Practice to Deceive by Ann Rule Page B

act like a self-indulgent kid sometimes, and Fran let him have it. When he whined about his miserable marriage, she told him, ‘Either get a divorce, or get into counseling.’
    “And he was beginning to change and stop feeling so sorry for himself. Before, he would call Brenna and threaten suicide if she wouldn’t take him back. Poor ‘Eeyore.’ All of a sudden, I said, ‘Oh my God—Russ has grown up.’
    “He was finally happy, but Brenna wasn’t. He was responsible—he paid child support and he paid spousal support, too. But I don’t think Brenna wanted him back.”
    Initially, Gail tried to help Brenna out of the financial mess her beauty salon books were in, and recommended a CPA who could help her. That annoyed her newly widowed daughter-in-law.
    Two remarks that Brenna Douglas made to Gail still disturb her. She doesn’t know what Brenna was trying to say. At first, Gail couldn’t believe that Brenna had anything at all to do with Russ’s murder, but as the circumstantial evidence piled up, she wondered.
    “I asked her a direct question once. And she was very snotty when she answered me. I asked her: ‘Have you ever thought—when you were working with your friend—Peggy Sue—that Russ was worth more dead to you than alive?’ ”
    Peggy Sue Thomas often worked at Just B’s as a hairdresser; she was Brenna’s landlady, and the two were close friends.
    “She said, ‘Well . . . I might have. ’ ”
    Later, Brenna suddenly burst out with an inscrutable remark:
    “If push comes to shove, I have a bomb that will devastate the family . . .”
    What did she mean?
    * * *
    B OTH BRENNA AND FRAN could account for their whereabouts on the afternoon of December 26. And their stories checked out.
    But someone had shot Russ during that time. So far, Detectives Mark Plumberg and Mike Birchfield were as puzzled about the actual killer as they were when they first walked up to the yellow Tracker in the woods.
    They had to spread their net wider and find more people who might have been involved with the dead man. The worst possible outcome of their probe would be that this was a stranger-to-stranger murder, the cold act of someone who had no connection at all to Russel Douglas, someone who simply wanted to feel what it was like to kill someone.
    And that is the kind of homicide that frightens everyone who lives in the area of the crime, and makes people lock their doors and cars when they usually don’t.
    Wherever shocking crimes happen, television news crews invariably film footage of residents who seem to read from the same script. As the interviewees face the camera, they shake their heads and say, “Something like this just doesn’t happen here. We can’t understand why Russ was murdered. I guess it happens in a big city or a bad neighborhood—but not here .”
    But, of course, it does happen there.
    And it invariably shakes bystanders hard. With the first news bulletin, they have to acknowledge their own mortality. And, yes, wonder if they might be next.
    When the killer isn’t caught, they grow more afraid as time passes.

PART THREE
----

The Investigation

C HAPTER S EVEN
----
    O NE OF THE MAIN questions that needed to be answered was how Russ Douglas had ended up on Wahl Road, an area where no one had ever known him to be.
    The investigating team studied the placement of homes along Wahl Road. Diane Bailey, the only witness who had seen the yellow Tracker and its driver before he was shot, lived just west of a rather impressive residence closer to Admiralty Way. The place had stone pillars and a heavy gate across its driveway. As the detectives walked farther west, they passed the Baileys’ driveway, another narrow road leading in, and finally the dirt road where Douglas’s body was discovered.
    Interestingly, there was another expensive-looking home on the other end of the street where Wahl Road turned into Ebb Tide. It was almost a mirror image of the first estate; it, too, had stone pillars