Practice to Deceive

head with a huge wooden two-by-four, knocking her to the ground. He drug [ sic ] her back to the trees, strangling her so badly that she was fading in and out of consciousness. I remember her telling me that she’d always heard people say that when someone was dying, they could hear music. She said she could hear music and was seeing white horses coming to pick her up.”
    Although her mother had died recently, Cathleen wrote that she sensed her mom had always felt guilty that her testimony wasn’t enough to get Thompson convicted before he could creep into Mary Ellen’s home.
    Rhonda and Cathleen exchanged many emails and calls. Facing the ugly past together helped the heretofore strangers cope with it.
    That is so often true; survivors of victims can understand and empathize with what more fortunate people can’t begin to understand. There is shock, grief, tragic acceptance after losing someone to murder—but there really is no closure. It is a concept that is alien to survivors. They do go on, but they never forget the time when their lives were forced into a different direction, when everything changed.

PART EIGHT
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Arrest and Punishment

C HAPTER T WENTY-NINE
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    A S TIME PASSED, MARK PLUMBERG of the Island County Sheriff’s Office never gave up on tracking down Jim Huden or knowing where Peggy Sue Thomas was. While he handled day-by-day assignments, Plumberg kept the missing suspect in the back of his mind, and worked on possible leads and theories whenever he could. Island County didn’t have that many detectives and they were kept busy with more current cases.
    Plumberg didn’t believe that Jim Huden had committed suicide as Jean Huden sometimes hinted. Unless he was in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, it was probably a lot easier to keep a few steps ahead of the investigators who were tracking him than it was to commit suicide without having your body discovered over seven years.
    It was, however, quite possible that the wanted man had somehow managed to get out of the country. If Jim had had help, it would have been achievable.
    Often it seemed that it would take the next thing to a miracle to find Jim Huden.
    The year 2011 was to be a watershed in the long-unsolved murder of Russel Douglas. As the Island County detectives had long suspected, Jim Huden’s wife, Jean, had known where he was since late 2004, but she had gone to great effort to keep that information to herself.
    But Jean continued to have a drug problem, and a very long rap sheet that listed more than twenty drug and larceny arrests. In the spring of 2011, she was arrested again on drug charges, and she faced a long prison sentence in Florida if she was convicted.
    She had a choice. Authorities in Florida were aware of the Washington investigators’ continuing search for Jim. Jean was offered a deal: if she would reveal where her husband was, she was likely to get a much-reduced sentence on her own criminal charges. If she didn’t, she could go away for years.
    Jean wouldn’t be able to help Jim if she was in prison, but most of all, she valued her freedom. Her only chance to avoid prison was to divulge where Jim was— if he was still alive— and to agree to cooperate when he went on trial for murder.
    In the end, Jean caved in. She admitted that she did know where her missing husband was.
    “He’s in Mexico,” she said quietly. “He’s earning a living down there teaching guitar.
    “They call him ‘Maestro Jim,’ ” she said.
    * * *
    J IM’S BLAZING AFFAIR WITH Peggy Sue hadn’t lasted much longer after Russ Douglas was murdered. Perhaps they were stalked by the terrible memory of what he—or they —had done near the empty cottage on Wahl Road on December 26, 2003. When they looked at each other, they must have seen Russ’s image caught forever in the pupils of their eyes.
    They very well may have stopped trusting one another. One of them, it turned out, had vowed to protect the other, no matter what. And the other would do whatever was necessary to stay free and avoid prison.
    Following their peripatetic trip to see friends around western Washington on the day Russ died, Peggy Sue and Jim had driven straight through to a motel near Peggy’s house in Nevada. Vickie had just moved in, and they undoubtedly wanted to gather themselves and get some rest before they joined her in Peggy’s home.
    Jim stayed with Peggy for only a little over a month. Probably she was a constant reminder of the dead man