Practice to Deceive

bleakly? Was she afraid contact with Jim might entangle her in a murder plot?
    Jim was afraid of something, but none of his buddies in Florida knew what it was. Jim and Jean Huden did a lot of drugs, but an arrest for possession of illegal substances wasn’t that intimidating, especially in the crowd of musicians that Jim ran with.
    Something, however, was haunting Jim Huden. His band members—the X-hibitionists—were growing annoyed with him because he missed so many gigs and practices.

C HAPTER T WENTY-FIVE
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    P EGGY HAD TOLD DETECTIVES that she and Jim stayed at Dick Deposit’s home during the 2003 Christmas holidays. All of his friends knew that Deposit, a certified public accountant, was meticulous and paid great attention to the smallest details. If anyone would remember the most minute aspect of his friends’ visit, it would be Deposit. Now, on August 13, 2004, Plumberg went to Deposit’s apartment to interview him. Dick Deposit said he’d known Jim Huden since they were in fourth grade together. Peggy Thomas’s half sister, Sue Mahoney, was a dear friend of his. Deposit was aware that Jim had left his wife, Jean, months before, and moved to Las Vegas so he could be with Peggy.
    The accountant didn’t live in his house on Soundview Drive, but he often spent weekends there, usually with guests. And he allowed his friends to stay there. He left a key to the house with Dean and Cathy Hatt, and asked those who stayed in his guest room to return the key to the Hatts when they left.
    “The only person who goes to my house alone, though, is my girlfriend,” Deposit said. “Sometimes she goes there with her friends.”
    Deposit had heard the accusations and rumors about Peggy Sue Thomas and Russel Douglas’s puzzling murder. Almost everyone connected to either Peggy or Jim had.
    “Did Peggy deny those allegations?” Plumberg asked.
    “My feeling was that she thought it was a total fabrication,” the accountant answered.
    Deposit said he hadn’t seen Jim since the previous December, but he had seen Peggy a few weeks before at Sue Mahoney’s birthday party.
    “I think I saw both Peggy and Jim during the week of Christmas—probably that Sunday, the twenty-first,” he said. “Jim, Peggy, Sue Mahoney, and her daughter were all at my Soundview house for dinner.”
    Asked if he’d gone to his house any other time that week, Dick Deposit thought he had probably dropped in on Christmas Eve.
    “Do you have a room there that you’ve set aside for the guest room?”
    Deposit nodded.
    “Did you check the house to see if everything was okay?”
    “I probably looked around. I usually do.”
    “Did you have to make the bed in the guest room?”
    “I don’t recall that—no. But I think I would have noticed if the bed wasn’t made.”
    That was on December 24—a day after Peggy Sue Thomas and Jim Huden left the island. And yet, when they said they’d come back to leave the key on the twenty-sixth, Peggy Sue had been emphatic about having to dry the sheets and make the bed in the guest room.
    It was another small disparity, but the string of events had more and more gaps with question marks.
    * * *
    P LUMBERG DECIDED TO CLOCK the time and distance between the Marriott Hotel near Sea-Tac Airport to Douglas’s apartment in Renton. Although they had yet to find any present that either Jim or Peggy—or both—had given Russ, each had indicated that they had traveled from the hotel to the Mission Ridge Apartments. Peggy Sue’s version was that Jim had left the Marriott headed for Russ’s apartment, but had called within ten minutes saying he couldn’t find it.
    That was strange. The location was easy to find, particularly for someone who had lived in the Seattle area for years.
    When Mark Plumberg did test drives in normal traffic conditions, he found one route was 9.3 miles and took twenty-one minutes. The alternate route was 5.6 miles and required twelve minutes’ travel time.
    Next, he drove from Dick Deposit’s Soundview Drive home to the crime scene on Wahl Road. The distance was only 5.1 miles. Peggy had recalled that Jim left to get “smokes,” while she dried the guest room sheets and made the bed. In her first statement, she said Jim was gone for a half hour to forty-five minutes. Later, she corrected herself and told Plumberg that Huden had been gone only fifteen minutes.
    With a search warrant, Plumberg obtained Jim Huden’s December credit card bill. All the places he had used it