Practice to Deceive

through the tracking device on her ankle. Banks said he considered Peggy Thomas an escape risk, nonetheless.
    Several of the areas she wanted to visit would be ideal jump-off spots, the prosecutor said, where she could slip across the U.S. border if she wanted to.
    “It sounds to me like just about everything she’s asking to do could be done by others, by family members or hired contractors,” he continued in his arguments to prevent the defendant from leaving Whidbey Island.
    “She wants to travel to New Mexico and Nevada to visit her two daughters, mow the lawn at her Nevada residence, take care of some of her other real estate, and pack up some stuff and move it.”
    The prosecutor didn’t see why Peggy herself needed to go to Nevada to cut her grass or winterize her houses. Couldn’t she hire someone to do it?
    “We do have dentists in Washington,” Banks told Judge Moynihan. “And they do sell clothing in Washington as well.”
    The GPS anklet that semihobbled Peggy Thomas was far from foolproof. It would not work in areas outside certain cell phone ranges. If the person wearing the device wandered outside the coverage of AT&T towers, transmission would stop and no one could track where she was. Nor would the GPS activate on airplanes. And Peggy Sue was asking to go to Bonners Ferry, a Canadian border town in Idaho, and to Nevada, New Mexico, Washington State outside of Whidbey Island, and Utah.
    Much of Peggy Sue’s travel would be in regions where there were dead spots for cell phone transmission. And she would also be flying much of the time.
    Platt countered that his client had every reason to return for her trial. There was the property bond that she didn’t want to forfeit, and there was her sincere intention “to appear in court and defend herself zealously.”
    To the prosecutor’s dismay, Judge Moynihan granted Peggy Sue’s request to travel America, albeit with a GPS device that would sound an alarm on Whidbey Island if she attempted to pry it off.
    She was required, of course, to give Greg Banks’s office a detailed itinerary of her travels, right down to times, dates, flight times. She also said she would be glad to check in with local law-enforcement agencies wherever she went.
    Craig Platt had extolled Peggy Sue’s many virtues and reliability to Judge Moynihan, but it didn’t do much to ease Banks’s mind.
    Media outlets all over America and in Great Britain found Peggy’s travel arrangements after being charged with murder in the first degree so unusual that her case made headlines again in many newspapers and television programs.
    * * *
    W HILE PEGGY SUE WAS gone on her bizarre trip to get her world and wardrobe in order before her trial, it would be fair to say that Island County prosecuting attorney Greg Banks had some anxiety, wondering if she would come back or end up in another country. He knew how charismatic and engaging she could be, how chameleon-like. Although she was an almost Amazonian-size woman, Peggy could appear very feminine, even demure. She was many things to many people.
    Banks worried that if she took off her tracking anklet in a dead zone in the New Mexican desert, Peggy Sue could be long gone before they realized it.
    But she did show up at the places she had intended to visit. She was there at Brenda Gard’s memorial service in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Along with her many half siblings and family members, she watched the slide show of Brenda’s life, a life ended too soon, and seemed as saddened as the rest of the mourners.
    As Brenda’s lovely face flashed on the screen in still pictures and home movies, it seemed impossible that she should be gone at only the age of fifty-two.
    No one was sure why Brenda had taken her own life. It could have been the long-delayed result of her mother’s murder, it could be that she had lost her two marriages and felt very alone, and it could also be because of guilt she felt over the prospect of testifying against her own half sister. Despite the differences among Doris’s and Jimmie’s kids, they had always tried to be loyal to each other, protecting their joint family against the outside world.
    There were even those who suspected that Brenda had not died by her own hand—but that someone else had wanted to take her out of the picture. Autopsy findings did not validate that. In the case of hanging, forensic experts can determine which way a rope or cord has frayed and then see the difference between someone