Free In the Still of the Night by Ann Rule

would allow the dogs to come in the room.
    She worried about them; some of Ronda's stepsons were cruel to animals. One had shot a cat, and regularly threw rocks at the Rottweilers. Ronda was worried sick anytime she had to leave them for very long with Ron and his boys, particularly after her eight-year-old Rottweiler, Duchess, died while she was alone with Jonathan. Ron always said it was heatstroke, but Ronda hadn't believed it. She knew in her heart that her dog had been beaten to death. Barb kept Duchess's ashes in her trophy case.
    Barb herself had been concerned for Ronda's own safety; the boys had never accepted her. The oldest son living with Ron and Ronda--Jonathan--was almost eighteen and Ronda told her mother that he delighted in sneaking into the master bathroom when she was taking a shower. Several times she had caught him peeping through the shower curtains at her. Ronda came to feel that she had no privacy in her own home.
    The third time she saw Jonathan's face grinning through a crack in the shower curtain, Ronda took action. She had taught personal safety to rookies in the Patrol and many times she had had to overcome recalcitrant suspects when there was no backup available. Enough was enough. Ronda leapt out of the shower stall, pinned the teenager's wrists behind his back, and took him down, grinding his face into the bathroom floor.
    And then she told Ron. She was even angrier when he pooh-poohed her concerns about his eighteen-year-old son.
    "Jonathan hated Ronda after that," Barb told Dave Bell. "She humiliated him and she hurt him physically--but he had it coming. She told me he even threatened to kill her after that."
    Ronda had reported Jonathan to the Lewis County Sheriff's Office, and deputies took her complaint that her life had been threatened. Jonathan was sent to live with his mother, Katie, for four months and court-ordered to take anger management classes.
    But he never really forgave Ronda.

    B ARB KNEW MOST
of the people who were--or had been--in the center of Ronda's life: Ron Reynolds, Dave Bell, Mark Liburdi, Cheryl Gilbert, who had come to the Twin Peaks Drive house to drive Ronda to Portland, myriad friends, and some of the people she worked with at Walmart and Macy's. Some Barb liked and others made her uneasy. She needed to know more about them.
    Most of all, Barb Thompson needed sleep--if she could manage it without nightmares. She'd barely slept on Tuesday night; she'd been too excited about Ronda's arrival. They had talked late into the night, making plans. The last time Barb talked to Ronda was just before eleven. She thought Dave Bell had spoken to her at 11:45 and again at 12:30 A.M.
    And then there had been the strange phone call waking Barb when she finally did get to sleep.
    As crazy as it might sound to some people, Barb wondered if it had been Ronda, saying a last goodbye from somewherein a misty place between earth and heaven where she could no longer talk. Maybe Ronda had died then at twenty minutes to 2 A.M. and not at five or six, as the deputies said Ron told them.
    Barb
did
need sleep. In the morning, her head might be clearer. Whether that was good or bad was moot.
    Every morning for the rest of her life, she knew she would always wake up thinking about Ronda.

    O N T HURSDAY MORNING
, Barb Thompson rose in the frigid hours before dawn, prepared to fly to Seattle. It was an hour's flight, over the snow-tipped peaks of the Cascade Mountains, and even at that hour, the early planes were crowded. For the rest of the world, Christmas Eve was a week away, and families had begun to travel so they could be together for the holidays. Barb had forgotten about Christmas.
    Dave Bell, Ronda's long-ago fiance, had promised to meet Barb at SeaTac Airport in Seattle at a quarter after eight that Thursday morning and drive her the two hours to the Lewis County Sheriff's Office in Chehalis.
    Barb trusted Dave, and she desperately needed a shoulder to lean on. Beyond Ron Reynolds and