Practice to Deceive

think might have killed Russ?” Plumberg asked.
    “I have no idea!”
    “What would have been his connection to Wahl Road?”
    “I have no idea,” Brenna said again.
    Mark Plumberg told her frankly that he was still a little surprised about how quickly she had walked outside in her robe late at night when there were two strange men—himself and Mike Birchfield—in her driveway.
    “I thought it was Russ coming home,” she said. “My son woke me up and said there were lights in the driveway. I was angry—pissed—because I was thinking ‘Great! He finally shows up after I’ve gone to sleep.’ When I saw you, I didn’t think you were any threat to me.”
    Brenna didn’t think it odd that her girlfriends had called her so late at night.
    “That’s just what girlfriends do.”
    Jessie Valentine agreed with Brenna, adding that it was what women often did.
    Still nonplussed at the way Brenna had responded to the news that her husband was dead on the night of December 27, Plumberg bore down harder.
    “You only asked us in a kind of off-handed way why we were there. And we talked to you a long time and asked you some very pointed questions and you still didn’t ask us what had happened. Even after Mike Birchfield told you that Russ was murdered, you didn’t ask us why or where. Why was that?”
    “I guess I was in shock. I assumed something bad had happened to him or you wouldn’t have been there asking questions. I’m not a retard!”
    Brenna seemed a bit indignant.
    “I guess I just emotionally shut down. Russ couldn’t swim very well,” she said. “Actually, he swam like a rock. I guess I thought something had happened to him because he was going surfing the last time I saw him. I just didn’t know what had happened that night.”
    Jessie Valentine chimed in once more, assuring Banks and Plumberg that she wouldn’t have asked what happened in the same circumstances.
    But Greg Banks and Mark Plumberg weren’t there to find out how Jessie would have responded; it was Brenna’s demeanor that made them curious.
    At times, Brenna Douglas seemed to have been most aware of Russel’s banking and email accounts and passwords, but often she seemed confused. She did not know anything about two payments made on the Tracker—one on December 24, 2003, and another on January 8, 2004—nine days after Russ died.
    As for his email, she said she hadn’t bothered to look to see who he was writing to—until he told her he had broken off his relationship with Fran Lester.
    “Then I looked to see if he was telling me the truth.”
    Even though Brenna said she hadn’t trusted her husband after he allegedly had an affair with a woman in Wisconsin three years earlier and she had put spyware on his computer, she appeared sad as she told the prosecutor and the detective that she and Russ had done “okay” as friends in their marriage.
    Their Christmas reunion, if not perfect, was at least amicable while he was there. Some of their friends thought they might actually bind up the wounds of their marriage and give it another try.
    Russ often stayed with the children, and was available to help Brenna with repairs and chores. He had helped her move a washer and a dryer.
    “Did you have a key to his apartment in Renton?”
    “I did, but I only went there once when he wasn’t home. The kids and I were shopping on the mainland and we all had to go to the bathroom—so we went to his apartment.”
    “What was he wearing the last time you saw him?” Plumberg asked.
    “Pretty average clothes—I think maybe blue jeans, a tank top, and a jacket. We were talking Christmas night and I asked him to wear ‘normal’ clothes when he was in my space—”
    “And that is?”
    “Whidbey Island, Everett.”
    Brenna said she had been embarrassed by some of Russ’s weird outfits.
    Asked to remember their discussions at Christmas about their relationship, Brenna said they had decided to take reconciliation slowly and see what happened. They had talked about building up trust and seeing how that went.
    “How did Russ feel about that?”
    “He was okay. We were having a great time, taking it slow.”
    “You told us before that you and Russ had sex on the morning of the twenty-sixth and you took a shower after?”
    “Mmm-hmm.”
    Finally, they came to the end of a long session. Russel Douglas’s widow still claimed he was unfaithful and sexually demanding, quick to anger, and unpopular. But she had also acknowledged that