by J. A. Jance
“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.
It was like listening to one of those canned recordings that you can carry around in a museum to give yourself a guided tour. I’m sure the governor had conducted that kind of tour countless times. I had been to a charity auction or two where a guided tour of the mansion had been on the auction block. No doubt this was the first time two homicide investigators had been given the full meal deal tour treatment.
Clearly the house was more a public edifice than it was a private home. The framed oil paintings on the walls were official portraits of notable folks in Washington State’s history rather than anything that might have come from the governor’s own family. The oriental rugs in the hallways and on the stairs were no doubt expensive, but they were also worn. By the time we reached the top floor—Josh’s floor—they were downright shabby. Apparently the mansion renovation budget didn’t stretch all the way to the top floor. I also noticed that the wooden steps creaked noisily under our weight. That probably explained why Josh had found it necessary to use the emergency rope ladders to go in and out.
In the third-floor hallway, Marsha stopped in front of a closed door and pushed it open. Before stepping inside, Mel removed the search warrant from her purse. “Don’t you want to take a look at this?”
Governor Longmire shook her head. “Ross Connors’s office drew it up. I’m sure it’s in order.”
Her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket, glanced at it, and then put it back.
“You’re welcome to be here while we do the search.”
Marsha shook her head. “That was my husband on the phone. He needs some help. You’ll give me receipts for anything you take, including the computer, right?”
“Right,” Mel answered.
“Fine,” Marsha said. “No need for me to hang around then. I’d just be in the way.”
She left in what struck me as a big hurry. Yes, her husband was ill and yes, he maybe needed her, but there was a real urgency in the way Marsha almost sprinted back down the stairs.
Once she was gone, Mel handed me a pair of latex gloves and then pushed open the bedroom door. She stepped inside and I followed. The hallway outside the room had been totally impersonal. This was the opposite. Every inch of available wall space had been covered with drawings—both in pencil as well as in pen and ink—from a troubled kid who was suffering the agonies of the damned.
These were not pretty pictures. All of them unframed, they were stuck to the wall by tacks and Scotch tape that would no doubt damage the wall finish.
Mel and I studied the pictures in silence for some time, moving from one image to the next as though we were walking through an art gallery specializing in the art of the macabre. Several appeared to be devoted to various complicated implements that could have been instruments of torture used in the Spanish Inquisition. The instruments themselves were carefully rendered in every mechanical detail, but the faces of the suffering victims appeared to be chillingly modern. I suspected that if we examined Josh Deeson’s high school yearbook, some of those faces might be readily identifiable.
In the pictures there were people being savaged by medieval weapons—swords in some cases, or iron maces. Others were being mowed down in hails of bullets. In each of those, the spray of blood, created one dot at a time with pointillist precision, probably would have done a crime scene blood-spatter expert proud. There were gaping wounds. There was suffering. And for some odd reason, those bloody wounds were all the more chilling for having been artistically and painstakingly crafted in pen and ink.
Mel broke the long silence with a single word. “Whoa!” she said, reaching up to take down one of the drawings. “No wonder Marsha’s next call was to Ross Connors.”
I nodded in agreement and then added, “What do you want to bet that it’s been a long time since either the governor or the First Husband have set foot in this room?”
“Absolutely,” Mel agreed. “If they had, they might have blown the whistle on this budding Columbine kid a long time earlier than just today. First I’ll photograph and number these, then I’ll collect them,” she added. “You look at everything else.”
Mel carries a tiny digital camera in her purse for just this kind of occasion. She dredged it out of her purse, turned it on, and put it to use photographing all of Josh Deeson’s pictures in situ.
She had told me to handle everything else. At first glance, there didn’t appear to be a whole lot of “everything else.” There was a small flat-screen TV set on the dresser. When I switched it on, it came up on the Playboy Channel. That was pretty predictable. I switched it back off.
Lots of boys have mountains of sports stuff scattered around their rooms. Not this one. If Josh Deeson was interested in any wholesome sports, there was nothing here to prove it. A freestanding bookshelf stood next to the desk. It was mostly bare. There were no photos of any kind and no knickknacks, either. The second shelf down held only four books. One was a combination biography and collected works of Sylvia Plath. One was a history of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with a section of shiny pages that contained photographs of some of the equipment we had already seen depicted in Josh’s drawings on the wall. One was a biography of Kurt Cobain. One was a King James version of the Bible with the name “Elizabeth Desiree Willis” printed in gold on the leather-bound front cover.
I still have the Bible that was given to me in my early teens after I had gone through confirmation classes. It was imprinted with my name in gold leaf the same way this one was. Clearly the Bible had belonged to Josh Deeson’s mother, not that it had done her much good. It made me wonder if anyone had ever cared enough about Josh to point him in the direction of church attendance. If so, I doubted if anything he had learned there had taken root. Judging from the books he kept, Josh was twice as interested in suicide as he was in (a) the Spanish Inquisition or (b) his immortal soul; take your pick.
The room itself was neat and clean, spookily so. Emphatically so. I looked through all the dresser drawers, top to bottom. There were socks—carefully paired socks—in the sock drawer, folded briefs in another, folded undershirts in a third, and a selection of folded T-shirts in a fourth. I checked the bottoms of each drawer to see if anything was hidden there, but I found nothing.
For a teenager, Josh’s closet was atypical. All the clothing was carefully hung on hangers, with pants, slacks and even jeans at one end of the closet, while shirts, carefully divided into long sleeves and short sleeves, hung at the other end. There were several pairs of shoes—also neatly arranged—on the floor of the closet. There was a clothes hamper in one corner, half filled with dirty clothes. The only thing stored on the top shelf was an extra blanket.
As an adult, my son, Scott, gives every appearance of being neat and well organized, but I remember his stepfather, Dave Livingston, telling me how when Scott was fifteen his room was such a mess that Dave and Karen had found mushrooms growing in his closet. That was certainly not the case here. For a kid with very little parental involvement, I had the sense that the compulsive cleanliness of the room was Josh’s doing and nobody else’s.
It didn’t seem likely to me that a housekeeper working for the governor would have ventured all the way up here to the third floor to spend time in this unwanted child’s room doing cleaning. Any right-thinking housekeeper in the u
niverse would have taken one look at the disturbing subject matter in those pictures and freaked. Most likely she would have gone straight downstairs and ratted out Josh Deeson either to the governor or to the First Husband.
The old-fashioned en-suite bath was also scrupulously clean. His medicine cabinet contained a carefully arranged collection of toothpaste, men’s cologne, and deodorant; nail clippers, comb, brush, and a bottle of styling gel. The only visible medication there was a nearly empty prescription tube containing what was evidently a topical treatment for acne. But there was no dust on the glass shelves. There was no grime, and no film of dead toothpaste in the sink. No garbage in the trash can. To top it all off, the toilet seat was definitely down. That was the capper on the jug. Even if I’d never seen the pictures on the wall, I would have said from studying the bedroom and its attached bath that Josh Deeson wasn’t normal—not at all.
When I came back out of the bathroom, Mel was finished with the photos and had started removing the artwork. Where they had once been I could see tracks of tape and tacks. Once Josh moved out of this room it would have to be spackled, sanded, and painted, floor to ceiling.
“Anything?” Mel asked.
“Nothing. The whole room is neat as a pin.”
“Scary, isn’t it,” Mel said. And I had to agree.
The rope ladder had been fastened to the bed frame and headboard, and the bed had then been pushed up against the window. I disconnected the rope ladder from the bed and dropped it into my evidence box. If we ever had an actual crime scene, distinctive fibers from that ladder or the one on the second-floor balcony might very well be important.
I put the rope in the Bankers Box I had brought up from the car to use in gathering evidence. Then I looked at the bed. It wasn’t made, but I guessed that was an unusual occurrence. What appeared to be a bedspread was neatly folded on the floor. I wanted to look under the bed, so I picked up the mattress and box spring and peered down at the floor through the bed frame. Nothing. Not even a respectable collection of dust bunnies on the hardwood floor underneath.
Then, as I was putting the mattress and box spring back in place, I happened to think to look between them. What I saw hidden there was enough to make me feel sick at heart. It was a scarf, a blue silk scarf I was pretty sure I had seen before—wrapped around the throat of an unidentified dying girl in an iPhone video.
“Uh-oh,” I said, leaving the mattress crooked enough that the scarf still showed. “Bad news. You’d better bring that camera over here.”
Mel turned away from the wall. “What?” she asked.
“Come take a look.”
Mel retrieved her camera and came over to where I was standing. As soon as she saw the scarf she raised the camera and began photographing the bed.
“Give me your keys,” I said.
“Why?”
“By the time we pack up the computer and the artwork, we’re going to need that spare evidence box you’ve been carrying around in the back of the Cayman.”
I managed to limp down the two flights of stairs, but on my way back up, my knees were screaming at me. When I finally reached the top floor, I had broken out in a cold sweat. I paused in the hallway outside Josh’s bedroom door long enough to wipe the moisture off my forehead with the sleeve of my jacket. I had told Dr. Bliss about how bad my knees were, but somehow I hadn’t mentioned it to Mel.
Back in the room I discovered that Mel had finished taking pictures of the scarf and had returned to collecting the drawings. I began dismantling Josh’s computer system—a PC laptop and a tiny printer—into the Bankers Box I had dragged up from the car. Each time I added an item to the box I noted it on the evidence inventory form waiting there. Once I tore the two-page form apart, I’d have an original as well as a copy.
One at a time, I went through every drawer—every exceptionally neat drawer—in the desk. I expected to find some kind of camera or video equipment there, but I didn’t.
We were almost finished when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Mel and I both turned to the door, expecting to have our first glimpse of Josh Deeson. Instead, Marsha Longmire stood in the doorway. She looked at the scarred and empty walls and shook her head.
“I wanted to let you know that class is getting out. He’ll be here soon,” she said.
I walked over to where she was standing. “Until this morning, you had no idea, did you?”
She shook her head. “None at all.”
I took her arm and led her over to the desk where the Bankers Box was still sitting open. “You need to prepare yourself,” I warned. “This is bad.”
I reached into the box and pulled out the clear bag in which we had placed the now-folded scarf. Worried about preserving trace evidence, we had handled it as little as possible. Through the plastic it was apparent that the bag contained a swatch of material of some kind—light blue material. Marsha knew what it was without a moment’s hesitation.
She gasped and sank almost to the floor and knelt there with her face buried in her hands. “It’s the scarf,” she murmured. “It’s the damned scarf!”
I reached out to help her up, but she waved aside my hand and rose from her kneeling position without any help from me. Preoccupied with Marsha, neither of us heard the sound of other feet on the stairs or on the worn rug in the hallway.
“Who are you and what are you doing in my room?” Josh Deeson demanded from the doorway. “And what have you done with my artwork? Those pictures are mine. Give them back.”
He was a tall, scrawny, blond blue-eyed kid with spiked hair and a terminal case of acne. He looked more like a geek than a Goth. No black clothing. No visible piercings. His pants—ordinary jeans—were belted around his waist, not worn gangbanger style, riding down somewhere near the bottom of the butt. He wasn’t wearing an oversize hoodie or sweatshirt as some kids do regardless of the weather. He wore a light blue short-sleeved buttoned shirt; ready-made and most likely from somewhere like Nordy’s. It was exactly the kind of shirt I had always lusted after back when my mother was making mine.
He wore no jewelry of any kind, including that Seiko his grandfather had given him.
With his hands outstretched, he lunged toward Mel, probably intent on grabbing the artwork out of her hand. I leaped forward and cut him off.
“We’re police officers,” I told him. “We have a search warrant.”
Bristling with anger, he stopped a foot or so away from me and gave me a cold stare. He was tall enough that he nearly looked me in the eye. For a moment he glanced around the room, looking first at the bed with its displaced mattress and then at the desk.
“Where’s my computer?” he wanted to know. “Where’s my printer?”
“They’re in an evidence box,” I explained. “You’ll have a receipt for everything we take with us. As I said, we have a search warrant as well as your grandmother’s permission. That document applies to your room here as well as to both your computer and your cell phone.”
“She’s not my grandmother!” Josh Deeson said. He spat out the words with enough venom that it was instantly clear there was no love lost between him and the governor, not in either direction.
Marsha seemed to have recovered her equilibrium. “These are police officers, Josh. They’re investigating a homicide. You need to let them continue searching your room. Come downstairs with me. I’ll call an attorney.”
“I’m not going downstairs,” Josh declared. “And I don’t need an attorney.”
“Yes, you do,” Marsha insisted. “You can’t stay in the same room with these people, Josh. You mustn’t talk to them.”
“Sure,” Josh said. “Like I can’t talk to them without an attorney present, the way they say on TV. Give me a break.”
I waited to see if he would crack and do as he was told. If he played to type, I knew for sure his teenage resentment and arrogance would work against him just as it would work in our favor. For the space of almost a minute no one moved in the room and no one spoke.
; Marsha was the one who finally broke the long silence. “Are you coming or not?”
“Not,” he said.
“Very well,” she said. “I’m going to have to go tell your grandfather what’s going on.”
“Right,” Josh said. “Go ahead. Tell him. What’s he going to do about it? Come dragging his sorry ass all the way up here in his wheelchair? Like that’s gonna happen!”
“Josh,” Marsha said, “I order you—”
“You can’t give me orders. I don’t work for you.” He sneered. “I’m not one of your so-called civil servants. I don’t have to jump just because Governor Longmire tells me to.”
Ever since Josh entered the room, Marsha had been holding the evidence bag with the scarf in it. Tightening her lips and handing me the bag, she started to say something, then stopped. When she did speak it was with the forced calmness of someone who has carefully stifled a sharp remark.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “This is a homicide investigation. Whatever you say can be used against you.”
“I get it,” Josh replied, mocking her. “One of those Miranda warnings. Big deal.”
“All right,” Marsha said. “Suit yourself.”
Closing the door with what I considered to be remarkable restraint, she left the room.
“She’s right, you know,” I told Josh. “You probably shouldn’t talk to us.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “That witch doesn’t give a damn about me. I’ll talk to you if I want to.”
There are times in this business when teenage rebellion and bravado can be very good things. Apparently this was one of those times.
If Josh Deeson chose to be stupid rather than smart, it was his problem, not ours.