Practice to Deceive

again that if the killer had used an untraceable “drop gun,” and left it at the scene on Wahl Road, Russ’s manner of death would quite possibly have been determined to be suicide.
    And the true manner of death would never have come out.
    Another woman at city hall told the Island County detective that she had noticed how much Russ had changed almost a year before he was terminated from his Mukilteo position.
    “He began to pump weights and change the way he dressed—and then he got an apartment by himself.
    “He came by to see me sometime in the fall of 2003. I had just posted a new job opening and I was afraid he might be coming to apply for that position. I didn’t want to rehire him, and I wanted to avoid any discussion about that with him.”
    “Why wouldn’t you rehire him?”
    “I was the one who wrote his performance evaluations and I really tried to cover for him at the end because he was in a very deep down place. His professional judgment was off, and he couldn’t seem to perform, couldn’t even start a task, work it efficiently, or follow it through. Sometimes he was angry and he swore and we had to ask him not to do that at the front counter.”
    But she, like everyone else, described Russel Douglas as a nice guy who was friendly and whom they all liked.
    Mark Plumberg continued to canvass everyone who had known Russ at the Mukilteo City Hall. He spoke with a man named Ralph Randolph.*
    “I saw you at the front counter and I said to myself, ‘That’s a cop,’ ” Randolph blurted. “I wondered why you hadn’t talked to me.”
    Before their interview in the mayor’s office began, Randolph explained that he had “a problem” with one eye, so if he seemed to be looking at Plumberg strangely, that was why.
    He was quite agitated during the interview, and could barely sit still. He folded his hands in his lap, but he pressed them together with so much force that his thumbs turned white.
    Randolph seldom looked at Plumberg, averting his face at a forty-five-degree angle. His skin often turned blotchy—red and white—and he kept pointing out that he knew that was happening because he could feel it.
    He felt he had known Russ very well and said they had many conversations about everything from diet to music to mood changes. Plumberg studied Randolph’s body language and wondered why this man was so antsy.
    Finally, Randolph told Plumberg that he would probably find out about his being investigated by the FBI. They had “tracked him down” because he had once purchased a fairly rare replacement barrel for a gun he owned. He believed that had probably had something to do with the still-unsolved, much-publicized murder of a federal prosecutor in Seattle.
    Oddly, Ralph Randolph said he had never seen that Russ Douglas was depressed. Every other employee in city hall had noted that moroseness—but not Randolph.
    And then, within minutes, he reversed himself, saying that he had wondered if Russ had committed suicide when he learned he was dead.
    “He was very smart, you know. If he wanted to, he could have killed himself and made it look like a murder so that insurance would pay off.”
    Almost as if he was talking to himself, and still facing away from Mark Plumberg, Randolph went through some outlandish scenarios of how that could have happened.
    “Maybe Russ used springs to make the gun fly a long way, or some laser-activated device. Something that would propel the weapon into the water.”
    Plumberg hadn’t mentioned anything about water at the crime scene, beyond saying that the road ended near beachfront homes.
    He wondered just how springs and lasers could vanish from the Tracker.
    Plumberg changed the subject. “Did Russel have insurance?”
    “Oh—I don’t know. We never talked about it.”
    More and more, Randolph veered away from answering questions directly, taking a long-winded, circuitous route before he addressed the subject. He said he and Russ Douglas liked the same kind of music, like Black Sabbath.
    “He ever talk about alternate lifestyles or cults?”
    “No!”
    “You ever think he was gay or bisexual?”
    “No.”
    Ralph Randolph acted spooked when the detective asked him where he lived. Again, he went into a winding story, this time about his divorce, some woman he’d met on the Internet who was “the love of my life,” but he never actually gave Plumberg an address or his home phone number.
    “Did Russel ever evince any problem with pornography?”