Practice to Deceive

didn’t say which beach she planned to visit.
    “She said she had asked Jim to move out.”
    Jean had known about the other woman in Las Vegas for some time, but she had hinted that there was “another problem.”
    “I asked her if it was a legal problem, but she didn’t answer,” her brother said. “Jean doesn’t tell about other people’s business or personal problems.”
    Jean told her brother only that the other problem was why the Washington State detectives were in Florida at the moment.
    Many people knew that Jean was leaving for a few days during the prior week, but no one recalled having seen Jim for a week to ten days. Jean had returned to their house and continued her usual routine and neighbors expected Jim to drive up at any moment.
    Almost everyone the investigators talked to said that Jim had been “a different man” or “not himself” since he’d come back from Las Vegas months before. He had seemed depressed and distracted. Some even thought he might be ill.
    Jean’s brother didn’t know what to make of it all. When he spoke to Jean on the phone, he sensed that Jim might be listening in, but she swore he wasn’t with her.
    She told her brother that she had hidden her gun so Jim couldn’t find it; he was so depressed. They all knew about Jean’s gun, but no one was sure Jim had a gun of his own. They doubted it.
    “Jean told me that Jim needed to see a shrink and that he was having problems,” one female acquaintance recalled.
    One thing was clear: Jim Huden wasn’t in Punta Gorda. Surely someone would have seen him, but it appeared that he had left Punta Gorda shortly after he gave a statement to Mark Plumberg and Mike Beech.
    Most people who knew him believed he had flown to Las Vegas, and the two detectives weren’t that worried about finding him as they headed west just in time to escape the hurricane. He had been quite cooperative with them.
    But Jim Huden was not nearly as predictable as everyone thought. At least at the moment. He wasn’t in Las Vegas, although he was in touch with Jean. They had plans to meet in a hotel miles away from Punta Gorda after the investigation simmered down a bit.
    Whether Jean Huden had somehow aided her husband in his vanishing act was hard to tell. According to their close friends, they had been having marital problems, and she was considering divorce. Since Jean obviously knew about his obsession with Peggy Sue Thomas, it wasn’t surprising that their marriage might be in big trouble.
    Jim had left Jean once before. This time, he hadn’t been home in Florida with her for more than four or five months, and now he was gone again.
    Jim had told Bill Hill that he was going to try to get Peggy Sue back. Jean Huden would have to be a saint to want to help him evade the Island County investigators, especially after Peggy Sue had come to Florida and Jean had seen her husband and his lover together. Even so, if she still loved him, Jean might have delivered his red sports car to him.
    Mark Plumberg’s search into Peggy Sue’s background was unearthing tangled and complicated secrets.
    Were it not for the vicissitudes of fate, karma, and even sheer coincidence, Peggy Sue Stackhouse Thomas might never have been born.
    And, some said, that would have been a good thing . . .

C HAPTER N INETEEN
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    O N AUGUST 18, 2004, the Island County Sheriff’s Office authorized a press release, hoping that might encourage someone to come forward with information. They officially named Jim Huden and Peggy Sue Thomas as “persons of interest” who might be connected to the unsolved murder of Russel Douglas.
    The story was carried by print, radio, and television media that night.
    It paid off, and it led to the most important piece of physical evidence the Island County investigators retrieved since the night Russel Douglas died.
    At a quarter to one the next day, Commander Mike Beech received a call from Investigator Boeglin of the Doña Anna County Sheriff’s Office in New Mexico.
    “We just had a weapon turned in,” Boeglin said. “A citizen named Keith Ogden brought in a .380 caliber Bersa pistol. He thinks it might have been used in the homicide up your way—victim might have been a guy named Russel Douglas.”
    It seemed almost too easy. If this was the death gun, the murder probe might be coming to a successful conclusion. It had been a frustrating eight months for the investigators.
    But if they thought they were home free, they were