Practice to Deceive

with Jim Huden.
    “He told me that we were having lunch so he could say good-bye to me. He said he’d heard that there was a new investigator on the case, and the sheriff’s detectives were going to come looking for him, so he was packing up and heading for Vegas in the next few days. He said he needed to get together with Peggy so they could get their stories straight.”
    Mark Plumberg felt this gave credence to Bill Hill. He clearly wasn’t the tipster who knew all about the sheriff’s probe. Mark was the new investigator on the case. Someone on Whidbey Island or Las Vegas had their ears to the ground and had passed that information on to Jim Huden very rapidly.
    How Jim had learned that the sheriff’s detectives were close to contacting him was a mystery. They themselves had only heard his name recently, and Beech and Plumberg had kept that intelligence to themselves.
    The two detectives agreed that they should fly at once to Florida so they could interview Jim Huden before he left for Las Vegas. While they were headed east, detectives Shawn Warwick and Ed Wallace flew south to the Las Vegas area to interview Peggy Sue Thomas, the woman with whom Huden had reportedly had an affair.
    Mark Plumberg applied for search warrants through Island County’s superior court. He was granted two—one for Huden’s residence in Punta Gorda, Florida, and the other for Peggy Sue’s home in Henderson, Nevada.
    It seemed possible— if they could get to Punta Gorda before Jim Huden left—that they might open another pathway to solving Russel Douglas’s homicide.
    They didn’t know then just how long their investigation would stretch into the future. Or how frustrating it would become. At this point, they didn’t know all that much about the relationship that existed between Huden and Peggy Sue Thomas. Was it a casual affair or an intense bonding?
    And it was vital that they learn about that.

C HAPTER S EVENTEEN
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    A LTHOUGH BOTH OF THEM lived far away from the serene island in Puget Sound in 2004, Jim Huden and Peggy Thomas had grown up on Whidbey Island. Their paths barely crossed over the years. During their school days, Jim was much too old for Peggy Sue.
    Jim had been married twice—to his first wife, Patti, and then to his current wife, Jean. In 2004, Peggy Sue, who was a dozen years younger than Jim, had also been married twice. Jim and Peggy had initially seemed unlikely lovers. After all, she was living in Las Vegas and Jim was in Florida.
    Jim’s father died when he was young. He, his brother, and his mother eventually moved to Clinton on Whidbey Island and his mother remarried. His stepfather was reported to be a physically abusive man who often beat Jim’s mother and sometimes got in some swats for him and his younger brother. Jim wasn’t twelve yet and he wouldn’t have had the physical strength—or the courage—to defend his mother. He reportedly felt humiliated and ultimately frustrated.
    Some sources opined that he never got to avenge his mother. In his midteens, when he was finally big enough to fight back and protect her, his stepfather suddenly died in bed of natural causes.
    One school of thought said that Jim carried that hatred for domestic abusers who hit women and children throughout his life. Was this really true? It created a background for Jim that might one day offer a feasible reason for his actions as a middle-aged man. But it also may well have been apocryphal. His own brother insists that no abuse happened in their boyhood home.
    Jim Huden was a nice kid whose grades usually didn’t reflect his high intelligence. He got along fine with his peers in grade school. Many of those boys, who are now in their fifties, remember him as a “typical kid.”
    When Jim was in the fifth grade, the local school levy failed to pass and South Whidbey Elementary School had no choice but to combine fifth and sixth grades.
    “We were both in that combined class,” longtime friend Lloyd Jackson recalls. “I think I was actually supposed to be a year ahead of him. After that, they were able to raise school taxes and we went back to single classes. My next clear memory of him was in high school.”
    Asked if he’d ever gone to Jim’s home, Jackson shook his head. He didn’t recall Jim ever talking about a “mean stepfather,” although he himself had seen the man from time to time in their small town. If Jim had bruises that were apparent in gym class or the football locker room, those