Practice to Deceive

Jennifer McCormick now had her own salon in Freeland, and it happened to be in the same building as the sheriff’s South Precinct substation.
    He immediately contacted Jennifer McCormick and asked her if she knew Peggy Sue Thomas.
    She did. She said that she and Peggy had worked at Brenna’s salon at the same time. When Peggy moved away, she had referred her list of clients to Jennifer—a thoughtful gesture on her part that Jennifer appreciated.
    “Do you know anything about Peggy’s boyfriend?”
    “She’s had a lot of boyfriends, but I don’t know the current guy’s name,” she answered. “But I heard that he had a wife in Florida and they had some kind of business together. He was supposed to be divorcing his wife—and he and Peggy moved to Las Vegas together. I heard the guy has a brother on Whidbey who owns a bed-and-breakfast. And I heard through the grapevine that Peggy’s boyfriend just recently left her in Las Vegas.”
    Jennifer McCormick had always had a friendly relationship with Peggy when they both worked at Brenna Douglas’s salon.
    “The only thing that concerned me was one time—when I think she was kidding—she came into Just B’s and she warned someone about something. Then she lifted her arms as if she was holding a gun and pointed and said, ‘You’d better remember that or I’ll come back and go 007 on you!’ ”
    At this point, Mark Plumberg didn’t know exactly what they had with the Florida caller, or where this new angle was going. He and Commander Mike Beech were very committed to keeping their tenuous contact with their nameless informant. They didn’t want to alarm him and lose track of him.
    Beech’s relationship with the unknown caller held firm. The detective commander established certain times on particular days when the tipster could call him back. He hoped they could ask him more questions about how Peggy Sue and her as-yet-unknown boyfriend might be involved in Russel Douglas’s murder.
    The informant kept contact, calling them at the prearranged times. During each conversation, Beech and Plumberg learned a little more about what seemed to be an unbelievable hostile plot to kill Douglas.
    But they still didn’t have a possible motive.
    Whoever the caller was, he was careful that he could not be traced, hanging up before they could isolate the phone from which he was calling.
    But he had finally come to a point where he felt trusting enough to describe how Russel Douglas died.
    “This person put the gun to Russ’s head and shot him.”
    The detectives knew, of course, that Douglas had died of an almost-contact wound, and not from a “distance of one foot away” that local newspapers had reported.
    “This led us to believe that the tipster wasn’t getting his information from media sources that anyone curious about the homicide could seek out,” Plumberg recalls. “He knew that the murder gun was a .380 handgun, but he didn’t know what make it was.”
    Commander Beech subtly attempted to find the source of the caller’s information; he asked him where the murder had occurred.
    “He didn’t talk to me about that, but I want to say it was near an apartment complex.”
    This was wrong. Television and newspapers had written that the site was in the country, and even named Wahl Road, saying that the body was found in a private drive about twenty-five yards off the road itself.
    It was becoming more clear that the anonymous man was not repeating something he’d found out in public media.
    And then the mysterious caller said that the suspect’s girlfriend was named “Peggy.”
    Mark Plumberg recalled talking with Peggy Sue Thomas in the one phone conversation he’d had with her. She certainly hadn’t seemed nervous or concerned, and she’d readily acknowledged that she was a good friend of Brenna Douglas, and also considered Russ a close friend. It was difficult to believe that someone who might truly be a person of interest had been so relaxed, even charming when he talked to her.
    “The victim’s wife was probably involved, too—or knew what was going to happen,” the informant continued. “By that, I don’t mean to say that she was directly implicated at the scene.”
    He still hadn’t given the Island County investigators the name of a suspect—but now they knew they were so close.
    “The shooter told me that he and Peggy lured the victim to the place where he was shot. They told him that they had a Christmas present for the