by J. A. Jance
“You’re not leaving,” Marsha said firmly. “Neither one of you is leaving.”
There were steps on the stairs—heavy steps—that were definitely not Zoe’s.
Garvin McCarthy poked his head around the end of the archway. “You shouldn’t be talking to these people,” he said curtly, addressing the governor. “You shouldn’t, and neither should your husband.”
I didn’t like it that he spoke about the First Husband rather than to the First Husband when Gerry Willis was right there in the room. Subtract two points from Mr. McCarthy, although, being a criminal defense lawyer, in my book he was already in negative territory to begin with.
“Call me at the office,” McCarthy added. “Or on my cell. You have them both.”
Marsha nodded.
“Don’t bother showing me out,” he added gruffly. “I know the way.”
“He’s an arrogant bastard, but he’s also the best money can buy,” Marsha said, turning to Gerry. “He’ll do what needs to be done.”
This time Gerry was the one who nodded. For the first time, he looked ill. His skin color had faded. Obviously Marsha was right and this was too much for him.
“I think I need to go back to bed for a while,” he said.
Marsha jumped to her feet. “Are you okay? Should I call the doctor?”
“No,” he said. “Don’t call the doctor, and you don’t need to come with me. I just need to lie down for a while. I believe I overdid it.”
He rolled himself out of the room while Marsha subsided onto her chair. She waited until Gerry was out of earshot, then she turned to Mel and me.
“Just you wait,” she said. “If this kills him, I’ll strangle that little shit with my own two hands, and you may quote me on that.”
Chapter 7
Before leaving the governor’s mansion, we each gave Marsha Longmire our business cards loaded with the full collection of contact information. She looked at the cards and nodded. “I’ll be keeping a very close eye on Josh,” she said. “He won’t be going anywhere or doing anything without my knowing about it.”
What was it my mother used to say? Something about locking the barn door after the horse was already gone. I decided against passing that bit of folk wisdom along to the governor.
“Good idea,” I said.
Once outside, I loaded the evidence boxes into the backseat of Mel’s Cayman. “Next stop Todd Hatcher?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Do you have an address?”
“I’ll call Ross’s office and get it.”
While we had been in the governor’s mansion, we’d had our phones turned off. Two of the missed calls on my phone were from Katie Dunn, Ross’s secretary. One of the missed calls on Mel’s phone was also from there.
“You wanted to talk to us?” I said when Katie came on the phone.
“Mr. Connors would like to see you both,” she said. “He’s in a meeting right now and has another one early this evening. He was wondering if you’d mind stopping by his house later this evening, sometime around eight.”
“We’ll be there,” I said. “Meantime, we need the physical address for Todd Hatcher. I know where he used to live, but I understand he’s moved.”
Katie gave me the necessary information, a rural address outside Oakville, half an hour away. I relayed the message and the information to Mel. While she set off in what constitutes rush-hour traffic in Olympia to get us there, I sat back to enjoy the ride. When Mel is making like a Formula One driver behind the wheel, I often find it helpful to think about other things. In this case, I thought about Todd Hatcher.
Call me a hopeless romantic. I love happy endings, or, rather, happy beginnings.
Todd Hatcher is a very smart guy with a Ph.D. in economics, a couple of books to his credit, and a natural flair for computers. In the olden days, he might have been a prospector out wandering in the wilderness during the California gold rush. These days he’s a geek who specializes in data mining. As I understand it, that’s what his latest book is all about—data mining for fun and profit.
But Todd is a most unlikely-looking geek, not at all the buttoned-down type. He wears cowboy boots and cowboy hats—not the rhinestone-cowboy variety, but the scuzzy down-at-the-heels boots that have seen years of wear in all kinds of terrain and all kinds of weather. He’s tall, skinny, and bowlegged from too many hours in the saddle. That’s how he supported himself through college—working as a ranch hand in southeastern Arizona.
When I first met Todd several years ago, it took some time for me to realize that Ross Connors had stumbled on a diamond in the rough. Back then, Todd was barely making ends meet. He lived in a studio apartment, got where he needed to go by using a bus pass, and existed on a diet that consisted mostly of Top Ramen noodles. He was a kid from a small town in the desert stranded in the big-city wet of western Washington where it really does rain, even though tourists who come through the state in the summer are convinced that it never does.
The work Todd did and still does for Ross Connors helped put him on a more stable financial footing. Getting his doctorate and having his first book published didn’t hurt. Both of those professional accomplishments led to his doing consulting work for other states. Within a matter of months his life had turned around: he was still living in western Washington and it was still raining, but instead of using a bus pass to get around, he was driving a new dual-cab Ford pickup truck. To ward off a bad case of homesickness he started following the local rodeo circuit, sometimes participating, sometimes as a spectator.
That was what had taken him to the Kitsap County Fairgrounds out on the Kitsap Peninsula the previous summer. Each year during the Kitsap County Fair and Rodeo, one of the rodeo’s evening performances benefits the breast cancer foundation Susan G. Komen for the Cure. At that performance, everyone is supposed to wear pink, and a local organization donates money to the foundation for everyone who wears pink and wins one of that night’s events.
As Todd told me shortly afterward, “It takes balls for a cowboy to wear pink.”
On the evening in question, he had screwed his courage to the sticking place, dressed himself in a brand-new pink Western shirt, and showed up. Sometimes the fates are with you and that’s all you have to do—just show up. Sometime during the rodeo he was introduced to Julie Dodge, who was the winner of the evening’s barrel-racing contest and who was also wearing pink.
As a fund-raiser at the rodeo, people are able to show their support by purchasing pink balloons that are released all at once in a moving ceremony at the end of the evening’s performance. When it came time to let go of his balloon, Todd Hatcher found himself standing next to Julie Dodge, and the rest is history.
It turned out to be a match made in heaven. Julie had inherited her father’s horse farm, where her divorced father had raised her along with plenty of prizewinning quarter horses. She had grown up helping him run the farm. After his death, she ran it solo, hiring help only as needed. It was also after her father’s death that she managed to reconnect with her mother. Julie’s mom had bailed when she discovered she wasn’t cut out for ranch life or motherhood. She died of breast cancer only a few months after being reconciled with her daughter.
I think standing there side by side, holding those stupid pink balloons, caught Todd and Julie with their customary defenses down. Todd had been through a lot with his own parents’ stormy relationship. He and Julie let go of their pink balloons, went to the nearest Denny’s, and spent the rest of the night, well into the wee hours, talking. They got married a few short weeks later—saying their vows before a justice of the peace in Gray’s Harbor County with the two of them dressed in boots, jeans, and matching pink cowboy shirts. At the ceremony, Ross Connors stood up for Todd. Julie’s best friend from high school stood up for her. Mel and I were invited along to serve as witnesses.
So now Ross’s consultant-in-chief lives on his wife’s horse farm out in the boonies, where he has a top-of-the-line Internet connection and
plenty of real manure to shovel whenever he gets tired of shoveling the politically motivated, man-made, virtual variety. From the looks of it, he and Julie are partners in every sense of the word.
It was five-thirty in the afternoon when we pulled up in front of a picturesque farmhouse set back several hundred feet from the banks of the Black River. The house, boasting a relatively recent coat of white paint, looked as though it had been plucked off a farm in Iowa or else from a movie set and dropped unscathed in the wilds of western Washington. The barn, gleaming with an equally new coat of bright red paint, could have come from the same source.
Todd emerged through the screen door on the front porch and then bounded down the steps to meet us. He was in his favorite duds—worn jeans, worn boots, worn shirt. He waved and greeted us with a lopsided welcoming grin.
“Come on in,” he said, grabbing Mel’s hand and half dragging her out of the driver’s seat of the Cayman. “Julie’s inside making supper. She’s dying to see you.”
Supper, I noted, not dinner.
“It’s a pork roast, homemade applesauce, and early corn fresh from the garden, picked just this afternoon. We’ve got plenty. She said to tell you she’s already put extra plates on the table and you are not allowed to say no.”
I got the feeling from being around Julie Hatcher that she didn’t believe in anyone telling her no, which probably also explained why she and Todd were married. Besides, my single half of one of Governor Longmire’s tuna sandwiches was long gone. I have to admit that the idea of eating a real home-cooked meal had a lot of appeal.
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“What have you got?” he asked.
Mel stepped out of the car, opened the door, and showed him the evidence box with the computer in it. “Here it is,” she said. “Help yourself.”
He picked up the box, hefted it, rattling, onto his shoulder, and led the way into the house.
I have been in farmhouses occasionally in my life, and some of those occasions have been during summer months—hot summer months. So make that miserably hot farmhouses. As I walked across the front porch, I was happy to note that on a concrete pad beside the porch sat a huge Trane AC unit quietly humming away. Julie and Todd’s house was not going to be miserable. In fact, once we got inside, compared to the summer heat outside, it was practically chilly.
Todd led us through both the living room and dining room and into a spacious country kitchen, where a round oak table held four place settings. Julie, smiling in greeting, was carrying a platter full of corn on the cob to the table. The pork roast was already there.
“Everything you see here is homegrown,” Todd said proudly. “The corn is from our garden. Even the peaches in the cobbler for dessert come from our own fruit trees—last year’s crop. Not the pork, though. That comes from a guy who raises pigs down in Lewis County.”
“A friend of my dad’s,” Julie explained. “And we buy sides of beef from a guy in Toledo.”
I know enough about Washington geography to understand she didn’t mean Toledo, Ohio. Mel was smart enough not to ask.
The pitcher of iced tea on the table was fruit-flavored and presweetened, which was fine with me. Mel drank hers without complaint, and we both dug into the food, which was utterly delicious. All during dinner we chatted about this and that, making sure we made no reference to the purpose of our visit in front of Julie. If Todd saw fit to confide in her after we left, that was his business, but Mel and I didn’t mention it.
Finally, when Julie got up to clear away plates and serve the peach cobbler, she looked at Todd and said, “Well, are you going to tell them or am I?”
“We’re expecting,” Todd announced with a proud but sheepish grin. “We confirmed it just this week. She’s almost two months along.”
Mel and I both offered enthusiastic congratulations, although mine were tempered by thinking about Gerard Willis’s rocky venture into fatherhood, not to mention my own. That’s the thing with having kids. You can never tell what’s going to happen or how they’ll turn out.
The peach cobbler arrived still warm from the oven and topped with a generous dollop of store-bought vanilla ice cream. I did my best not to clean my dessert plate, but I didn’t succeed. Once dessert was over, Julie shooed all of us out of the kitchen so we could work while she cleaned up.
“Okay,” Todd said. “What have we got?”
He led us to a room that, in another era, had probably once been the farmhouse’s master bedroom. Now it was a fully functional office space, complete with multiple computers, copiers, printers, and scanners. On the way to the office I picked up the Bankers Box containing Josh Deeson’s electronics equipment. Once in the office, I set the box down on Todd’s desk. Without a word of consultation, we donned latex gloves. We all knew that the less the computer and phone were handled, the better. We also understood that we needed to access the information from the devices as soon as possible. I was worried that Garvin McCarthy would make some effort to erase the contents of both the phone and the computer remotely before anyone else had a chance to see what was there.
Todd directed Mel and me to chairs. Then, whistling under his breath, he set about examining everything we had brought along. “Great,” he said. “I’ve got a power supply for this right here.” Moments later he busied himself copying the laptop’s hard drive as well as the information on Josh Deeson’s phone.
“Once I have the information off the computer, I’ll be able to analyze it,” Todd said as he waited for the hard drive to finish copying. “Before I can do that, though, I need to know what I’m looking for and what you’re hoping I’ll be able to find.”
“One of the last files sent to this phone is the video of what appears to be a snuff film, the murder of a juvenile female,” Mel told him. “Are you okay with that?”
Todd gave her a bemused look, but then he nodded. “I guess,” he said. “I’ve never seen a snuff film, but I’ve butchered cattle, if that’s what you mean.”
“All right then,” Mel said. “We need to know who sent that video and when. We also need to try to isolate the girl’s face in a benign enough manner that we can use the image in an attempt to locate her next of kin. We may also be able to match the photo with an unsolved missing persons case.”
“Of course,” Todd said. “You can’t very well go around showing copies of the original video to the victim’s possible relatives.”
“When you look at the film,” Mel continued, “you’ll see that the murder weapon is most likely a scarf, a blue silk scarf. We believe we now have the scarf in our possession, and we’ll be taking that to the crime lab in hopes of finding DNA evidence.”
Looking at the cell phone, Todd frowned. “You do understand that, for any of this to be legal, I need a search warrant.”
Without a word, Mel reached into her purse, pulled out the search warrant, and handed it over. “And now you have one,” she said. “Ross expects you to follow up on all of Josh Deeson’s text and e-mail messages—who they came from and where and when they went. Working with phone company records and cell phone towers, we’re hoping you’ll be able to triangulate and tell us where Josh Deeson was physically when he sent and received those text messages.”
“Josh Deeson being the suspect,” Todd confirmed.
“Yes.”
“But why us?” Todd asked. “Why bring all of this stuff to an outside consultant and not to the Washington State Crime Lab? They’ve got plenty of computer-savvy folks there.”
“Yes, they do,” I told him. “And plenty of potential media leaks, too. Ross wants to be as far ahead of the game as possible before any of this hits the media.”
“How come?” Todd asked.
“Because Josh’s grandfather and guardian is a man named Gerard Willis—Gerry Willis—who happens to be married to Marsha Longmire, who is Josh’s other guardian.”
Todd’s eyes widened. “You mean Governor Longmire?”
“One and the same,” I told him.
>
“Okay,” Todd said. “I get it, and I’ll get right on it. I’ll work on extracting the photo first. I’ll let you know first thing in the morning if I’ve made any progress.”
“Great,” I said. “Ross says to bill it at your usual rate.”
We sat and watched for some time while Todd made his copies. By the time I glanced surreptitiously at my watch, it was almost seven-thirty. From here it would take us a good half hour to get back to Ross Connors’s place in Olympia. If we didn’t get under way soon, we were going to be late for our meeting with him.
“Sorry to eat and run,” I said. “But we need to go.”
Todd nodded. “And from the sound of things, I need to go to work.”
We gathered up the computer and the iPhone and returned them to the Bankers Box. In the interim Julie had finished cleaning the kitchen. We found her sitting in the living room, curled into a comfortable ball on a big easy chair, thumbing through a glossy magazine called Your Baby and You. We thanked her for the wonderful dinner, then Todd carried the evidence box back out to the car and loaded it for us.
“Stay in touch,” Mel called as we headed out.
Todd nodded and waved, but I could tell from the preoccupied look on his face he was already busy, mentally turning the problems at hand over in his head.
In Washington in June, the sun doesn’t set completely until around ten at night. Once we turned east on U.S. Highway 12, the sun was still fairly high in the sky. We were happy to have the sun to our backs, although it was probably blinding to the traffic coming toward us.
“Todd and Julie will make great parents,” Mel said. “And that farm! What a wonderful place to raise kids.”
“I hope so,” I said.