Practice to Deceive

northwesterners can count on sunny and rainless days. But now, the night sky burst open up with a series of frightening electrical storms. Chain lightning streaked shards of blue and white across the dark sky and hailstones as big as golf balls pounded down on windows and skylights, waking sleeping citizens in Coupeville and other island towns.
    Jurors and those who had become familiar faces in the courtroom often had to run through wind-driven rain sluicing down the building’s exterior walls as the storm didn’t let up in daylight, either.
    Inside Judge Vickie Churchill’s domain, there was another kind of storm building; without windows, no one could see or hear the raging lightning and thunder outside. Still, there was a heaviness here. When someone’s cell phone rang, spectators jumped in surprise. Peggy Sue’s mother, Doris, had forgotten to turn off the ringer on her phone. She fumbled with it quickly and the sound stopped. Judge Churchill chose to wait until the end of the day to chastise her for what is considered a blatant interruption in a court of law.
    * * *
    J EAN HUDEN’S NAME WAS not on the witness list, but William Hill’s of Port Charlotte, Florida, was. Jean was still married to Jim, and couldn’t testify against him because of the state’s marital disqualification law. She could, however, testify against Peggy Sue Thomas when her trial began in a few months. Detectives had interviewed Jean, who now admitted that both Jim and Peggy had told her they plotted to kill Russ. She also revealed that Peggy had traveled to Punta Gorda and come to the house Jean shared with Jim.
    Peggy had confided they just needed to figure out “how to get Russel to where they needed him to be and take care of it.”
    Bill Hill was scheduled to testify on a most inopportune date: Friday the thirteenth. It would be agonizing for him to face Jim Huden and the jurors and seal Jim’s fate.
    Hill was a retired air force officer, a man of late middle age whose haircut was a spiky crew cut. He was one of the “X-hibitionists” in the band that Jim Huden headed, but he hardly resembled an aging rock star!
    Bill Hill testified that he and Jim were driving along the Gulf Coast from Punta Gorda to Sarasota when Huden blurted out that he had shot and killed a man back in Washington State. As the man he considered his best friend gave details on Russ Douglas’s murder, Hill had said he had difficulty believing him. This wasn’t the Jim Huden that he had come to know.
    But Jim told Bill Hill that he went up to the yellow Tracker and shot Russ Douglas point-blank in the face from about six inches away.
    Jim had confided that his stepfather used to beat him and his mother, saying: “I always hated that man with a passion, and I wanted to find someone who was like him and get revenge.”
    Jim told Hill that Peggy Sue, his mistress at the time, had convinced him that Russel Douglas was an abusive husband and father, and Huden had finally found the ideal target.
    “I didn’t know what to do,” Hill testified. “I waited a couple of months before I contacted the authorities here [Whidbey Island]. I wasn’t sure whether I was gonna spill the beans or not.”
    “Why was that?” Greg Banks asked.
    “Partly out of fear, I guess. And loyalty,” Bill Hill finally said, fighting back his own emotions. “He’s my best friend.”
    The witness said he and Jim were such good friends that he had flown to Las Vegas and walked Jean down the aisle when Jim and Jean got married.
    “When did you talk to him last?” Banks asked.
    Bill Hill recalled having lunch with Jim Huden sometime in 2004. Hill complained about his boss, and Jim had asked him: “Do you want your boss to be taken care of ?”
    Hill demurred, and Huden said: “Well, I’ve done it once. I could do it again.”
    The “best friends” never saw each other again until this moment in a courtroom in Coupeville, Washington.
    On Monday, July 16, a witness who had not been in the news much took the witness stand. Cindy Francisco was the woman who once lived in the lavish estate next door to the murder site.
    “What is your current residence?” Greg Banks asked.
    “On Saratoga Road in Langley.”
    “How long have you lived on Whidbey Island?”
    “Since 1990, except for two years when I was in Las Vegas and Colorado.”
    “How do you know the defendant?”
    Cindy said she had met Jim Huden through her good friend Peggy Sue Thomas, whom she had known for a