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were introspective, written by a man who asked himself questions about how he should be managing his life, a man wondering how he could achieve happiness.
    Mark Plumberg set those aside to study in depth later; they might let him understand who Russel Douglas had been.
    The next morning, Plumberg attended Russel Douglas’s postmortem examination. Dr. Daniel Selove, a forensic pathologist who often travels around Washington State to do autopsies in sparsely populated counties, performed this after-death exploration while Island County Coroner Dr. Robert Bishop stood by.
    There were no surprises. Douglas had died of that single bullet fired into the bridge of his nose, and the slug had plowed into his head, forcing out a large amount of brain matter that dangled grotesquely from his forehead.
    He would have died instantly. When the bullet was removed, Plumberg logged it into evidence, along with plastic bags that held hair and nail clippings, a loose hair from the victim’s lower lip, and anal and oral swabs.
    Even the fragment of blue plastic from his broken sunglasses was saved. If the hair on his lip wasn’t his, it would only be probable evidence. Unless its follicle is attached to a hair, it is impossible to tell anything beyond class and characteristics.
    Plumberg was aware once again that it would surely take a motive or, he hoped, a match to the bullet casing and slug to the gun that fired it. And that gun seemed to be as lost as if it had been flung into Puget Sound.
    Perhaps it had been.
    Douglas’s clothing was bagged and sent to the Washington State Police lab to be tested by criminalists. They found semen on the victim’s underwear, but DNA results weeks later indicated the fluid was his own.
    On New Year’s Eve 2003 Mark Plumberg took the slug and the shell casing, labeled C-1, to Evan Thompson at the Seattle Police Department’s Crime Lab. If possible, they needed to know what brand of gun might have fired it. If they ever found the gun, that could be a vital link between the murder and the murderer. Less likely, the shooter’s DNA might be on the casing, but Plumberg would take the casing to the Washington State Police Lab in Marysville, Washington, to test for that only after Thompson examined the bullet and casing.
    The Seattle criminalist saw immediately that the missing gun was definitely a cheap .380 automatic weapon. The brand of guns that came to his mind were possibly a Llama, a Grendel, or a Bersa.
    Immediately after the tests, Mark Plumberg took possession of the bullet/slug and casing again.
    * * *
    N ICOLE LUA AND HER friend Janet Hall were interviewed for a second time. The women who had first noticed the yellow Tracker on their late-afternoon walk the day after Christmas had told Mike Birchfield that they hadn’t seen that either of its doors were open at that time.
    On reflection, they now told Plumberg they believed that they had seen the driver’s door open. If their recall was accurate, that would mean that the shooter was probably still at the scene when they passed by.
    And it was fortunate that they hadn’t approached the vehicle. Perhaps the killer had subsequently shut the door next to the steering wheel, gone around the SUV to search for something on the passenger side, and left that door open when he left.
    If so, what was he—or she—looking for? And had he found and removed it?
    Russel Douglas’s father, Jim, flew down from Juneau, Alaska, and he and other members of his family met with Mike Birchfield on December 30 at Brenna’s house in Langley. Birchfield’s interviews with the Douglas side of the family were private.
    Jim said he and Russel were as close as a father and son could be, considering that Jim lived far away in Alaska. “We would talk on the phone about once a month.”
    Jim Douglas was aware of his son’s bouts with depression; Russ had suffered with periods of sadness for most of his life. He was probably bipolar. When he was up, he was way up—but