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to between seventy-five and a hundred pounds. They are wonderful dogs, but they need daily exercise, exacting training because they can be stubborn, and their luxurious coats have to be brushed at least every other day. Gail used her dogs to herd sheep, an activity that these French sheepdogs were born to perform. Briards love children and they protect their owners’ home and family.
    Of course, it was not a good choice for a couple already dealing with a baby, and Brenna railed at Russ that their dog was way too much for her to handle and clean up after.
    Seeing that the match wasn’t a good one, Gail offered to take the puppy back and keep it until they were ready.
    “I knew they would never be ready, but it seemed like a good way to get the poor pup out of there,” Gail said, “and hopefully, to stop some of their fights. Finally, Russ agreed to let me take the puppy. And, of course, they never asked for it back.”
    Brenna’s favorite pastime was shopping.
    “I would have to call her a shopaholic,” Gail O’Neal said. “She could easily spend a thousand dollars on one trip to Costco. I helped her unload after a visit to the grocery store once, and was surprised to see that she had two large freezers and a refrigerator and I could hardly find room in any of them to store her new purchases! And she still fed her kids junk food all the time.”
    It was more than just the expected bickering between a wife and her mother-in-law. Both Russ and Brenna called Gail O’Neal for advice, and she did her best to remain neutral. She knew her son was immature and sometimes hard to deal with, but so was Brenna—only in a different way.
    When Russel Douglas complained about something—even something as childish as not being able to find his favorite soda pop—his mother told him, “You’re an adult. You want a Mountain Dew, and your store doesn’t have it. You are grown up—just go find a store that carries it, and get your Mountain Dew yourself.”
    * * *
    W HILE MIKE BIRCHFIELD SEARCHED for a financial reason behind the homicide, Mark Plumberg prepared to find out as much about Douglas as he possibly could. The picture on his driver’s license showed a bland-looking man with an almost shy smile. He certainly didn’t appear to be a sex-obsessed fiend, but then few sex offenders do. He apparently had a good job and was a devoted father to his two small children, supporting them financially and visiting them whenever Brenna allowed him to see them.
    On the evening of December 28, Plumberg and Birchfield executed a search warrant on Russel Douglas’s apartment in Renton. The now-dead man had left a radio on, and the sound of soft jazz in the background made their visit a little eerie.
    The place was sparsely furnished. It was little more than a studio unit, but it did have one bedroom and one bathroom on the second floor of a building with many apartments. It looked like a temporary place where a man might live while he tried to salvage a marriage gone sour—or while he was making plans for a divorce. A bachelor’s apartment in every sense of the term.
    The investigators found a surfboard in its carrying case leaning against a bedroom wall, so Russ obviously hadn’t gone surfing. According to Brenna, Russel had told her that he had a number of errands to run that day after Christmas. One of them was apparently a present for her; she thought it might be a tablecloth she wanted.
    His closet was stuffed with clothing, books, and various papers. There was also a .22 rifle there, and two plastic garbage bags with adult sex toys—nothing very shocking or different than a lot of men had. Outside of those objects, the two detectives found nothing that smacked of pornography or sexual perversion.
    There were two computer cases, but when they looked inside, neither had a computer in it. Among the myriad papers, they found a number of notes that appeared to be in Douglas’s handwriting. An initial glance at them showed they