Practice to Deceive

and Eddie Navarre was definitely Caucasian.
    It was a huge disappointment for Plumberg.
    He came back to the mainland day after day, showing the photographs at myriad stores, gas stations, banks, and restaurants from Renton to Tacoma. Surely someone must have seen Russel Douglas with Eddie Navarre.
    But no one had.
    Mark never found Eddie Navarre. The man he had tracked to Florida had the same name, but it turned out that he was the one with the long rap sheet. The “Eddie Navarre” who had stalked Sandra Malle on Whidbey only had one charge, and that was for selling a tear gas weapon in California in 1978. “He might not even have known that was against the law,” Plumberg said.
    As he spun his outrageous lies and behaved so eccentrically, Eddie Navarre came close to being charged with murder. Perhaps he realized that himself, and traveled far, far from Whidbey Island.
    There were other leads that seemed—at least initially—to have merit. One man came forward, a part-time Whidbey Island resident who was an avowed homosexual. He recalled that he’d once met Russel Douglas in a bar and that they had had a “one-nighter.”
    “He said he’d never done that before, but that he was curious about it. I never saw him again.”
    When shown a lay-down of several photos which included Douglas’s, the man could not absolutely identify him, having met so many strangers in bars in Washington and in Hawaii.

PART FIVE
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Mark Plumberg

C HAPTER T HIRTEEN
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    T WO DAYS AFTER JULY 4 , 2004, Mark Plumberg returned from vacation. Commander Mike Beech called him into his office and informed him that he was now the lead detective on the Russel Douglas case. Mike Birchfield was leaving the Island County Sheriff’s Office and joining another island city’s department, and Mark would step in. (Tragically, Birchfield died in his early forties of pneumonia a few years after he left the department.)
    Plumberg was both elated and challenged by his new assignment. This was a case that only grew more convoluted as months passed.
    Mark Plumberg seems born to be a detective, although law enforcement was a career he had never aspired to in his early years. Tall, muscular, and highly intelligent, he started life in Kansas City, Missouri. Now close to fifty, he is a man of many interests and avocations, representative of a new generation of police officers who are anything but the doughnut-eating, hard-drinking, tough-talking cop caricature of decades ago. And that image in itself was a reputation given to them by macho writers and reporters. (In thirty-five years of writing true crime, I’ve never met a cop who ate doughnuts!)
    Plumberg could well be a college professor teaching zoology and ichthyology. As an avid scuba diver and underwater photographer, he was the first to film the procreation of sand lance—a type of fish that burrows beneath the sand to spawn in tidal flats—a huge step forward for ichthyologists.
    The Island County detective hikes in the Cascade Mountains, bikes for miles, enjoys the symphony, makes plum wine and beer, and also cooks holiday dinners for his two grown daughters.
    Plumberg is a devoted father, and as his daughters grew up, he spent every vacation with Natasha and Heather—and only them. They wanted to go back to the places they’d visited when they were younger and their dad took them to Idaho, to Craters of the Moon and Glacier Park. He recently became a grandfather to a beautiful baby girl— Kennedy.
    Long divorced, Mark lives in a home with easy access to Puget Sound, and sweeping views of mountains on all sides. He grows quinoa, barley, and kale in the backyard and raises chickens.
    The youngest of eleven children and raised in the Midwest, Plumberg went to college on a football scholarship as a linebacker, but he didn’t finish the four-year program. Instead, he joined the marines and stayed in the corps for eight years. He has lived in Hawaii, southern Spain, Asia, Corpus Christi, Texas, and too many areas of the world to note. He is fluent in Spanish. When he moved to Whidbey Island, he knew he was “home.”
    He pursued various careers for a time and became friends with local cops who suggested he consider being a reserve officer with the Island County Sheriff’s Office.
    Somewhat reluctantly, he gave it a try. Plumberg graduated from the Reserve Academy in 1996. His police friends urged him to take the civil service exam to become a regular deputy. He did, and graduated from