Worth More Dead

in the mask?
    Olan located the man Bébé called Uncle only to find that Bud Halser had the best alibi of all. He was once again behind prison bars, and there was no way he could have been free to commit any kind of crime on the night of March 21.
    It wasn’t Halser, and the woman’s identity was even more difficult to puzzle out. All Tim could describe about her was that she had a good figure and that her voice sounded young.
    That woman soon returned to Tim’s life.

18
    On March 24, three days after the home invasion, the Bremerton Police Department had an unexpected visitor. A nervous woman appeared, saying that she wanted to confess to a robbery.
    Her name was Beth Bixler. She had red hair and pale skin dusted with freckles. She was undoubtedly paler than usual now but was pretty in a quiet way. She looked like the sort of young woman who should be teaching Sunday school rather than turning herself in as a felon.
    She was quickly escorted to an interview room, where Lewis Olan and Detective Doug Wright listened with fascination to her story. They heard yet another woman go to bat for Roland Pitre.
    Beth Bixler told them that she had conspired with Tim Nash to work out a plan to fake his own kidnapping.
    Beth recalled that she had met Roland, Tim’s stepfather, at her church three years before and had participated in many church activities with him. She admitted that she recently found herself in love with him. Her husband accused her of having an affair with Roland, and her marriage completely collapsed. But her love for Roland Pitre was so compelling that she had accepted that she was headed for divorce.
    According to Beth, Tim called her and told her that Roland was trying to get back with his mother, Della. Tim didn’t want that to happen; he hated Roland and wanted him to stay away forever. Beth said she didn’t want the Pitres to reconcile, either. She loved Roland and wanted to be with him. So, she said, Tim had come up with a plan that would make Roland look really bad to Della so that she would lose all respect for him and refuse to take him back.
    The detectives stared at the woman who was confessing to what she called a complicated plot. They had seen Tim in the aftermath of the attack on him, and he certainly had not impressed them as the kind of mastermind who would suggest that Roland be framed to appear to be a monster. But that’s what Beth Bixler was telling them. At this point her version of the crime began to falter. She said Tim told her that if the two of them planted items that had obviously been in Roland’s custody—specifically, the two bags—in Della’s house, Della would be furious. That didn’t seem to be a particularly terrible thing for Roland to do: the investigators knew that Della allowed him to do his laundry there. She hinted that it was Tim’s idea to make up a story about the couple in black who threatened him, knowing that Della would immediately suspect Roland.
    When Wright and Olan questioned Beth Bixler about the details of the plot, her answers became increasingly vague. But she continued to insist that Roland had done nothing wrong; that he wasn’t even in Della’s house on Sunday night and had no knowledge of the plan she and Tim had formulated. She told them that it had basically been Tim’s plot to get rid of a stepfather he hated. He was so persuasive that she went along with it in the hope that Della would be angry and reject Roland and then she would have him to herself.
    Beth said she filled the two carryall bags that were supposed to be given to Tim to put in his bedroom and that a “female and a male were there,” but her description of the evidence didn’t match what the detectives knew. She inadvertently put herself into the crime, slipping up and admitting that she was the female involved.
    “The police were not supposed to be involved,” she stammered. “Somehow, everything got messed up.”
    It didn’t take much adept questioning by the detectives to shred Beth Bixler’s story. Doug Wright told her frankly that the statement they had just taped was obviously false.
    “After a brief discussion that we did not believe her story,” Lewis Olan told a Superior Court judge, “at which time she was given the choice to tell the truth—and decided not to—she was arrested and charged with first-degree burglary, conspiracy, attempted kidnapping, and conspiracy to commit murder.”
    “When was she arrested?” the judge asked.
    “She was