Betrayal of Trust

by J. A. Jance

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  It took only a few minutes to drive from the Red Lion to what was left of Janie’s House. Contrast is everything. The restaurant had been quiet and verging on sedate. At Janie’s House, chaos reigned for several blocks in either direction on Seventeenth Avenue Southeast. As Ross had told Mel, the middle building in the three-house complex had burned to the ground. Sparks from that had ignited the roof on one of the other two buildings and had burned through the shingles and into the attic space. No doubt that one would have suffered both smoke and water damage. Only the charred back wall of the middle building was still standing when we arrived. Firemen swarmed around it, extinguishing hot spots.

  Our Special Homicide badges were enough to get us through the police barricades. Officers there told us that the fire chief in charge of the incident was Alan Mulholland. Dressed in full firefighting gear, he stood at the center of the action waving his arms and shouting out orders, while a frantic Meribeth Duncan, wearing sweats and with her orange-and-purple hair in sleep-tossed disarray, dogged his every step.

  “How is it possible that there’s this much damage when the fire department is just down the street?” she demanded. “Couldn’t you have done something sooner?”

  “Look, lady,” he said impatiently, “we were here less than four minutes after the call came in. You should have had hardwired smoke detectors in all the buildings. The one in the second building went off just fine when the roof caught fire,” he said, pointing toward the house next door.

  “All three buildings had the same kind of equipment,” Meribeth insisted. “We had to install smoke detectors in order to bring them up to code. We have state-of-the-art intrusion detectors as well.”

  “Then maybe you should have a chat with the installer,” Mulholland said. “This one didn’t work at all.”

  Mel took Meribeth by the arm and led her away, giving me a clear shot at Mulholland.

  “Is there a chance someone disabled the alarm?” I asked.

  “That’s a possibility, I suppose,” Mulholland began, then he stopped answering my questions, glared at me, and fired back one of his own. “Who the hell are you?”

  When I showed him my badge, he gave me an appraising look. “Special Homicide,” he mused. “That’s Ross Connors’s outfit, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “What are you doing here? I haven’t released any information about finding a body.”

  “Is there one?” I asked.

  My question was met with a sharp “No comment.”

  Which told me that there was a body, but I didn’t press him about it.

  “We’re here working another case,” I told him.

  “A case connected to what happened here?” he asked.

  “Could be,” I said.

  When someone starts a game of noncooperation, it’s always pleasant to return the favor.

  “So what are we talking about here,” I asked, “arson?”

  Mulholland gave me a long look. Then, because I seemed to have passed some kind of first-responder professional muster, he gave me a reasonable answer.

  “Looks good for arson, but we don’t know that for sure,” Mulholland said. “It’ll have to cool off before we can do any real investigating. It’s too soon to send in the accelerant-sniffing dogs, but I’d say, yes, my best guess is arson. And, yes, there’s at least one body in the rubble and maybe more. If it turns out that alarms and sprinkler systems were disabled, that would boost the likelihood of it being an inside job.”

  Mel came over and joined us at that point. “How tough is that to do?”

  Mulholland looked at her and then at me. “We’re together,” I said.

  “It might be tough, but for someone with a reasonable amount of tech savvy, it wouldn’t be impossible.”

  “Who called in the fire?” I asked.

  “Some guy out delivering newspapers on his morning route saw it first. The 911 call came in just after six A.M., but the fire had been burning for some time before that. It looks like the fire was started in one of the back rooms, so it wasn’t visible from the front until after it had a good burn going. My lieutenant over there has the delivery guy’s contact information. Other than the fire, he didn’t see anyone. At least that’s what he told us.”

  As Mel went to get the contact information, my phone rang. I hauled it out of my pocket. Caller ID said it was a restricted call. That usually means that the caller is a member of some political action committee bent on saving the whales or opposing abortion. How solicitors at both ends of the political spectrum ended up with my cell phone number on their lists is more than I can understand, and I didn’t make it easy for them. There was an unmistakable hint of frost in my voice when I answered.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Captain Hoyt, with the Washington State Patrol,” Joan Hoyt said. “Dr. Mowat just sent over the official copy of his autopsy report on Josh Deeson. It turns out there was one item in particular he failed to mention to me earlier.”

  “Anything we should know?” I asked.

  “Apparently Josh was sexually active,” Joan said, “and not in the boy-girl sense of the word, either. There’s no way to tell if it was consensual or not, but there’s evidence of a recent sexual encounter that included sodomy.”

  “What do you mean by ‘recent’?” I asked.

  “Within ten to twelve hours of his death,” Joan answered.

  “Is there enough for a DNA profile?”

  “Mowat says not, but you and I know that’s a load of crap. I know they can extract DNA profiles from tiny microscopic samples, but I also know DNA testing isn’t cheap. I think that’s the real reason Mowat is dragging his heels. For him it boils down to a budgetary issue. He doesn’t want to squander his resources on something that’s going to turn out to be a simple suicide. Don’t worry, though,” Joan added. “I may have figured out a way to bypass him on this. To do that, however, I’ll need your help.”

  “What kind of help?” I asked.

  “I seem to remember there were dirty clothes in the hamper in Josh Deeson’s room.”

  “Right,” I said. “I remember that, too.”

  “I want those clothes,” Joan declared. “The room is still designated as a crime scene, so I’m hoping his family members have stayed out of it. I considered sending an officer over to the governor’s mansion to collect any and all clothing from the hamper in his bedroom, but I’m not eager to have to explain why we’re asking for it. You seem to have a good rapport with the governor and her husband. Do you think you and Ms. Soames could handle it?”

  “Wait a minute. These people’s kid committed suicide and now we’re going to show up and drop the emotionally incendiary bomb that maybe he was gay, too?”

  “Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t,” Joan said. “But one thing I know for sure is that Josh Deeson was a juvenile. According to Washington State law, that would make anyone having a sexual encounter with him guilty of statutory rape. That also makes Josh Deeson a victim.”

  When I didn’t respond immediately, Joan went right on making her case.

  “Look,” she said. “We’ve got a bunch of kids here who have been involved in some pretty unsavory behavior. If you toss your ordinary sexual offender into the mix, who knows? We might get lucky and find some answers in the DNA database.”

  Unfortunately, that premise made sense to me. A lot of sexual predators use volunteer work as a cover for searching out and stalking potential victims. It was possible that knowing Josh could have been the victim of a sexual predator might help overcome some if not all of his guardians’ objections to handing over his soiled clothing.

  “All right,” I said, allowing myself to be convinced. “We can give it a try.”

  As I closed my phone I thought again about Josh’s haunting suicide note: “I can’t take it anymore.”

  Our initial assumption had been that “it” had something to do with the texting harassment he’d been subj
ected to. Now I wondered if being involved in a same-sex relationship might have proved to be more than he could handle. I remembered that some of the harassing text messages had taunted him about having homosexual tendencies. I had thought that was just teenage meanness and spite. Maybe, however, those comments had some truth to them. If so, that, too, might have fueled Josh’s self-loathing and despair.

  By then, Fire Chief Mulholland was busy with someone else. Without bothering to tell him good-bye, I went looking for Mel. I found her huddled with some homicide cops from Olympia PD who were making it blatantly clear that they weren’t pleased to have us on the scene.

  “So that’s all you’re going to tell us, that the attorney general asked you to stop by an arson fire here in Olympia?” the ranking detective asked. “That he just happened to know there might be a body here?”

  “Pretty much,” Mel replied, giving them one of her winning smiles. That managed to defuse the situation, but it didn’t make it go away entirely. Eventually the city cops would connect the dots and come nosing around the governor’s mansion. Before that happened, however, Mel and I wanted to have all our own dots connected.

  Not that I blamed the locals, Dr. Bonnie Epstein included, for being pissed. After all, when I was at Seattle PD, I hated having someone from another agency land in one of my own investigations. As I recalled those instances when someone else was the interloper, I couldn’t remember a single time when the willing sharing of information in either direction had been part of the program. Same thing here. We weren’t talking to them and they weren’t talking to us.

  “Come on,” I told Mel. “We’ve got to go.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “To pick up some laundry.”

  Which tweaked the locals that much more. “What laundry?”

  “Just some dirty clothes,” I said.

  We left the guys from Olympia PD staring at us in disgusted silence as we headed back to the car. On the way I explained the situation. Mel didn’t like the idea of having to broach such a touchy subject with Josh’s grieving family any more than I did.

  “What are we going to do,” she asked, “draw straws to see who’s stuck explaining this bad news to Gerry Willis and Governor Longmire?”

  Why was it, whenever there was bad news to deliver, we had to resort to pulling straws?

  We threaded our way back through the police barricades and found the Mercedes trapped in the middle of a crowd scene. There were kids everywhere, hanging on one another, weeping and wailing. At the closest intersection someone had set up a hand-lettered sign that said WE ♥ JANIE’S HOUSE. Around the base of it was a collection of flowers and a few teddy bears. I’m never sure why there have to be teddy bears at memorials like that, but there are. Always.

  We were almost to the car when Mel’s phone rang. I could tell from her part of the conversation that the call was from Rosemary Mellon in Seattle with a few more details from Rachel Camber’s autopsy. Mel was still on the phone when I caught my first glimpses of someone who had to be Giselle Longmire.

  DNA is funny that way. In the midst of that crowd of distraught teenagers, and sobbing hysterically like the rest of them, Gizzy was her mother’s daughter through and through. Slender, tanned, fit, and lovely, she had come to the scene in a pair of exceedingly short shorts, but she seemed genuinely dismayed by the fire’s devastation. While I watched, a tall young man wearing a tracksuit made his way through the crowd. When he reached Gizzy, she looked up at him gratefully and then fell against his chest, weeping uncontrollably and craving comfort, while the kid I assumed to be Ronald Darrington Miller gazed off over her head toward the firefighters still dealing with the aftermath of the blaze.

  It was an unguarded moment. Ron was standing in a crowd of people, all of whom seemed to be mesmerized by the chaos around them. He had no idea he was being observed. If he had known I was studying him, he might have managed to conceal the look of smug self-satisfaction that washed across his face. Everyone else seemed to be caught up in the emotions of the moment while Ron appeared to glide effortlessly above the fray. Then Gizzy looked up at him and said something to him. In that moment, his face was transformed. Before he replied, he donned a convincing expression of concern.

  Of all the people around, I’m pretty sure I was the only one who caught that sudden change. All the other kids gathered there really were shocked and dismayed. Ron Miller was playing at being shocked and dismayed. Big difference.

  The cloud cover overhead broke up briefly, illuminating the two of them—Giselle and Ron—in a shaft of sunlight. And that’s when I saw them for what they were: two of the beautiful people whose sense of perfection would have been offended by the very existence of someone less than perfect—namely an interloper like Josh.

  I remembered what Monica Longmire had said about Giselle resenting his being added to her family. It seemed reasonable enough to assume that someone with her intimate knowledge of Josh’s background could easily have provided fodder for all those taunting e-mails, while Ron’s connections to the Janie’s House computer and communications systems could have provided the delivery system. If that was the case, the two of them might not have been legally responsible for kicking the chair out from under Josh and his homemade noose, but they were morally responsible for putting him on that chair in the first place.

  As for the video clip? That seemed to be part of the general harassment program. Was it possible then that Giselle and Ron, in all their native superiority, were also responsible for that? Had they pretended to murder Rachel Camber and then found it necessary to kill her once the investigation started to get too close? Or had they done it just for kicks? And did they really believe they could murder someone and get away with it?

  The brief splash of sunlight went away, taking with it that single telling moment of clarity. I was left with something that was little more than an unfounded hunch. If I was going to follow up on it—if I was even considering investigating the possibility that one or both of the governor’s daughters might be involved in the harassment of Josh Deeson or in the death of Rachel Camber—I needed some evidence that was a hell of a lot more compelling than a bare-bones hunch. I was pretty sure that we were going to have DNA evidence to work with. What I wanted now was something to compare it with. Without probable cause we wouldn’t be able to demand DNA samples, but if we just happened to have some on hand . . .

  My mother loved Columbo. Had she lived long enough to see the advent of video recorders, she would have watched each and every episode over and over. She loved how Peter Falk, playing the bumbling detective, always got his man . . . or woman. It seemed to me that this was an occasion that called for a real-life bumbler.

  When Mel is talking on the telephone, she doesn’t like to be interrupted by anyone or anything, but that didn’t keep me from pestering her while she was taking notes from Rosemary’s phone call.

  “I need some of your business cards,” I said.

  Mel glared at me in exasperation and shook her head as if to say, “Go away. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  When I persisted, she finally let loose with an exaggerated sigh. Then she handed me her purse—her oversize, magic, man-eating purse. Under ordinary circumstances I wouldn’t have ventured into the damned thing, but I was determined. I once saw a catalog photo of the ultimate Swiss Army knife with all of the Swiss Army tools loaded into one gargantuan assembly. The thing cost fourteen hundred bucks and looked huge, but I’m sure it would have disappeared into Mel’s purse without a whimper.

  I had to paw through any number of levels of stuff before I finally spotted what I was looking for—the little mother-of-pearl-covered card-shaped carrying case that holds Mel’s business cards. I pulled some of them out of the case and slipped them into my right-hand pocket. Strictly speaking, for this kind of evidence gathering I should have been wearing gloves, but those would have given me away. For this to work I needed Giselle Longmire and Ron Miller to think of me as an incompetent idiot.
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  Leaving Mel standing there talking on the phone, I sauntered over to Giselle and Ron. “Gizzy?” I said.

  The disapproving frown she leveled at me told me Mel was right. Giselle Longmire did not care for her nickname, and she most certainly didn’t like being hailed by that name in public by someone who was, as far as she knew, a perfect stranger.

  I held out my hand. “J. P. Beaumont,” I said. “I’m a friend of your mother’s. We went to Ballard High School together.”

  Her look softened, but only a little.

  “I’m also a police officer,” I continued, waving offhandedly back toward the fire scene and hoping they would assume that I was part of the fire investigation. “Are you involved with Janie’s House?”

  “I volunteer here,” Gizzy said. “This is my boyfriend, Ron Miller. He volunteers here, too.”

  I took Ron’s hand and gave it a firm handshake. “At least we used to volunteer here,” Ron said wryly.

  It was summer. It was going to be a warm day. I noticed the long sleeves on Ron Miller’s tracksuit and wondered if that was important.

  “I work for the attorney general’s office,” I explained, keeping my tone both brisk and casual. I wanted them to think that whatever was going on here wasn’t particularly important or critical. “We’ll be working on this case with the Olympia PD.”

  “Oh,” Ron said, equally casually. “Is it arson, do you think?”

  Ah, yes. The old how-much-do-they-know routine. That’s one of the interesting things about firebugs. They often want to be on the scene in person to assess the damage.

  “Too soon to tell,” I said, shrugging and waving his question aside. “By the time this is over, we’ll probably be interviewing all of the people involved with Janie’s House—employees, volunteers, and clients, but if you happen to hear any rumors about what went on, please don’t hesitate to give me a call. By the way, when’s the last time either of you was here?”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” Ron said.

  “A couple of days,” Gizzy replied.

  Reaching into my right-hand pocket, I pulled out Mel’s cards. I handed one to Ron and a second one to Gizzy. Involved in sizing me up, man-to-man, Ron didn’t even glance at his card. Gizzy did.