Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

once more, thanks to Bill Jensen.
    Bill, in his King County Police uniform, smiled broadly from the pages of his local paper as he held a picture that showed his Australian friend walking with ease. Once more, Jenny and Scott Jensen were very proud of their dad.
     
    Still, the Jensens’ children worried about the conflict in their home. They loved both their parents, and when Bill and Sue Jensen fell into arguments, Jenny and Scott tried to mediate, too young to understand their basic differences and the disappointments each of their parents felt in a marriage that sometimes seemed doomed to failure. Sue, the bubbly optimist, kept trying to bring Bill into a relationship in which they shared responsibility, while Bill, the sullen, self-focused pessimist, resisted—pulling further away. Sadly, it wasn’t a particularly unusual situation in many American marriages.
    Sue wasn’t afraid of Bill, not at all. She had long since pushed her dorm adviser’s warning back into her subconscious mind. She had almost forgotten her injuries at Bill’s hands when Scott was a newborn, as well as those that came later.
    She knew her children loved their father devotedly, and that Jenny and Scott wanted their parents’ marriage to succeed. Bill was still coaching Jenny’s teams, and he joined Scott in father/son Indian Guide activities. He and Scott still rode their motorcycles together, Bill on the big “hog” and Scott on one geared to his size.
    Every time Sue thought about leaving the man she’d been married to for eighteen years, she felt she couldn’t do it—it would break Jenny and Scott’s hearts. There had to be a way to get Bill to join her in serious counseling.
    Sue no longer had the self-confidence she once had as a young bride and in the early years of her marriage. Bill told her repeatedly that she was the reason they had problems. By now, Sue believed him. Her parents had been happily married, her sister was in a long-term positive relationship with a fine man, and most of her friends enjoyed solid marriages. Maybe Bill was right—maybe it was something she was doing wrong.
    Sue had always believed Bill and found him intelligent and a man who made sound financial decisions. She was no longer working at a job outside their home, happy to be able to stay home with her children, but in a way, that made her more vulnerable to Bill’s steady chipping away at her self-image. She often resented Bill, with his anger and his vacillating moods, but she still respected his opinions, although certainly not as she had done in their college days.
    Even though she had a degree in psychology, Sue wasn’t sure what factors were involved in the way Bill jumped from one obsession to another. For a while, he focused on showing champion-class dogs—Great Danes, to be exact. They had a Great Dane as a beloved pet, but when the dog developed problems with irritable bowel syndrome, Bill ordered that it be put down. Sue begged to have another dog, but Bill agreed only if she promised that he would decide when the next dog would either be given away or euthanized.
    Whatever irritated Bill had to go.
    No matter how mercurial he could be, few would quarrel with the notion that Bill Jensen was a whiz at finances. And making money was the most pervasive obsession he would embrace. He was one of the first to jump on the future prospects of computer stocks. He became a day trader long before most people had ever heard the term. He was out of bed every weekday at 6 A.M. and began to check the stock market, evaluating, buying, and selling until 1 P.M. Now he bought even more stocks on margin, but as long as the market stayed up, that wasn’t a problem.
    One day, when it dipped dramatically just before the millennium, Bill was caught short with margin calls, and he lost a lot of money. But for most of the nineties, he held 350,000 shares of prime computer stock.
    Bill Jensen continued to be a man who obsessed over one moneymaking scheme or avocation after another. In 1989, for example, during the Washington State Centennial, he found a way to make a lot of money very quickly. Through one of Sue’s former bosses, he snagged the franchise on official State Centennial gold-plated guns. He took time off from his sheriff’s duties to sell them at various venues—including the Washington State Fair. They sold for about $1,700, and $750 of that was pure profit.
    Next he set about building the best computer possible, and spent close to