Practice to Deceive Read online

  Jessie Valentine chimed in once more, assuring Banks and Plumberg that she wouldn’t have asked what happened in the same circumstances.

  But Greg Banks and Mark Plumberg weren’t there to find out how Jessie would have responded; it was Brenna’s demeanor that made them curious.

  At times, Brenna Douglas seemed to have been most aware of Russel’s banking and email accounts and passwords, but often she seemed confused. She did not know anything about two payments made on the Tracker—one on December 24, 2003, and another on January 8, 2004—nine days after Russ died.

  As for his email, she said she hadn’t bothered to look to see who he was writing to—until he told her he had broken off his relationship with Fran Lester.

  “Then I looked to see if he was telling me the truth.”

  Even though Brenna said she hadn’t trusted her husband after he allegedly had an affair with a woman in Wisconsin three years earlier and she had put spyware on his computer, she appeared sad as she told the prosecutor and the detective that she and Russ had done “okay” as friends in their marriage.

  Their Christmas reunion, if not perfect, was at least amicable while he was there. Some of their friends thought they might actually bind up the wounds of their marriage and give it another try.

  Russ often stayed with the children, and was available to help Brenna with repairs and chores. He had helped her move a washer and a dryer.

  “Did you have a key to his apartment in Renton?”

  “I did, but I only went there once when he wasn’t home. The kids and I were shopping on the mainland and we all had to go to the bathroom—so we went to his apartment.”

  “What was he wearing the last time you saw him?” Plumberg asked.

  “Pretty average clothes—I think maybe blue jeans, a tank top, and a jacket. We were talking Christmas night and I asked him to wear ‘normal’ clothes when he was in my space—”

  “And that is?”

  “Whidbey Island, Everett.”

  Brenna said she had been embarrassed by some of Russ’s weird outfits.

  Asked to remember their discussions at Christmas about their relationship, Brenna said they had decided to take reconciliation slowly and see what happened. They had talked about building up trust and seeing how that went.

  “How did Russ feel about that?”

  “He was okay. We were having a great time, taking it slow.”

  “You told us before that you and Russ had sex on the morning of the twenty-sixth and you took a shower after?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  Finally, they came to the end of a long session. Russel Douglas’s widow still claimed he was unfaithful and sexually demanding, quick to anger, and unpopular. But she had also acknowledged that on the last day of his life, they were looking toward a future where they might retrieve their marriage and avoid divorce.

  It was so hard to evaluate where she was coming from. If she had guilty knowledge about Russ’s murder, why would she have initially been so vindictive about his flaws? Wouldn’t she have played the grief-stricken widow to throw off suspicion?

  Now, six months after his death, she still bad-mouthed Russ, but she seemed less virulent. Plumberg sensed even a tinge of regret as Brenna recalled the almost nine years the two had spent together.

  Seizing an opportunity, he asked her if she would now consider taking a polygraph exam.

  “I won’t allow her to do that,” Jessie Valentine said quickly.

  “Do you agree with that, Brenna?” the detective asked.

  “I have to do what my attorney tells me to,” she answered.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  WITH MIKE BIRCHFIELD GONE, Mark Plumberg tried to do the work of two investigators. They had been to Tetra Tech and talked to Russel Douglas’s coworkers there, and found nothing at all that would suggest someone who might have wanted him dead.

  A number of the female staff members were very attractive, and several of them said that Russ hadn’t been an acquaintance but a “real friend.” Still, when Mark Plumberg asked them if Russ had “come on” to them, they shook their heads.

  “Absolutely not,” one secretary said. “I’m married.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean that Russel wouldn’t have tried—”

  “But he never did. His wife—Brenna—used to come to our office and she brought their children with her. We all knew that they sometimes had problems in their marriage, and that Russ was unhappy about that.”

  Plumberg moved back to another job on Russ’s résumé. He took the ferry from Clinton to the city of Mukilteo to speak with the staff there. He found that many people who worked for the city had known Russ Douglas—from temporary employees to Mike Murphy, who was Mukilteo’s chief of police.

  Almost universally, Douglas had been liked.

  “He loved his kids,” a woman in the personnel office recalled. “He was a nice young man.”

  It was true, she said, that Russ often spoke of his depression and thoughts of suicide. He knew he had problems with his temper and told her he was seeing a therapist to get better.

  Her opinion was echoed by a number of Mukilteo employees. In his last year or so working there, Russ had struggled with depression, sometimes locking himself in his office and even burning candles.

  Many of the Mukilteo staff commented that they were hurt when they weren’t notified of Russ’s memorial service.

  “We all would have gone,” one secretary said.

  A woman in the Mukilteo Planning Department said that about 90 percent of her contact with Douglas was via correspondence—phone or email.

  “The last time I actually spoke to Russ was sometime in October last year,” she said. “He was the happiest I’d seen him in a long time. He liked his new job and it seemed as though he might be getting back with Brenna. He told me that he had stayed with her and his kids on Whidbey Island two or three times. He also told me that he was dating someone else—but he wasn’t living with her.”

  Mark Plumberg asked a question he had put to many people: “Did he ever talk about being homosexual or bisexual?”

  “No! I never had any indication of that.”

  As he had with many of his Mukilteo coworkers, Russ had been open about his mood swings.

  “He had very high highs and very low lows.”

  “Tell me about when he was feeling down.”

  “He’d just withdraw from everyone. When I heard he had died, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out it was suicide. He had a tough childhood and many problems—especially with his mother—when he was growing up.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  Mukilteo Police Chief Michael Murphy said Russ would come in to talk with him at times.

  “He was interested in police work, and he even said he was thinking of becoming a cop.”

  Murphy said that Douglas rode the ferry to work with a number of the other men in the office, but hadn’t seemed particularly close friends with most of them. Sometimes the male employees went to a bar after work, a place they called “Cheers II,” and he went with them.

  After interviewing a dozen or more city hall staff in depth, and hearing them describe Russ Douglas as “a nice guy who was really depressed,” Plumberg felt again that if the killer had used an untraceable “drop gun,” and left it at the scene on Wahl Road, Russ’s manner of death would quite possibly have been determined to be suicide.

  And the true manner of death would never have come out.

  Another woman at city hall told the Island County detective that she had noticed how much Russ had changed almost a year before he was terminated from his Mukilteo position.

  “He began to pump weights and change the way he dressed—and then he got an apartment by himself.

  “He came by to see me sometime in the fall of 2003. I had just posted a new job opening and I was afraid he might be coming to apply for that position. I didn’t want to rehire him, and I wanted to a
void any discussion about that with him.”

  “Why wouldn’t you rehire him?”

  “I was the one who wrote his performance evaluations and I really tried to cover for him at the end because he was in a very deep down place. His professional judgment was off, and he couldn’t seem to perform, couldn’t even start a task, work it efficiently, or follow it through. Sometimes he was angry and he swore and we had to ask him not to do that at the front counter.”

  But she, like everyone else, described Russel Douglas as a nice guy who was friendly and whom they all liked.

  Mark Plumberg continued to canvass everyone who had known Russ at the Mukilteo City Hall. He spoke with a man named Ralph Randolph.*

  “I saw you at the front counter and I said to myself, ‘That’s a cop,’ ” Randolph blurted. “I wondered why you hadn’t talked to me.”

  Before their interview in the mayor’s office began, Randolph explained that he had “a problem” with one eye, so if he seemed to be looking at Plumberg strangely, that was why.

  He was quite agitated during the interview, and could barely sit still. He folded his hands in his lap, but he pressed them together with so much force that his thumbs turned white.

  Randolph seldom looked at Plumberg, averting his face at a forty-five-degree angle. His skin often turned blotchy—red and white—and he kept pointing out that he knew that was happening because he could feel it.

  He felt he had known Russ very well and said they had many conversations about everything from diet to music to mood changes. Plumberg studied Randolph’s body language and wondered why this man was so antsy.

  Finally, Randolph told Plumberg that he would probably find out about his being investigated by the FBI. They had “tracked him down” because he had once purchased a fairly rare replacement barrel for a gun he owned. He believed that had probably had something to do with the still-unsolved, much-publicized murder of a federal prosecutor in Seattle.

  Oddly, Ralph Randolph said he had never seen that Russ Douglas was depressed. Every other employee in city hall had noted that moroseness—but not Randolph.

  And then, within minutes, he reversed himself, saying that he had wondered if Russ had committed suicide when he learned he was dead.

  “He was very smart, you know. If he wanted to, he could have killed himself and made it look like a murder so that insurance would pay off.”

  Almost as if he was talking to himself, and still facing away from Mark Plumberg, Randolph went through some outlandish scenarios of how that could have happened.

  “Maybe Russ used springs to make the gun fly a long way, or some laser-activated device. Something that would propel the weapon into the water.”

  Plumberg hadn’t mentioned anything about water at the crime scene, beyond saying that the road ended near beachfront homes.

  He wondered just how springs and lasers could vanish from the Tracker.

  Plumberg changed the subject. “Did Russel have insurance?”

  “Oh—I don’t know. We never talked about it.”

  More and more, Randolph veered away from answering questions directly, taking a long-winded, circuitous route before he addressed the subject. He said he and Russ Douglas liked the same kind of music, like Black Sabbath.

  “He ever talk about alternate lifestyles or cults?”

  “No!”

  “You ever think he was gay or bisexual?”

  “No.”

  Ralph Randolph acted spooked when the detective asked him where he lived. Again, he went into a winding story, this time about his divorce, some woman he’d met on the Internet who was “the love of my life,” but he never actually gave Plumberg an address or his home phone number.

  “Did Russel ever evince any problem with pornography?” Plumberg persisted.

  “We joked about it sometimes because Russ put together the Mukilteo City Adult Entertainment Ordinance.”

  “You seem very nervous about something,” Plumberg said.

  “I am nervous.”

  “If you want to tell me something, I can put my pen away and stop taking notes—”

  “No, I can’t really think of anything to tell you.”

  Mark Plumberg’s sense was that Randolph was simply a very agitated man most of the time, acutely self-conscious, and possibly had cop paranoia. The more Randolph explained his eye problem, his sinus problems, and his tendency to blush, the redder he got.

  Maybe the FBI probe had frightened him; maybe he was just a nervous Nellie, but Plumberg would check him out.

  He thought he knew a red herring when he saw one, and speculated that he had just spent a long time talking to one.

  As it turned out, he was right. Randolph proved to have nothing at all to do with Russel Douglas’s death.

  PART SIX

  * * *

  Peggy Sue Stackhouse

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *

  AS JULY MOVED TOWARD August, Mark Plumberg thought of the many times he’d thought he’d struck gold in his investigation—only to have it disintegrate into dust. He had no way of knowing that there was someone far away from Washington State who was wrestling with his conscience. Should he call the sheriff on Whidbey Island, Washington? Or would that be a devastating act of disloyalty to someone he considered his close—perhaps closest—friend?

  Had Plumberg known, he would have been considerably cheered to know there was a witness detectives only dream of.

  For the moment, he continued retracing the steps he and Mike Birchfield had taken early in the game. He moved along Admiralty Way and Wahl Road, talking with residents there. It wasn’t rainy or snowing now, and the deciduous trees had leaves, while flowers bloomed in most yards. But July 26 was a discouraging day. Plumberg wasn’t finding any relevant information. He had talked to dozens and dozens of people who should have known something, some of them twice or more.

  And then he received a call on his cell phone that took him in a whole different direction.

  Island County Detective Sue Quandt told him that she had answered a phone call from a man who asked if the Island County Sheriff’s Office had an unsolved homicide that had supposedly happened around Christmas 2003! She couldn’t get the caller to give his name—or where he was calling from—but it certainly sounded as though this was something that should be followed up.

  Quandt had confirmed to the caller that indeed there was an open case of a murder on the island—on December 26, 2003.

  There was silence on the line and she wondered if the man had hung up.

  “I have information,” he finally said. “But I’m scared to talk about it.”

  Sue Quandt then transferred the call to the detectives’ commander, Mike Beech.

  The caller was frightened, but he sounded as if he was compelled to tell what he knew. Beech was able to establish some rapport with the man and felt he had gained his trust—or at least some of it. The informant said that the “shooter” was a friend of his.

  “He told me about what he had learned in February,” Beech said.

  Mark Plumberg wasn’t present during that first phone conversation, but he went to the Coupeville office as fast as he could get there.

  “Have you found any connection with anyone who used to work at the Just B’s salon and then she moved to Las Vegas with her boyfriend?” Beech asked.

  “Yes!” Plumberg said. “I’ve contacted a woman who told me she was friends with both Brenna and Russel Douglas. She drives a limousine in Las Vegas. I don’t know anything about her boyfriend, but I do know she used to work for Brenna in her salon.”

  “That meshes with what this guy—whoever he is—told me,” Beech said. “Evidently, the boyfriend has—or had—a wife in Florida and they owned a business together. He said that the guy has a girlfriend who worked in Brenna’s salon, and then the two of them moved to Las Vegas.”

  So far, Mark Plumberg and Mike Beech had validated everything the informant told them. But Plumberg had been through that scenario before.
After so many detours, it almost seemed too easy. He kept waiting for this, too, to blow up in his face.

  He wasn’t ready yet to ask Brenna about her connection to Peggy Sue Thomas, but there was a woman Mike Birchfield had talked to who was a former hairdresser at Just B’s. Jennifer McCormick now had her own salon in Freeland, and it happened to be in the same building as the sheriff’s South Precinct substation.

  He immediately contacted Jennifer McCormick and asked her if she knew Peggy Sue Thomas.

  She did. She said that she and Peggy had worked at Brenna’s salon at the same time. When Peggy moved away, she had referred her list of clients to Jennifer—a thoughtful gesture on her part that Jennifer appreciated.

  “Do you know anything about Peggy’s boyfriend?”

  “She’s had a lot of boyfriends, but I don’t know the current guy’s name,” she answered. “But I heard that he had a wife in Florida and they had some kind of business together. He was supposed to be divorcing his wife—and he and Peggy moved to Las Vegas together. I heard the guy has a brother on Whidbey who owns a bed-and-breakfast. And I heard through the grapevine that Peggy’s boyfriend just recently left her in Las Vegas.”

  Jennifer McCormick had always had a friendly relationship with Peggy when they both worked at Brenna Douglas’s salon.

  “The only thing that concerned me was one time—when I think she was kidding—she came into Just B’s and she warned someone about something. Then she lifted her arms as if she was holding a gun and pointed and said, ‘You’d better remember that or I’ll come back and go 007 on you!’ ”

  At this point, Mark Plumberg didn’t know exactly what they had with the Florida caller, or where this new angle was going. He and Commander Mike Beech were very committed to keeping their tenuous contact with their nameless informant. They didn’t want to alarm him and lose track of him.