headed out for a hike with their dog, hoping they could get rid of some of the pent-up energy.
    The Bellingham teacher saw the yellow SUV backed into a grassy spot between two fir trees. Its dome light was still on. His oldest son noticed that the passenger door was open.
    “I thought I should go up and shut the door,” Doucette recalled. “To keep the battery from draining and rain from getting in. I called out to anyone who might be in the car, but no one answered.”
    With an eerie sense that there might be something really wrong, Doucette quickly led his boys back to their cabin and told them to stay inside while he checked on something. Once his sons were safely out of the way, the teacher jogged back to the SUV.
    As he moved to shut the car door, he glanced in and froze in shock. There was someone inside the Tracker. The man behind the steering wheel appeared to be asleep, drunk—or perhaps even dead. Half hoping he might only be imagining the worst, Joe Doucette looked closer. The silent figure appeared to be buckled into a seat belt. He saw that the man was slumped over with his head down and his fists tightly clenched.
    Backing away, Doucette knew he shouldn’t touch anything, and he hurried back to his cabin to call 911.
    He told the Island County dispatcher that he’d noticed something that looked “like goo” coming out of the man’s forehead. That led him to believe that the stranger might be dead.
    Doucette had no idea who the man was or what had happened. He stayed beside the yellow vehicle, waiting for the ICOM (Island Communications) operator to dispatch someone who might know how to determine that.
    * * *
    I SLAND COUNTY SHERIFF’S SERGEANT Rick Norrie was working the 1 P.M. to 8 P.M. shift that Saturday afternoon, the supervisor of patrol duties in the south sector of Island County. At 4:26, ICOM dispatched him to investigate a “possible death” at 6665 Wahl Road in Freeland. He arrived at the scene eight minutes later, the first of many sheriff’s officers and emergency responders to head for the “unexplained/possible death.”
    He didn’t know what he would find. As with any call concerning a body, neither Norrie nor anyone else knew exactly what might have occurred. He could have responded to a heart attack victim, to someone who