Practice to Deceive

Thunder handgun. Fingerprint experts were able to find Jim Huden’s prints on it—but they also found Peggy’s.
    It wasn’t the strongest physical evidence; her prints could be explained away by a shrewd defense attorney who might say she had been dusting the coffee table where the pamphlet rested and unknowingly picked it up. Fingerprints in blood are dynamic physical evidence; these fingerprints didn’t begin to reach that level.
    If Peggy Thomas had blood on her hands, it was only in a figurative sense.
    Jim Huden had long since disappeared. Brenna Douglas had collected what was rumored to be about four hundred thousand dollars in Russ’s insurance and left Langley. She bought some expensive vehicles and a house, but didn’t stay long in any one place. Brenna had bought a house sometime in 2004, but it was foreclosed upon and sold at auction in August of the same year.
    She moved from town to town around the state of Washington, and eschewed contact with the Island County investigators whenever she could.
    * * *
    P EGGY MAY HAVE BEEN somewhat dismayed in 2009 by the inopportune timing in divorcing Mark Allen. Reportedly, her alimony was a spare twenty-five hundred dollars a month, far less than what she had hoped to get. She did retain a number of assets she had managed to hide from Mark. Conservatively, they added up to more than a million dollars.
    But Mark had been on his way up. In the spring of 2009, Mark’s horse Mine That Bird won the Kentucky Derby—and was headed for the Triple Crown.
    Bird’s winning run was the second-largest upset in the 185-year history of the Kentucky Derby!
    Had she stayed with Allen, Peggy Sue would certainly have enjoyed the Derby, the fancy clothes and ridiculous hats, mint juleps, and most of all, being in the winner’s circle as the wife of a winning owner. It would have been almost like reliving her Ms. Washington days, not to mention the purse that went with the win.
    Three books were written about Mine That Bird’s courage, and a theatrical movie is still rumored to be in the works.
    How Peggy Sue would have thrived in that exciting and inspiring Derby outcome, but she had burned those bridges.

C HAPTER T WENTY-EIGHT
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    J IMMIE STACKHOUSE’S FAMILY—OR RATHER, families—had known enough upheaval and tragedy to make their lives seem like a convoluted soap opera. As adults, Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda were more concerned with their husbands and children than they were about the Sturm und Drang of their half sister Peggy Sue’s life. She was nothing like they were, even though they shared the same father.
    And Jimmie’s first three daughters were still trying to cope with their own loss at the hands of a vicious sex killer. Fourteen years before, they had found answers to many of their questions about Mary Ellen Stackhouse. That helped a lot, but they still bore scars—particularly Brenda.
    Brenda had had profound post-traumatic stress disorder for all of her life. She still screamed in her sleep and suffered terrible nightmares.
    Her sisters worried about her, but weren’t sure how to help. They, too, were survivors of a homicide victim, but Lana and Rhonda were able to deal with the pain more effectively.
    In October 1995, Rhonda, who was a superior court clerk in Boundary County, Idaho, was watching television with the rest of the court staff as they waited to hear the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder trial.
    As reporters did a summary of how Nicole Simpson had perished, Rhonda realized that that was probably how her mother had died.
    “The details on the Simpson case made me sick,” she recalls. “And then O.J. was acquitted. I wondered if whoever killed my mother was still in prison—or if he was wandering around free.”
    Rhonda and her sisters were consumed with the need to know the things they had never learned about Mary Ellen Stackhouse. Would they feel better or worse if they found out what had really happened?
    They decided that it was worth the chance. Rhonda began to surf the Internet, looking for her mother’s name. She found a link there to the San Jose Mercury News, and a column called “Ask Andy Bruno.”
    It had been such a long time—more than thirty years—but Rhonda wrote to Bruno, wondering if anyone on the paper had any information about a crime so far in the past.
    Bruno headed for the microfiche for newspapers in the sixties, and found an article written by Ed Pope.
    “He still works here,” he told Rhonda. “He wrote