by J. A. Jance
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.”
Chapter 3
Mel and I did not go straight out to the parking lot. Without exchanging a word but by mutual agreement we turned left, got on the elevator, and rode up to our room. It wasn’t until the door clicked closed that she asked the question I knew was coming.
“How come I had no idea you knew Governor Longmire?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” I said. “And I still don’t.”
“But Ross just said. .”
“I knew her in high school, Mel,” I said. “High school! Do you have any idea how long ago that is? Back then she was Marsha Gray. She was one of the cool kids. I was not. In fact, back in those days, she didn’t see fit to give me the time of day. And believe me, other than seeing the woman on the news occasionally, I haven’t seen her since, either.”
“So you didn’t like date or anything?” Mel asked.
“No,” I said gruffly. “Not at all!”
Some people recall their high school experiences through an idyllic haze that makes them seem like heaven itself. Not me. Grade school and high school were hell. My mother certainly wasn’t the only single mother in the world back then. In the aftermath of World War II, there were plenty of war widows raising kids alone. The problem was, my mother wasn’t a widow since she and my father never married in the first place. He was a sailor stationed at Bremerton. They had just gotten engaged when he died in a motorcycle accident on his way back to the base. My mother was pregnant. Her parents were horrified. Her father kicked her out and wouldn’t have anything to do with us.
I never knew my father’s real name. My mother told me that my last name came from my father’s hometown, Beaumont, Texas. I have no idea if she ever made any attempt to contact my father’s people. Maybe she did, and maybe given the time and the circumstances, they didn’t want to have anything to do with us, either.
I had told Mel that story, and she had asked me why, after my mother’s death, I had made no effort to contact them on my own. Mutual disinterest, I suppose. Besides, I couldn’t shake the feeling that any attempt on my part to contact them would have been disloyal to my mother’s memory. She had fed us and sheltered us with money she earned working as a seamstress. But her sewing was also part of what made my childhood and adolescence difficult. She made most of my shirts, and that embarrassed the hell out of me. I wanted to look like the other kids-the cool kids-the ones with shirts from JCPenney’s or Sears or even Frederick amp; Nelson.
Whenever I think about my mother, I can’t help but be ashamed by how I felt back then. And that’s the other reason I’ve never gone looking for my father’s relatives. My father wasn’t there for me. My father’s family wasn’t there for me, either. My mother was. I figure I owe her that much loyalty and respect.
I didn’t give Mel the benefit of any of that background information, at least not right then.
I said, “When we were in high school, as far as Marsha and her pals were concerned, I was a joke-a laughingstock.”
“So why did she ask for you now?”
“No idea,” I said. “None. In fact, if you get a chance, why don’t you ask her?”
While we spoke, Mel had booted up her computer. She sent a copy of the video clip to her iPhone and a second copy of the file to her laptop.
“Ready to watch it again?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “We’d better.”
It’s one thing to go to a crime scene after the fact. You view the body. You examine the surroundings. You look for clues. Although this wasn’t the first snuff film I had ever seen, this was certainly the youngest victim.
I’m not sure who first coined the expression “choking game” to apply to this monstrosity. Probably the same kind of language experts who invented the words “suicide by cop.” Right. That cleans it up. Makes what happens a little more presentable. But, as I said before, this was no game-a game would have ended before the girl was dead. This was straight-up strangulation and cold-blooded murder. The fact that the victim seemed to be a willing participant to begin with made it that much worse. And the fact that the killers had come prepared to film the event made it despicable.
But Mel and I needed to watch it, and we did so, several times, before leaving for the governor’s mansion forty-five minutes later. We watched the girl’s tentative last smile. We watched for anything about her clothing that might be distinctive. She seemed to be wearing a red sleeveless tank top of some kind. As she lurched to her feet, late in the assault, we caught a glimpse of what might have been lettering on the shirt-a logo of some kind-before the camera refocused on her face.
The scarf was blue and made of some kind of gauzy material-a scarf made for decoration rather than warmth. We studied the hands on the ends of the scarf. They were clearly not a pair. They were different skin tones, one whiter and one much darker, but not black. Hispanic, maybe? And one of them was definitely wearing a ring of some kind and the other one was wearing a watch. I knew that a careful computer-aided analysis of the frames containing the ring and the watch might provide important clues in identifying our suspects. First, though, we needed to identify our victim. In order to do that, we would need some pre-strangulation “still” photographs that we could send out to both the media and to other agencies.
I glanced at my own watch. “It’s time,” I said. “Let’s go see Old Mother Hubbard.”
Mel was right. The GPS knew exactly how to get to the governor’s mansion. Lush greenery and immaculately maintained lawns surrounded the stately three-story brick house. With dormers across the top and a spacious balcony opening off the second level, it might have been designed by some of the same people who built the mansions in the Highlands, an upscale development north of Seattle and home to some of the city’s most prosperous founding fathers.
As I recalled my Washington State history, the guy who should have been the first person to occupy the Olympia governor’s mansion ended up taking sick and dying elsewhere without ever living there. The mansion had fallen on hard times and had been renovated sometime back in the 1970s or ’80s. And I seemed to remember their having a recent problem with rats-the four-legged variety, although I imagine plenty of two-legged ones had prowled the premises on occasion, Josh Deeson being a current candidate for Chief Rat-in-Residence.
Mel is a relative newcomer to the Evergreen State. On our way to the governor’s mansion I filled in the empty airtime by giving Mel as much background as I could on both the building itself and some of the governors who had inhabited it. This recitation of trivia served two purposes. It kept Mel from asking me more questions about our current governor. It also kept me from jabbering about her, but I realized it was only a stopgap measure. I might have stifled Mel Soames’s questions for the time being, but they wouldn’t be stopped forever.
We parked out front and walked up to the porch together. We showed our IDs to the uniformed Washington State Patrol officer standing next to the door. He nodded us past, and Mel rang the bell. I expected a maid of some kind would answer the door. Instead, the governor herself stood there. She was dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a purple-and-gold U-Dub sweatshirt. She looked tired and careworn, not at all like her public persona.
Without acknowledging Mel’s presence, Marsha Gray Longmire focused all of her attention on me. “Beau?” the governor asked. “Is it really you?”
I nodded. “Yup,” I said. “At your service.”
She seemed to recognize me on sight, although I couldn’t imagine that I still resembled the callow youth I had been in high school. And I saw no sign of the scrawny girl formerly known as Marsha Gray in this formidable but clearly troubled woman.
With a small moan, Marsha Longmire muscled her way around Mel and fell weeping on my shoulder.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said in a rush. “I’m so glad you’re here. I cou
ldn’t bear to talk about this with a complete stranger.”
Mel gave me a searching look-one that said, “So what am I, chopped liver?”
Before Mel had a chance to say anything, however, the governor seemed to get a grip. Taking a deep breath, she squared her shoulders, pulled away from me, and turned to Mel.
“Please forgive that outburst,” she said, managing to put her public mask on over her private hurt. “You must be Agent Soames. Ross told me about you. Do come in, but if you don’t mind, I’ll visit with you in my study rather than taking you into the living room. It’s more private in there.”
I understood what the word “private” meant in that instance. There was a convalescing patient somewhere in the house, and Marsha Longmire didn’t want her husband to overhear a word of what we’d be discussing.
After the heat outside, the interior of the house was comfortably cool. Marsha took us into a small office that was just to the left of the front door. Two walls were full of tall bookshelves, loaded with what appeared to be leather-bound volumes-a decorator statement, most likely, rather than books that had ever been read. There was a magnificent but apparently little-used desk at the base of one wall of shelves. There was a seating area in front of the desk made up of four worn leather chairs around a coffee table. Depending on the season, the focus of the seating area could be either a gracious window that overlooked the front of the manicured grounds or a gas-log fireplace on the opposite wall. Currently the window was in vogue.
Marsha directed us to the seating area. Before taking a seat herself, she plucked a box of tissues from the corner of the desk and placed it on the coffee table in front of her.
“Have you seen it?” she asked.
Mel and I didn’t have to ask what “it” meant. We both knew.
“Yes,” I said. “We’ve both watched the clip several times.”
Marsha Longmire’s eyes looked haunted. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “At first I thought it was just a game, but it’s not. It wasn’t.”
“No, ma’am,” Mel agreed. “It wasn’t a game.”
“And the girl is really dead?”
“So it would appear,” Mel replied. “We can’t be certain, of course.”
Tears welled up again. Marsha took a ragged breath. “She had such a nice smile. I’m going to be seeing that smile in nightmares for the rest of my life. You have to find out who did this, even if. .” She stopped cold because she was thinking the unthinkable-that somehow one of the hands pulling the deadly scarf tight around an unsuspecting little girl’s neck belonged to her husband’s beloved grandson.
Marsha seemed to focus on Mel now rather than on me. “How do you do it?” Marsha asked. “How can you stand to deal with all those dead people?”
“Someone has to,” Mel answered. “Someone has to look out for the victims. Sometimes we’re all they have.”
Marsha nodded. “That’s what Ross said, too, but I can’t believe that Josh would be involved in something like this. The idea that he’d even have the image-” She broke off and then shivered. “It’s chilling. I can’t take it in. But if he wasn’t involved somehow, why would someone send it to him?”
There’s a time for brusque questions, and there’s a time for gentle conversation. This was the latter, and Mel is better at doing that than anyone I know.
“First off, Madam Governor-” she began.
“Please, call me Marsha,” the governor interrupted. “I’m not feeling very much like a governor today.”
“First off, Marsha,” Mel began again, “there’s no way to tell how old the film is. We may discover that it’s something that has been out there on the Internet for a long time.”
“You mean like on YouTube or something? Do they have sites like that?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Mel answered. “Lots of them. More than you can imagine.”
“So maybe it didn’t happen here-in Washington, I mean,” she said.
That was a bit of light in a very dark tunnel. Marsha Longmire grabbed at that straw for all it was worth.
“That’s what we’ll hope,” Mel said. “What time does your grandson come home from school?”
“My husband’s grandson,” Marsha said.
Marsha had obviously been shocked and shaken by what she had seen on the iPhone, and she was suffering because of it. Up to that moment, the one when she deftly distanced herself from her grandson, I had let myself be carried along by a wave of sympathy for her. Just then, though, I caught a glimpse of the teenager who, along with her fat-cat pals, had found it so easy to torment a gawky poor kid from downtown Ballard who had the unmitigated nerve to inhabit the same universe. And behind the gleeful expression on the mocking teenager’s face from long ago and the pained one on this woman’s face, I could see Marsha Longmire for what she was-a tough-minded politician. Josh Deeson might live in her home, but if he was involved in some kind of sordid mess that might dim Governor Longmire’s chances for reelection, the kid was about to be thrown under the bus.
As they say, blood is thicker than water, and Josh’s connection to Marsha Longmire had apparently just turned into H2O. I wondered if he would have been treated the same way if he were an actual blood relation. In fact, given the public scandal that was bound to ensue, I wasn’t so sure Gerard Willis, the First Husband himself, would manage to make the cut.
Strike one for Governor Longmire. In her book being a politician came first; wife and mother were a distant second.
When I turned back to the conversation at hand, I found that Mel had continued the interview without me.
“But you didn’t recognize the girl when you saw her.”
Governor Longmire shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
“And as far as you know, she’s not one of Josh’s friends or acquaintances.”
“Josh doesn’t have any friends,” Marsha said. “Or at least not many. That’s one of his problems.”
In my book, that constituted strike two for the governor. When you’re a friendless, parentless kid, you’re stuck in a cruel universe that is not of your own making. I had never met Josh Deeson, but I was already in his corner.
“Does Josh wear any jewelry, like a watch or a ring?” Mel asked.
“Josh has the Seiko watch Gerry gave him for eighth-grade graduation. At least I think he still has it. Although, now that you mention it, I don’t think he’s been wearing it much lately.”
Strike three. Governor Longmire was clearly far too important to notice what the kid she’s supposed to be looking after might be wearing. Believe me, I know teenagers can be annoying as hell. And I have some experience with being a less than exemplary parent, but I had also read about some of Marsha Longmire’s stump speeches where she waxed eloquent on a return to “traditional family values” and talked about how loving parenting was needed to bring at-risk kids back from the brink, as long as said at-risk kids weren’t part of her own extended family. How do you spell hypocrite?
Mel glanced at her watch and closed her notebook. “Since you’d like us to complete the search of Josh’s room before he gets home from school, we should probably get started. We won’t be disturbing your husband, will we?”
“No. Gerry is in a hospital bed in what used to be the maid’s quarters on this floor. Before the surgery, going up and down the stairs was just too much for him. Josh’s room is on the third floor.”
“I understand he was using ropes to get in and out?”
Marsha nodded. “Rope ladders, really,” she said. “This is an old building with old wiring and lots of wood. For safety’s sake we keep a rope ladder in each upstairs room to serve as emergency exits in case of fire. Josh used two of them-one to lower himself out his window and onto the balcony over the front portico. He used a second ladder to go from the balcony to the ground.
“One of the guys on my security detail called to report seeing someone exiting the building. Whoever it was managed to get away, but they were pretty sure it was Josh
. I went to his room to check. He was gone, but his window was open and the upstairs ladder was tied to the headboard of his bed. I told the security guys that I’d handle things from there, and I did. I left the ropes where they were. When Josh came scrambling back into his room a little after sunrise, guess who was lying in wait? He was quite surprised to see me.”
“I’ll bet he was,” I said. “Is that where Josh’s computer is, on his desk?”
She nodded. “I tried accessing it, but it’s password-protected now with his password instead of mine.”
Somehow I doubted a fifteen-year-old’s idea of an unbreakable password would be much of a barrier to a computer-savvy guy like Todd Hatcher.
“What about your husband?” Mel asked. “Might he know the password?”
“He might, but please don’t ask him. As I said, Gerry is ill. If I can be trusted to handle the governing of Washington State, I can certainly handle a recalcitrant fifteen-year-old. I told Josh that, because he broke curfew, he was losing all his privileges, including his cell phone and his computer. He knew I wasn’t bluffing, and he handed over the cell phone. The computer is up in his room. I made sure he didn’t delete anything before he left for school.”
“I’m assuming you didn’t mention anything to Mr. Willis about what you found on the phone.”
“Absolutely not,” she declared. “I saw no reason to upset him. It was bad enough that I was upset.”
Mel stood up and collected her purse. “Let’s go upstairs and execute that search warrant,” she said. “We don’t have much time.”
Chapter 4
Marsha Longmire led us through the house and up two sets of stairways, all the while giving us a running commentary about who the mansion’s builders were, how much it had cost to build it, how much it had cost to renovate, and how much it had cost to rehab the place after it had been allowed to deteriorate almost to the point of demolition.