Betrayal of Trust
J. A. Jance
From New York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance, a suspenseful mystery from the creator of Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady and Seattle homicide detective J. P. Beaumont.At first glance, what happens on the video appears to be a childish game: a teenage girl with dark, wavy hair smiles for the camera, a blue scarf tied around her neck. Then things turn dark and gruesome, and the girl ends up dead.When a snuff film is discovered on a cell phone belonging to the governor of Washington State's grandson—a boy with a troubled background who swears he doesn't know the victim—the governor turns to an old friend, J. P. Beaumont, for help. Of the many horrors the Seattle private investigator has witnessed over the years, this one ranks near the top—especially since the crime's multiple perpetrators might well be minors.But this case of an apparent juvenile prank gone hideously wrong has deeper, more startling implications, leading Beau and Mel Soames—his partner in life and work—down a twisted path of corruption and lies that must be exposed before more young lives are obliterated.
For Rebekah Kowalski Ming and Joan Hoyt Thank you
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u2c5b082e-68db-546b-b83e-c9e3d165a57b)
Dedication (#u17f3c4f8-6c63-5312-9be8-d416011bb882)
Chapter 1 (#ud865bbd6-e87c-51c5-9d4b-9865dc5350cc)
Chapter 2 (#u5557d3db-f009-5121-9935-1216f9cb1d60)
Chapter 3 (#u23aa05ab-07cb-542e-a96c-f19de6491c01)
Chapter 4 (#uec98f6bb-436c-550d-9a8b-947286916358)
Chapter 5 (#u4b227adf-15ef-55fb-9e2e-18f9ec30429b)
Chapter 6 (#u473851f6-56b5-59b7-992c-c02369dbac14)
Chapter 7 (#u774f09a9-7922-5542-a304-3d14659f8b78)
Chapter 8 (#ufae297be-233f-56e7-bc02-7ab974bea9f8)
Chapter 9 (#uc329120e-d7a6-5e39-9f86-9452d2616dcb)
Chapter 10 (#uc118ee0a-1b66-5deb-a978-ed11a309d67d)
Chapter 11 (#ub80f761f-a55e-5893-b668-7e4759864cec)
Chapter 12 (#u5f4105a4-9428-574b-b292-ee223236435c)
Chapter 13 (#u773ca6dc-b539-5d4b-bc34-c8af973bc6f6)
Chapter 14 (#ue550e5f6-addd-5f17-91af-a6c114a753b7)
Chapter 15 (#uc9a587fd-fa40-5150-a674-98ee053c4cf7)
Chapter 16 (#ue6b34952-ac2c-5233-b9ca-2ea941816d9a)
Chapter 17 (#u2ecdd1a9-ef0d-549a-984f-1e741d3443bb)
Chapter 18 (#u7950af2e-42ef-52c7-80a5-a11985664c08)
Chapter 19 (#u43b1cd3f-849b-5fbd-b22c-11ddb0b78ea1)
Chapter 20 (#u8993195e-b670-5a51-8612-40c3f2df9744)
Chapter 21 (#u2e305673-7a86-5948-8b0b-1323f01ea783)
Chapter 22 (#ued54e6f6-d54f-5ffb-a505-eed0488b0f3c)
Chapter 23 (#u17d69672-34f4-5c35-ac4b-6dfe8adae876)
Chapter 24 (#u9825853c-1398-59a4-9564-0f399d4d2d5f)
Chapter 25 (#u4bde833c-968a-5ba4-9e72-aa2ae7f3dc5f)
Chapter 26 (#u1bcd42a2-0df7-572d-ba91-f020ad2ac741)
Chapter 27 (#u9b377db6-c556-5a5c-a4f3-35c5e2e8132d)
Chapter 28 (#ue8e80f2d-143b-566a-afc9-7225ff26de83)
Chapter 29 (#u8972a0f4-cde1-595a-a10f-3c8ed3c4f3d6)
Also by J. A. Jance (#u14b0fc98-f76c-5e24-b50f-368164f821b3)
Copyright (#u7247d17a-3d3c-5c91-8422-df3446d7a24f)
About the Publisher (#u209ffa7a-7c34-522a-a818-14391715b7b9)
CHAPTER 1
I WAS SITTING ON THE WINDOW SEAT OF OUR PENTHOUSE unit in Belltown Terrace when Mel came back from her run. Dripping with sweat, she nodded briefly on her way to the shower and left me in peace with my coffee cup and the online version of the New York Times crossword. Since it was Monday, I finished it within minutes and turned my attention to the spectacular Olympic Mountains view to the west.
It was June. After months of mostly gray days, summer had come early to western Washington. Often the hot weather holds off until after drowning out the Fourth of July fireworks. Not this year. It was only mid-June, and the online weather report said it might get all the way to the mid-eighties by late afternoon.
-People in other parts of the country might laugh at the idea of mid-eighties temperatures clocking in as a heat wave, but in Seattle, where the humidity is high and AC units are few, a long June afternoon of sun can be sweltering, especially since the sun doesn’t disappear from the sky until close to 10:00 P.M.
I remember those long miserable hot summer nights when I was a kid, when my mother—a single mother—and I lived in a second-story one-bedroom apartment in a blue-collar Seattle neighborhood called Ballard. We didn’t have AC and there was a bakery on the floor below us. Having a bakery and all those ovens running was great in the winter, but in the summer not so much. I would lie there on the couch in the living room, sleepless and miserable, hoping for a tiny breath of breeze to waft in through our lace curtains. It wasn’t until I was in high school and earning my own money by working as an usher in a local theater that I managed to give my mom a pair of fans for Mother’s Day—one for her and one for me. (At least I didn’t give her a baseball glove.)
I refilled my coffee cup and poured one for Mel. She grew up as an army brat. Evidently the base housing hot water heaters were often less than optimal. As a result she takes some of the fastest showers known to man. She collected her coffee from the kitchen and was back in the living room before the coffee came close to reaching drinking temperature. Wearing a silky robe that left nothing to the imagination and with a towel wrapped around her wet hair, she curled up at the opposite end of the window seat and joined me in examining the busy shipping traffic crisscrossing Elliott Bay.
A grain ship was slowly pulling away from the massive terminal at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill. Two ferries, one going and one coming, made their lumbering way to and from Bremerton or Bainbridge Island. They were large ships, but from our perch twenty-two stories up, they seemed like tiny toy boats. Over near West Seattle, a collection of barges was being assembled in advance of heading off to Alaska. Nearer at hand, a many-decked cruise ship had docked overnight, spilling a myriad of shopping-intent cruise enthusiasts into our Denny Regrade neighborhood.
“How was your run?” I asked.
“Hot and crowded,” Mel said. “Myrtle Edwards Park was teeming with runners off the cruise ships. I don’t like running in crowds. That’s why I don’t do marathons.”
I had another reason for not doing marathons—two of them, actually—my knees. Mel runs. I walk, or as she says, I “saunter.” Really, it’s more limping than anything else. I finally broke down and had surgery to remove my heel spurs, but then my knees went south. It’s hell getting old. I talked to Dr. Bliss, my GP, about the situation with my knees.
“Yes,” he said, “you’ll need knee replacement surgery eventually, but we’re not there yet.”
Obviously he was using the royal “we,” because if it was his knee situation instead of mine, I’m sure “we’d” have had it done by now.
I glanced at my watch. “We need to leave in about twenty, if we’re going to make it across the water before traffic stops up.”
Since we were sitting looking out at an expanse of water, it would be easy to think that’s the water I meant when I spoke to Mel, but it wasn’t. In Seattle, that term refers to several different bodies of water, depending on where you are at the time and where you’re going. In this case we were looking at Elliott Bay, which happens to be our water view, but we work on the other side of Lake Washington, in this instance, the “traffic” water in question. People who live on Lake Washington or on Lake Sammamish would have an entirely different take on the matter when they used the same two words. Context is everything.
“Okeydokey,” Mel said, hopping off the window seat. “Another refill?” she asked.
I gave her my coffee mug. She took it, went to the kitchen, filled it, and came back. She handed me the cup and gave me a quick kiss in the process. “I started a new pot for our travelers,” she said, then added, “Back in a flash.”
I had showered and dressed while she was out, not that I needed to. There are two full baths as well as a powder room in our unit. When I married Mel, rather than share mine, she took over the guest bath and made it her own, complete with all the mysterious vials of makeup and moisturizers she deems necessary to keep herself presentable. I happen to think Mel is more than presentable without any of that stuff, but I’ve gathered enough wisdom over the years to realize that my opinion on some subjects is neither requested nor appreciated.
So we split the bathrooms. As long as we share the bed in my room, I don’t have a problem with that. Occasionally I find myself wondering about my first marriage to Karen, who is now deceased. Most of the time we were married, we had two bathrooms—one for us and one for the kids. Would our lives have been smoother if Karen and I had been able to have separate bathrooms as well?
No, wait. Denial is a wonderful thing, and I’m going to call myself on it. Despite my pretense to the contrary, the warfare that occurred in Karen’s and my bathroom usually had nothing to do with the bathroom itself. Karen was a drama queen and I was a jerk, for starters. Yes, we did battle over changing the toilet paper rolls and leaving the toilet seat up and hanging panty hose on the shower curtain rod and leaving clots of toothpaste in the single sink, but those were merely symptoms of what was really wrong with our marriage—namely, my drinking and my working too much. All the squabbling in our bathroom—the only real private place in the house—was generally about those underlying issues rather than the ones we claimed we were fighting about.
For years, Karen and I never showed up at the kitchen table for breakfast without having spent the better part of an hour railing at each other first. I’m sure those constant verbal battles were very hard on our kids, and I regret them to this day. But I have to tell you that the pleasant calmness that prevails in my life with Mel Soames is nothing short of a dream come true.
Don’t let the different last names fool you. Mel is my third wife. She didn’t take my name, and I didn’t take hers. As for the single day Anne Corley’s and my marriage lasted? She didn’t take my name, either, so I’m two for one in the wives-keeping-their-own-names department. Karen evidently didn’t mind changing names at all—she took mine, and later, when she married Dave Livingston, her second husband, she took his name as well. So much for the high and low points of J. P. Beaumont’s checkered romantic past.
When the coffeepot—an engineering marvel straight out of Starbucks—beeped quietly to let me know it was done, I went out to the kitchen and poured most of the pot into our two hefty stainless-steel traveling mugs. This is Seattle. We don’t go anywhere or do anything without sufficient amounts of coffee plugged into the system.
I was just tightening the lid on the second one when Mel appeared in the doorway looking blond and wonderful. Maybe the makeup did make a tiny bit of difference, but I can tell you she’s a whole lot better-looking than any other homicide cop I ever met.
On our commute, she drives. Fast. It’s best for all concerned if I settle back in the passenger seat of my Mercedes S-550, drink my coffee, and do my best to refrain from backseat driving. One of these days Mel is going to get a hefty speeding ticket that she won’t be able to talk her way out of. When that happens, I expect it will finally slow her down. Until that time, however, I’m staying out of it.
And don’t let all this talk about making coffee fool you. Mel is no wizard in the kitchen, and neither am I. We mostly survive on takeout or by going out to eat. We have several preferred restaurants on our list of morning dining establishments once we get through the potential bottleneck that is the I-90 Bridge.
The people who planned the bridges in Seattle—both the 520 and the I-90—were betting that the traffic patterns of the fifties and sixties would prevail—that people would drive into the city from the suburbs in the mornings and back home at night. So the lanes that were built into the I-90 bridges have express lanes that are westbound in the morning and eastbound in the afternoon. Except there are almost as many people working in the burbs now as there are in the city, and “wrong-way” commuters like Mel and me, on our way to the east side of Lake Washington to the offices of the Attorney General’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, pay the commuting price for those long-ago decisions every day.
If we make it through in good order, we can go to the Pancake Corral in Bellevue or to Li’l Jon’s in Eastgate for a decent sit-down breakfast. Otherwise we’re stuck with Egg McMuffins at our desks. You don’t have to guess which of those options I prefer. So we head out a good hour and fifteen minutes earlier than we would need to without stopping for breakfast. Getting across the lake early usually makes for lighter traffic—unless there’s an accident. Then all bets are off. A successful outcome is also impacted by weather—too much rain or wind or even too much sun can all prove hazardous to the morning commute.
That Monday morning we were golden—no accidents, no stop-and-go traffic. By the time the sun came peeking up over the Cascades in the distance, we were tucked into a cozy booth in Li’l Jon’s ordering breakfast. And more coffee. Because our office is across the freeway and only about six blocks away from the restaurant, we were able to take our time. Mel had pancakes. She’s a runner. She can afford the carbs. I had a single egg over easy with one slice of whole-wheat toast.
We arrived at the Special Homicide Investigation Team’s east side office at five minutes to nine. We don’t have to punch a time clock. When we’re on a case, we sometimes work extraordinarily long hours. When we’re not on a case, we work on the honor system.
For the record, I do know that the unfortunate acronym for Special Homicide Investigation Team is S.H.I.T., an oversight some bumbling bureaucrat didn’t understand until it was too late to do anything about it. In the world of state government—and probably in the federal government as well—once the stationery is printed, no departmental name is going to get changed because the resulting acronym turns out to be bad news. S.L.U.T. (the South Lake Union Transit) is another unfortunate local case in point.
But for all of us who actually work for Special Homicide, the jokes about S.H.I.T. are almost as tired as any little-kid knock-knock joke that comes to mind, and they’re equally unwelcome. Yes, we laugh courteously when people think they’re really clever by mentioning that we “work for S.H.I.T.,” but I can assure you, what we do here at Special Homicide is not a joke. And neither is our boss, Harry Ignatius Ball—Harry I. Ball, as those of us who know and love him like to call him.
Special Homicide is actually divided into three units. Squad A works out of the state capital down in Olympia. They handle everything from Olympia south to the Oregon border. Squad B, our unit, is in Bellevue, but we work everything from Tacoma north to the Canadian border, while Squad C, based in Spokane, covers most things on the far side of the mountains. These divisions aren’t chiseled in granite. We work for Ross Connors. As the Washington State Attorney General, he is the state’s chief law enforcement officer. We work at his pleasure and direction. We work where Ross Connors says and when Ross Connors says. He’s a tough boss but a good one. When things go haywire, as they sometimes do, he isn’t the kind of guy who leaves his people blowing in the wind. That sort of loyalty inspires loyalty, and Ross gives as good as he gets.
That morning Mel and I both managed to survive the terminal boredom of the weekly staff-meeting ritual. After that, we returned to our separate cubicle-size offices, where we were continuing work on cross-referencing the state’s many missing persons reports with unidentified homicides in all other jurisdictions. It was cold-case work, long on frustration, short on triumphs, and even more boring most of the time than staff meetings.
When Squad B’s secretary/office manager, Barbara Galvin, poked her head into our tiny offices and announced that Mel and I had been summoned to Harry’s office, it was a real footrace to see who got there first.
Harry is a Luddite. He has a computer on his desk. He does not use it. Ross Connors has made sure that all his people have the latest and greatest in electronic communications gear, but he doesn’t use that, either. It’s only in the last few months that he’s finally accepted the necessity of carrying a cell phone and actually turning it on. He and Ross Connors are really birds of a feather in that regard—they’re both anti-geeks at heart. Occasionally we’ll receive an e-mail with Harry’s name on it, but that’s because he has dictated his message to Barbara, who dutifully types it at the approximate speed of sound and then presses the send button. The same goes for electronic messages that come our way from Ross Connors’s e-mail account. His secretary, Katie Dunn, sends out those missives.
In our unit, Barbara Galvin and Harry I. Ball are the ultimate odd couple in terms of working together. Harry is now, and always has been, an exceptional cop who was kicked out of the Bellingham Police Department due to a terminal lack of political correctness that survived several employer-mandated courses in sensitivity training. He would have been stranded without a job if Ross Connors, no PC guy himself, hadn’t taken pity on him and hired him as Squad B’s supervisor.
Barbara Galvin is easily young enough to be Harry’s daughter. Her body shows evidence of plenty of piercings, but she comes to work with a single diamond stud in her left nostril. I suspect that her clothing conceals any number of tattoos, but none of those show at work. She’s a blazingly fast typist who keeps only a single photo of her now ten-year-old son on an otherwise fastidiously clean desk. She manages the office with a cheerful efficiency that is nothing short of astonishing. She prods at Harry when he needs prodding and laughs both with him and at him. When I’ve had occasion to visit other S.H.I.T. offices, I’ve also seen how Squads A and C live. With Harry and Barbara in charge, those of us in Squad B have a way better deal.
When Mel and I walked into Harry’s office he was studying an e-mail that Barbara had no doubt retrieved from his account, printed, and brought to him.
“Have a chair,” he said, stripping off a pair of drugstore reading glasses.
Since there was only one visitor’s chair in the room, I let Mel have that one. When Harry looked up and saw I was still standing, he bellowed, “Hey, Barbara. Can you round up another chair? Who the hell keeps stealing mine?”
Without a word, Barbara brought another office chair to the doorway and then rolled it expertly across the room so it came to a stop directly in front of me.
“Sit,” Harry ordered, glaring at me.
I sat.
Harry picked up the piece of paper again and returned the reading glasses to the bridge of his nose.
“I don’t like this much, you know,” he said.
Mel and I exchanged looks. Her single raised eyebrow spoke volumes, as in “What’s he talking about?”
“I’m not sure why it is that you’re always Ross’s go-to guy, but you are,” Harry grumbled, sending another glower in my direction. “This time the attorney general wants both of you in Olympia for the next while. It’s all very hush-hush. He didn’t say what he wants you to do while you’re there, or how long he wants you to stay. He says you should ‘pack to stay for several days,’ and you should ‘each bring a vehicle,’ which leads me to believe that you won’t necessarily be working together. You’re booked into the Red Lion there in Olympia.”
“I’m assuming from that we probably won’t be staying in the honeymoon suite?” I asked.
“I would assume not,” Harry agreed glumly. “Now get the hell out of here. Time’s a-wastin’.”
CHAPTER 2
SINCE WE HADN’T PACKED TO GO TO THE OFFICE, AND since we hadn’t brought both cars, we had to go back home to throw some clothing into suitcases and pick up Mel’s Porsche Cayman. Driving into Seattle, though, we were able to be a two-person carpool in the right direction for a change. Way to go!
Packing took no time at all. We have no kids at home and no pets, either—not even a goldfish. That meant that all we had to do was turn off the lights and lock the door. Simple. Trouble-free. Then we headed south, caravanning on I-5 with Mel in the lead.
It’s a little over sixty miles from downtown Seattle to downtown Olympia. Driving directions say the trip should take a little over an hour. It actually took an hour and a half due to a semi that jackknifed for no apparent reason on a perfectly dry, straight highway just south of Fort Lewis. Driving alone gave me time to think about what Harry had said about my connection to Ross Connors. He was right. I was and am Ross Connors’s “go-to guy” for more reasons than Harry I. Ball knows.
Ross and I have dealt with similar tragedies. Anne Corley, my second wife, chose suicide by cop, although that was long enough ago that the term wasn’t in common usage at the time. Ross’s wife, Francine, was carrying on a torrid affair with the husband of a friend. In the process she let slip some information on a supposedly protected witness with fatal results for said witness. When Francine realized that the jig was up and we were coming for her, she went out into their backyard with a handgun and blew her brains out.
Ross and I had also had our difficulties with booze before those tragedies struck, and we both had to get a lot worse before we got better. Ralph Ames, who was once Anne Corley’s attorney and who is now my friend, helped get me into treatment. When Ross finally came to me for help, I did the same thing for him by personally escorting him into his first AA meeting.
-People who venture into AA are given a sponsor—someone you can call in the middle of the night when the temptation to drink is too great and you need a human voice to talk you down out of the trees. My longtime AA sponsor is Lars Jenssen, a retired ninety-something halibut fisherman who became my stepgrandfather by virtue of marrying my widowed grandmother, Beverly Piedmont. He was my sponsor before he married my grandmother and he remains my sponsor to this day, even though, in the aftermath of my grandmother’s death, he took up with another widow, Iris Rasmussen, from Queen Anne Gardens, a Seattle-area retirement home, where the two of them are evidently scandalizing all concerned by openly living in sin.
But I digress. Ross wanted me to be his sponsor. I know from personal experience that having a sponsor who’s more than an hour away is a bad idea, so I found him a group and a sponsor in Olympia. That was the part Harry knew nothing about. Mel knew because she had been privy to some of the phone conversations when Ross called me looking for help, and I know for a fact that Mel can be trusted to keep her mouth shut.
Ross must have understood that, too, I theorized, or he wouldn’t have asked Harry to send both of us, but I couldn’t imagine why. What was going on that Ross couldn’t afford to hand the case off to his Squad A home team?
It had to have something to do with politics. Ross is a political animal. He’s won reelection to the position of attorney general over and over, usually by wide margins. The last election, after the scandal with Francine, he won again, but that one was a squeaker. He had hinted to me that after this four-year term, he most likely wouldn’t run again. Those weren’t words that made me feel all warm and fuzzy. S.H.I.T. has Ross’s own particular stamp on it, and I couldn’t really see myself—or any of us—working for someone else with the same kind of personal loyalty that we all give willingly to Ross Connors.
Whatever this case was, it was also big enough to bring people down.
Harry called while I was still stuck in the traffic jam waiting for the wreckage of the semi to be towed off the freeway.
“Ross says to meet him in the coffee shop of the hotel,” Harry said. “What’s the matter? Doesn’t that ‘dreaded Red’ have a bar? Or maybe their coffee shop serves booze.”
I knew that Ross and Harry had done some drinking together in the old days, but in this instance I played dumb.
“I’m sure you can get anything you want in the coffee shop,” I assured him. “Maybe he missed lunch.”
“Right,” Harry said sarcastically. “Whatever.” He hung up.
If you’ve been in any Red Lion Hotel in the continental United States, you know the drill. There used to be huge wooden carvings on the walls of the lobby and the restaurant. Whenever I saw them, I imagined some crazed woodcarver living off in the woods somewhere, cutting out those gigantic pieces and then warehousing them so there would be a ready supply waiting when it came time to open a new hotel. But things change, and time has taken its toll. Now the Olympia Red Lion lobby is cream and butter-yellow and stone. The crazed carver has probably hung up his chain saw and moved to Palm Springs, where he plays golf every day.
Mel had beaten me to the registration desk. When I walked up to ask for my room key, the desk clerk couldn’t help but give me a knowing leer.
“Ms. Soames has already arrived, Mr. Beaumont,” he said. “Your room charge is already paid, and she left a credit card to cover incidentals. Would you care to leave a card to cover your own?”
I was wearing my wedding ring, and I’m sure Mel was wearing hers. Her credit card charges and mine were all one account, but I didn’t bother explaining that or the last-name situation to the clerk. He was a young guy, somewhere in his late twenties, who seemed astonished by the idea that someone of my advanced age—older than dirt in the clerk’s eyes—could possibly be about to get lucky. I wanted to tell him, “Listen up, turkey. I already am lucky,” but I didn’t. Leaving him to arrive at his own erroneous and dirty-minded conclusions, I took my room key and left.
Mel was upstairs in our room and totally unpacked by the time I got there. I told you she drives fast. Like her speedy showers, the unpacking part came from growing up as a military dependent. Every time her family was shipped to a new base, suitcases were unpacked immediately. With clothing in the drawers and closets, it was easier to feel settled faster. She had appropriated the room’s only decent chair and was working on her laptop.
“You took long enough,” she said.
“Harry called,” I told her. “We’re supposed to meet up with Ross in the coffee shop right about now.”
“I know,” Mel said. “I got a call, too, but there’s still no hint about what this is all about?”
“None,” I said.
“Most likely politics as usual,” she said.
“That would be my guess.”
Even though I would have been happy to leave my crap in my roll-aboard, I allowed myself to be influenced by peer pressure. I unpacked and put my underwear and socks in an unoccupied dresser drawer. I hung up my extra slacks and clean shirts, still covered with the dry cleaner’s plastic wrapping. I’m waiting for the day when someone decides that there has to be an extra charge for putting plastic around your freshly laundered shirts. It hasn’t happened so far, probably only because no one has noticed.
“You should check your e-mail,” Mel said, peering at her computer screen.
“Why? Something new from Barbara Galvin? Or is that nice Nigerian widow wanting to send me money again?”
My kids, Scott and Kelly, had been pretty much out of my life for years. When their mother died of cancer, we started trying to reconnect, an effort that was helped immeasurably by Dave Livingston, Karen’s widowed second husband and my kids’ caring stepfather. Kelly, her husband, Jeff Cartwright, and my two grandkids live in Ashland, Oregon. Scott and his wife, Cherisse, live in the Bay Area. For a long time we communicated back and forth by e-mail. Now my generation-X progeny mostly send me text messages or e-mail. Other than work-related messages, most of the other new mail in my e-mail account turns out to be spam.
Mel grinned at me and shook her head. “I was scanning down the junk mail in your spam folder. There’s something in there with a subject line that says ‘Beaumont, Texas.’”
The room phone rang just then. Mel picked it up. “Okay,” she said after a moment’s pause. “We’ll be right down.”
“Ross?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Just move that message to my new-mail folder,” I told her. “I’ll read it later. Right now we’d better go see what the boss has in mind.”
“And why he’d rather meet with us here instead of having us stop by his office, which, in my opinion, is a hell of a lot nicer than any hotel coffee shop, and a lot more private, too.”
I was glad to know I wasn’t the only one who had been wondering about that.
We found Ross in the coffee shop downstairs. It was still early enough that the room was mostly empty. The attorney general, with a cup and saucer in front of him, was seated in a booth in the far corner of the room under a huge oil painting that depicted a salmon heading upstream to a most likely unhappy end. From the morose look on Ross’s usually cheerful countenance, the painting seemed like an apt reflection of the AG’s current mood.
As a general rule, when I’m in public places I don’t like sitting with my back to the door. Neither does Mel. We both want to be able to see who is coming in and going out, just in case. In this instance, Ross had already appropriated the door-facing seat in the booth. Mel solved the problem by slipping into the booth next to our boss and letting me have the other side of the booth to myself.
“Your room is all right?” he asked.
“The room’s fine,” Mel assured him.
A waitress showed up, order pad at the ready. “They’ll have coffee,” Ross said, without bothering to ask our opinion. “Bring us one of those big pots. When we’re ready to order lunch, I’ll let you know.”
Nodding, the waitress went away. She was back a minute or so later with an insulated carafe of coffee.
“Cream and sugar?” she asked, pouring into the cups in front of us.
“Black,” Mel and I answered together.
“Okay,” she said, and went away, leaving us alone.
The moment she was gone, Ross reached into his pocket. He pulled out an iPhone, tinkered with it for a moment, and then set it in front of Mel. “I need you to watch this video before anyone else comes into the dining room,” he said.
Mel watched. The sound was turned off. There was no way to tell what was happening on the tiny screen, but from watching the subtle shifts in Mel’s features—the tightening of the muscles on her jawbone, the sudden iciness in her eyes, the paleness of her cheeks—I knew whatever it was wasn’t good.
When the video ended, she turned on Ross. “Is this real?” she demanded.
He nodded. “I think so.”
Without another word, Mel punched what must have been the replay button and pushed the phone over to me. There was a girl on the screen. She looked to be fourteen or fifteen, maybe, straight teeth, dark wavy hair, a blue scarf tied around her neck. She smiled for the camera—a nice smile; a shy smile—as though she was a little nervous about being there. Then two disembodied hands appeared on the screen. Each hand grasped one end of the scarf, and they began to pull. For a moment the girl was docile, as though this was something she expected and might even have welcomed. I had heard of the choking game before. I realized this wasn’t a game about the same time the girl did. She began to claw at the scarf and try to loosen its hold on her neck. She surged to her feet, struggling. The camera’s focus moved with her, staying on her face, keeping the bodies and faces that belonged to the hands pulling on the scarf safely out of the camera’s view.
I watched it all the way to the end. When it was over, I knew the girl was dead. I also understood why Ross hadn’t ordered any food. I felt as sick to my stomach as Mel Soames looked.
“Snuff film,” I said, unnecessarily. “Who is she?”
Ross shook his head. “No idea who she is or where she’s from.”
“But there are three people involved in the homicide,” Mel said. “Two guys pulling the scarf and one guy running the camera.”
“Right,” Ross said. “Three.”
“So if you don’t know who she is or where she’s from, how come this is our case?” I asked.
Ross looked uncomfortable as he collected the iPhone and stuffed it back into his pocket.
“Governor Longmire brought it over to my office and dropped it off earlier this morning,” he said. “It’s the governor’s husband’s grandson’s phone. He’s fifteen.”
“Do you think he’s involved?” Mel asked.
Ross shook his head. “No way of knowing. His name is Josh Deeson. The kid could be one of the hands pulling the ends of the scarf or he could be the guy with the camera. It’s also possible that he’s entirely innocent. His mother, the governor’s stepdaughter, is deceased. From what I can tell, she was pretty much of a loser who overdosed on meth two years ago. The father was declared unfit, and the courts awarded custody to the boy’s maternal grandfather, Gerard Willis, who happens to be married to Governor Longmire and who also happens to have undergone quadruple bypass surgery just last week.”
“I remember reading something about the governor’s husband going in for surgery, but I don’t recall anything about his daughter’s death being drug-related.”
“There are still a few things that aren’t fit to print—if you have enough pull, that is,” Ross said. “The version of the daughter’s death that went out to the media was that she died of an accidental overdose. The custody hearing was conducted behind closed doors, and those documents are sealed. From what I’ve been able to learn so far, Josh has been living in the governor’s mansion since before the custody arrangement was finalized. Sounds like he’s got ‘issues.’
“Governor Longmire and her husband are giving the kid a roof over his head—a very nice roof, by the way; food to eat; clothing to wear; a cell phone; a computer. In return, he’s been giving them fits by ditching school, getting into fights, and sneaking out at night. That’s how the phone ended up in Governor Longmire’s possession this morning. The governor’s security detail saw him letting himself out, using the old rope-ladder trick to climb down from the upper stories. He managed to give them the slip, but they called in a report. Governor Longmire confiscated the rope ladder and was waiting for Josh when he came back to the house early this morning. As punishment, she confiscated his iPhone. Once she turned it on and saw the film, she called me.”
With noon approaching, several groups of people had come into the restaurant. For a time the hostess managed to keep our booth separated from other diners. As the place filled, however, that was no longer possible. Two people in the latest group of four nodded in Ross’s direction. He was an official with a statewide office and a reputation to go with it. Naturally people recognized him.
He removed the phone from his pocket and handed it to Mel. “You might want to put that in your purse,” he told her. Then, to both of us, he said, “No more names, by the way—aliases only when in public. Little Jack Horner is at school today, with one of Old Mother Hubbard’s bodyguards along as an enforcer.”
“Why school?” Mel asked. “Isn’t it summer vacation?”
“Summer school,” Ross said. “Supposedly making up classes he flunked. She’d like to see you about two o’clock.”
“In her office?”
“At home,” Ross said. “You know how to find it?”
“My GPS knows how to find it,” Mel said confidently.
“What about the kid’s computer?” I asked. “That might have a lot more information than his phone.”
Ross nodded. “So I understand,” he said. “I told Old Mother that you’d pick it up when you stop by this afternoon. For starters, I’d like you to take it to Todd and let him make a copy of whatever’s there.”
Todd was Todd Hatcher. He is an electronics wunderkind who also has a Ph.D. in economics. He had come to Ross Connors’s attention when he did a study on the high cost of geriatric prison care. Todd’s interest in the subject had grown out of his own experience. His father, a convicted bank robber in Arizona, had been sentenced to life in prison. When the father began exhibiting symptoms of Alzheimer’s, he was paroled to the care of his wife, a waitress, who exhausted her life savings and her life trying to care for her ailing husband. Todd’s doctoral committee at the University of Washington had dismissed Todd’s study out of hand. When Ross Connors heard about it, not only had he stepped in to rescue Todd’s Ph.D. aspirations, he had also taken Todd on as an occasional consultant whose computer hacking skills went beyond his publicly recognized skills as a forensic economist.
But there was also a subtle warning here for Mel and me. There are some pretty savvy computer experts working for the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. I couldn’t help but wonder why Connors was using a private consultant to examine Josh Deeson’s computer. Probably the same reason Mel and I were on the job.
“Search warrants?” Mel asked.
“Got ’em,” Ross said. He patted the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a packet of documents, which he handed over to Mel. “That covers Jack Horner’s computer, his iPhone, and his room. It’s Old Mother Hubbard’s house. She bought the computer with her credit card and she’s the one who pays for Little Jack Horner’s Internet connection. Legally, since she’s the one providing his room, she could voluntarily give us access to that and to his computer as well, but just in case the kid is actually involved in a homicide here, we’re better off with properly drawn warrants.”
“Works for me,” I said. “Warrants are always better than no warrants.”
“Does Grandfather Time know about any of this?” Mel asked, inventing a suitable alias for Gerard Willis on the spot.
“Not so far,” Ross replied. “There’s some concern that being given upsetting news right now might interfere with his recovery.”
Ross’s answer to that question went a long way to explain all the secrecy.
“And why us?” Mel asked. “Why Beau and me?”
“That’s easy. Old Mother Hubbard asked for Beau in particular,” Ross said, nodding in my direction. “She says the two of you go back a long way.”
Mel gave me a quizzical look.
“We were in high school together,” I said.
“Oh,” Mel responded cheerfully. “That certainly explains it.”
There are probably a lot of married men out there who instantly understood that when Mel said that, she meant the exact opposite—that what I had said explained nothing. We would need to have a much more detailed conversation on the subject, but the lack of privacy in the Red Lion coffee shop precluded my providing a detailed explanation of my connections to Governor Old Mother Hubbard.
“Exactly,” Ross said, missing the sarcasm entirely. “When she asked for J.P., I told her the two of you were a matched set—that you work well together.” He stopped long enough to glance at his watch, a doorknob-size Rolex. I could see the hands from across the table. It was half past noon.
“Are you hungry?” Ross asked. “Your appointment at her house is scheduled for two. If you’d like, there’s plenty of time to grab a sandwich before you go. It’s on me.”
That wasn’t entirely true. It wasn’t on him nearly as much as it was on his expense account, which meant the taxpayers were the ones paying the freight.
Mel pushed aside her coffee cup, stood up, and then collected her purse. “No, thank you,” she said. “After seeing what we saw on that phone, I seem to have lost my appetite.”
I stood up, too.
“Same goes for me,” I said. “We’ll give you a call when we find out more about this oddball collection of nursery rhymes.”
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