Practice to Deceive

Moreover, the lands and grooves striations on the single bullet recovered from the victim’s brain also matched the Bersa’s barrel!
    This, at last, was a vital piece of physical evidence. The link between Jim Huden and the death weapon had been made.
    It should have been enough to arrest Huden, if they could find him.
    Jim was proving to be extremely elusive.

C HAPTER T WENTY
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    O N AUGUST 31, 2004, Commander Mike Beech and detectives Shawn Warwick and Ed Wallace from Island County arrived in Henderson, Nevada. Accompanied by Detective Daniel Leath of the Henderson Police Department, they served a search warrant on Peggy Sue Thomas.
    Beech, Wallace, and Warwick talked to Peggy Sue for two days. They saw that she was a very tall, striking woman with long, reddish-tinted hair. She would certainly stand out in any crowd.
    Peggy Sue explained that she was working for a limousine service in Las Vegas. Her day planner and appointment book verified that. She kept very precise records on her clientele. She saved business cards, and jotted down her regulars’ favorite snacks and drinks. She also put in the hourly base rate for the limousine and noted tips. One group might leave her a five-hundred-dollar tip, while others left ten dollars. Of course, when she drove a celebrity, she mentioned that, too.
    Peggy Sue’s attorney—Gerald Werksman of Los Angeles—was present when the Washington State detectives interviewed his client.
    She was accommodating and didn’t seem upset when they removed the hard drive from her computer, five sealed and labeled bags of possible physical evidence, and a laptop computer in a gray case. The items were shipped securely back to the sheriff’s office on Whidbey Island.
    Peggy’s business cards featured a photo of her draped over a luxury limousine, wearing a clinging black dress that was open almost to the waist.
    Apparently, Peggy’s fortune had risen since Jim left for Florida; some of her tips were a thousand dollars or more! Hers was a transportation business that attracted high rollers—many of them men, but she also had glowing thank-you notes from couples who had visited the Vegas Strip.
    Her Henderson, Nevada, home was upscale, the golden stucco of the southwest with lavish landscaping of palm trees, cacti, and paloverde trees.
    Peggy Sue had good recall of the Christmas season now eight months in the past. She had flown to Seattle, she said, with one of her daughters.
    “Jim drove my Lexus up before I got there, and he picked us up at Sea-Tac Airport.”
    Werksman wanted Jean Huden’s phone number, but Peggy said it would be better if she had Jean call him.
    When Jean called Peggy’s attorney a short time later, she verified that she’d heard Jim say that he had shot Russ Douglas. It happened while he was going out for cigarettes.
    Werksman disagreed. “I don’t think he did it.”
    But Jean Huden insisted. “He keeps saying he did it.”
    Werksman told Jean that this was a very important statement, and she had to be certain. Werksman, too, was concerned that Jim might commit suicide.
    “I told her that she ought to call Plumberg. And then I told her that it was very decent of her—knowing the strain she’d been under—to talk to me.”
    Werksman said he had Peggy write down a statement about what, to the best of her memory, was closest to what had actually happened during her Christmas visit to Whidbey Island.
    Peggy was prepared to sign the one-page statement. Warwick and Beech exchanged glances; how could Peggy sum up everything that occurred on the prior December 26 in just one page?
    Asked once again about who had delivered the present for Brenna to Russ, Peggy said that both she and Jim had gone to his Renton apartment.
    That, of course, presented a continuing problem with their separate versions of the errand, but the investigators didn’t correct her.
    Peggy’s appointment book showed that her last hair appointment was on December 23, 2003, at Just B’s—the day the couple both said they left Whidbey Island and moved to a motel near Sea-Tac Airport.
    Peggy told Shawn Warwick that she realized she still had the key to Dick Deposit’s house on Soundview Drive in Langley where they’d been staying for four days.
    “We drove back to Whidbey on the twenty-sixth,” she said. “Jim left me at Dick’s house for thirty, maybe forty-five minutes and drove off in my Lexus to get some smokes.”
    This was a very important date, the day that Russel