Practice to Deceive

on the last day of his life, they were looking toward a future where they might retrieve their marriage and avoid divorce.
    It was so hard to evaluate where she was coming from. If she had guilty knowledge about Russ’s murder, why would she have initially been so vindictive about his flaws? Wouldn’t she have played the grief-stricken widow to throw off suspicion?
    Now, six months after his death, she still bad-mouthed Russ, but she seemed less virulent. Plumberg sensed even a tinge of regret as Brenna recalled the almost nine years the two had spent together.
    Seizing an opportunity, he asked her if she would now consider taking a polygraph exam.
    “I won’t allow her to do that,” Jessie Valentine said quickly.
    “Do you agree with that, Brenna?” the detective asked.
    “I have to do what my attorney tells me to,” she answered.

C HAPTER F OURTEEN
----
    W ITH MIKE BIRCHFIELD GONE, Mark Plumberg tried to do the work of two investigators. They had been to Tetra Tech and talked to Russel Douglas’s coworkers there, and found nothing at all that would suggest someone who might have wanted him dead.
    A number of the female staff members were very attractive, and several of them said that Russ hadn’t been an acquaintance but a “real friend.” Still, when Mark Plumberg asked them if Russ had “come on” to them, they shook their heads.
    “Absolutely not,” one secretary said. “I’m married.”
    “That doesn’t necessarily mean that Russel wouldn’t have tried—”
    “But he never did. His wife—Brenna—used to come to our office and she brought their children with her. We all knew that they sometimes had problems in their marriage, and that Russ was unhappy about that.”
    Plumberg moved back to another job on Russ’s résumé. He took the ferry from Clinton to the city of Mukilteo to speak with the staff there. He found that many people who worked for the city had known Russ Douglas—from temporary employees to Mike Murphy, who was Mukilteo’s chief of police.
    Almost universally, Douglas had been liked.
    “He loved his kids,” a woman in the personnel office recalled. “He was a nice young man.”
    It was true, she said, that Russ often spoke of his depression and thoughts of suicide. He knew he had problems with his temper and told her he was seeing a therapist to get better.
    Her opinion was echoed by a number of Mukilteo employees. In his last year or so working there, Russ had struggled with depression, sometimes locking himself in his office and even burning candles.
    Many of the Mukilteo staff commented that they were hurt when they weren’t notified of Russ’s memorial service.
    “We all would have gone,” one secretary said.
    A woman in the Mukilteo Planning Department said that about 90 percent of her contact with Douglas was via correspondence—phone or email.
    “The last time I actually spoke to Russ was sometime in October last year,” she said. “He was the happiest I’d seen him in a long time. He liked his new job and it seemed as though he might be getting back with Brenna. He told me that he had stayed with her and his kids on Whidbey Island two or three times. He also told me that he was dating someone else—but he wasn’t living with her .”
    Mark Plumberg asked a question he had put to many people: “Did he ever talk about being homosexual or bisexual?”
    “No! I never had any indication of that.”
    As he had with many of his Mukilteo coworkers, Russ had been open about his mood swings.
    “He had very high highs and very low lows.”
    “Tell me about when he was feeling down.”
    “He’d just withdraw from everyone. When I heard he had died, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out it was suicide. He had a tough childhood and many problems—especially with his mother—when he was growing up.”
    “He told you that?”
    “Yes.”
    Mukilteo Police Chief Michael Murphy said Russ would come in to talk with him at times.
    “He was interested in police work, and he even said he was thinking of becoming a cop.”
    Murphy said that Douglas rode the ferry to work with a number of the other men in the office, but hadn’t seemed particularly close friends with most of them. Sometimes the male employees went to a bar after work, a place they called “Cheers II,” and he went with them.
    After interviewing a dozen or more city hall staff in depth, and hearing them describe Russ Douglas as “a nice guy who was really depressed,” Plumberg felt