Practice to Deceive

idea just how long the trail would be before they found out the baffling story behind the body in the woods.
    It was probably better that they could not see what lay ahead, how long it would take to solve the puzzle of Russel Douglas’s death, or the tragedies the future would bring.
    Indeed, one of them would not live to see the final denouement.
    The two detectives saw that the Tracker’s keys were still in the ignition. They measured the driver’s window and saw it was lowered by 6.5 inches. Although it had been unhooked, the driver’s seat belt was still partially wound around his torso. It looked as if the dead man had rolled down his window to speak to someone. He might have been in the process of removing his seat belt before getting out of the car. More likely, Plumberg felt, someone had unbuckled the belt after he was shot.
    Rick Norrie said he had looked for the gun to no avail. As they searched for the missing gun and failed to find it, Birchfield and Plumberg regretted that any of the first patrol officers on the scene had touched the yellow SUV. Although the sodden grass around the car probably wouldn’t have given up much in the way of footprints, they would never know, because several people had walked there by now.
    And it was definitely beginning to look as if this might not be a suicide after all. Unless they found the gun within a reasonable distance from the Tracker, this could very well turn out to be a homicide. People who shoot themselves in the forehead cannot then fling the weapon many feet away.
    Experienced detectives know that the manner of death should be viewed first as homicide, second as suicide, then accidental, natural, and finally, as undetermined. Because this had seemed to scream suicide, the scene wasn’t as untouched as Birchfield and Plumberg would have liked.
    Mark Plumberg remembers standing on the edge of Wahl Road, and looking all around him. Something niggled at him.
    “I saw how deserted it was. Totally out of easy access except for the few families who lived there in the winter. I said to myself ‘This is ridiculous! Why would the victim have come way out here—he had to have been lured out here by someone.’
    “Mike Birchfield said he had that sense from the beginning, too.”
    Even on that first night, Mark Plumberg was curious about something he noted. A small, partially coagulated pool of blood was next to the dead man’s hand, and that hand would have been directly below the gunshot wound on the bridge of his nose. It seemed to him that that odd stain should still have been on the victim’s hand if he had remained in the same position since the time of the shooting.
    “But it wasn’t,” Plumberg said. “I thought then—and I still do—that someone had attempted to move the body for some reason—possibly looking for the bullet casing. That made me doubt even more that we were looking at a suicide.”
    Still, working with only artificial light, the two detectives couldn’t say for sure where the casing was.
    They would have to look for it in the morning.

PART TWO
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Russ and Brenna

C HAPTER T HREE
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    C ORONER DR. ROBERT BISHOP released the body and it was taken to Burley’s Funeral Chapel to await autopsy. The Tracker would be towed to the Island County Criminal Justice Center to be stored in a locked sally port until the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab criminalists could process it.
    It was after ten when Mark Plumberg and Mike Birchfield cleared the scene, leaving reserve deputies Bill Carpenter and Jay Geiler to provide security in case anyone—a killer or merely someone curious—should try to get inside the crime-scene tapes.
    The detective team had their suspicions and their gut reactions, but the probe was embryonic at this point; the two uniformed officers who had done the initial canvass of nearby houses had located one possible witness who sounded as if she had seen the dead man’s car the day before.
    Diane Bailey, who lived a short distance from the Blacks’ property where Russel Douglas was shot, gave a statement about a “boxy, small, bright yellow SUV” that was driving west along Wahl Road, as if the driver was searching for an address. That had been sometime between 11:30 A.M. and 1 P.M. on the twenty-sixth. She hadn’t paid that much attention to it until she saw the same vehicle backing out of her own driveway.
    “It looked as though he’d seen my red Volvo parked there and realized he had the wrong