Betrayal of Trust

Chapter 12

Once back at the Red Lion, we stopped by the front desk long enough to pick up the envelope of photos of the video clip’s dead Jane Doe. Riding up in the elevator, we pulled one out of the envelope. Todd Hatcher had done an excellent job of extracting a usable head-shot photo from the video. His enhanced image showed an average-looking brown-haired girl with a tentative smile-the smile Marsha Longmire had said would haunt her for the rest of her life.

“You know what?” I said. “From that photo, I’d say she was a willing participant, at least initially.”

“Yes,” Mel muttered, sliding the offending photo back into the envelope. “The old ‘choking game.’ Some game!”

Up in our room, while Mel sat down at the desk and booted up her computer, I studied the clothing I had brought along in my suitcase.

“What’s wrong?” Mel asked.

“I seem to have brought along nothing but work clothes. When I packed I had no idea that garbage was going to be part of the work agenda.”

“Try Goodwill,” Mel said. “You should be able to buy stuff you can throw away after you use it.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “Where’s the nearest Goodwill?”

I was fully capable of looking it up on my own, but Mel already had her computer open and at the ready. She gave me the address.

“What are you going to do while I’m off on garbage detail?” I asked.

“See if Todd can enhance the images of the arms pulling the scarf.”

I knew what she meant. She wanted to know if the watch in the picture was Josh Deeson’s watch. So did I. I left her to it and set off on my own. With help from the GPS, I pulled into the Goodwill parking lot in a matter of minutes.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. I arrived at the thrift store to buy cheapo clothing while driving a very expensive Mercedes. Since I had no idea of how many days of garbage duty I was in for, I went wild and stocked up. I came out of the place fifteen minutes later feeling like I had scored and carrying a plastic bag that contained three pairs of shorts, three T-shirts, and a pair of flip-flops-all for under fifteen bucks. I loaded my bag of purchases into the trunk of the Mercedes and sped off.

The storage unit was a multilevel affair. To my amazement and relief, it was also air-conditioned. Who knew? I found the front desk, asked for Rebekah, and gave her my name.

“Unit D-335,” she said. “Take the elevator to the third floor.”

As she handed me the key, she gave me that singularly disapproving one-raised-eyebrow look all women seem to use on occasion. In the old days I wouldn’t have had a clue about what that look meant, but being married to Mel has made me almost fluent in nonverbal female-centric lingo.

Rebekah thought I was overdressed for the job at hand. So did I.

I held up my bag of thrift-store duds. “I’m planning on changing,” I said.

Without a word Rebekah handed me a second key. This one was on a ring that also contained a large wooden paddle that was too big to slip into a pocket. Written on the paddle was the word RESTROOM.

“Good,” she said. “The restrooms are just beyond the elevators on the right.”

I changed clothes there. Then, carrying my good clothes in the bag, I located unit D-335. Even with the AC going, a pungent odor assailed my nostrils the moment I opened the rolling door. There were two separate and bulging tarps on the floor of the unit. The first one, the recycling bin, was easily disposed of. It consisted primarily of soda cans and clear plastic water bottles. There was also a whole bale of shredded paper, along with an impressive stack of print newspapers. Obviously Governor Longmire preferred to get her news in dead-tree fashion rather than over the Internet.

Keeping the recycling safely contained, I tied that tarp shut and dragged it out into the hallway. The second tarp was a bit more problematic. In last-in-first-out fashion, the garbage heap was topped with yesterday morning’s coffee grounds. It was possible to trace the previous day’s events in chronological order, ending with a pizza box that no doubt dated from last night’s dinner. Somewhere in the middle I found the flurry of paper napkins that had accompanied our unadorned tuna sandwiches-several of which had been tossed into the garbage along with the napkins.

Let me say right now that I was very grateful Washington’s First Family had no pets. That would have made a tough job even tougher. It was clear, however, that these folks were big on fresh fruit. There were apple cores, orange peels, and banana peels in abundance. What happens to dead apple cores and banana peels overnight in the heat of summer isn’t pretty, but it’s nothing compared to witnessing any given autopsy, so I soldiered on, trying to do so with a cheerful heart.

I sifted through the garbage as best I could and found nothing that looked remotely related to what we were doing. I found a newspaper page with a completed Sudoku puzzle that had made it into the garbage instead of the recycling. Nowhere did I find any wadded-up sheets of notebook paper with cryptic phone numbers or coded messages. This was garbage-plain and simple garbage.

I spent forty-five minutes on the thankless task, then I tied up the tarp of garbage and dragged both that and the recycling downstairs. I emptied the tarps, folded them as best I could, and then took them back up to the storage unit so they could be reused. Josh Deeson might be dead, but I had a feeling that Ross Connors’s interest in Governor Longmire’s garbage wasn’t going to end anytime soon.

I locked up and returned the keys to Rebekah. I drove back to the Red Lion feeling conflicted. I felt virtuous because it was a dirty job and I had done it. I felt frustrated because I had found nothing.

Mel wasn’t in the room when I got back. There was a piece of hotel notepaper sitting on top of her closed computer. There was only one word written on it: AUTOPSY.

That surprised me. Mowat had picked up the body a relatively short time ago. Usually there was a little more wait time built into the system, but I chalked it up to Josh’s being related to Governor Longmire. That probably greased the skids and made things happen faster than they would otherwise.

I headed for the shower with the slightest bit of guilt added to the mix. Sorting garbage wasn’t my first choice of afternoon activity, but it beat the hell out of spending the afternoon with Dr. Larry Mowat.

I threw away the first set of Goodwill clothing and wore the second one. Yes, Ross Connors expects his agents to go out in public properly dressed in business attire. For men that means slacks, dress shirts, jackets and ties, even in the dead of summer. As long as I was working in the privacy of my hotel room, there was no reason not to be comfortable.

I turned on my computer and booted it up. There were several new e-mails listed. I cleared those out one at a time. Among them I found three from Todd Hatcher and one from Ross, which meant that one really came from Katie Dunn. There was also a copy of the e-mail Mel had sent to Ross giving him an overview of what had gone on earlier in the day. The next message after that, the one I’d saved as new, was the one from Sally Mathers-the one marked “Beaumont.” I owed her a response, but I wasn’t ready to deal with all of that, at least not yet.

I avoided the issue by hiding out in work and opened Todd’s first message instead. That one contained two attachments-a copy of the snuff video and a copy of the Jane Doe jpeg. The second contained a short note and two jpeg attachments. I read the note first.

Look at both jpegs. I’ll have to go somewhere else to do a more detailed enhancement to see if we can identify the watch. Back to you when I can.

I opened the attachments. Each one contained a photo of an individual hand and arm, with the hand knotted into a tight fist around the end of the scarf. I squinted at the watch in the one photo. I wished I had a magnifying glass on me to help make out the details, but I didn’t. In the other photo, the top of the thumb was clearly visible. Todd was online, so I sent him an instant message.

Is that nail polish on that thumb? Does that mean one of the assailants is a girl?

He wrote back almost immediately.

You’re out of the loop, J.P. These days boys wear nail polish, too.

Not this boy, I thought.

The door opened and Mel came in looking surprisingly grim. More than a little surprised, I glanced at my watch.

“You’re done already?” I asked. “That has to be one of the fastest autopsies in history.”

“As far as I know, the autopsy has yet to start.”

She came over and sank down on the bed. That’s when I noticed she was holding a bag of ice against her right hand.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I punched him,” she said. “Right in the kisser. If I’d made better contact, I would have broken his nose, but he ducked back out of the way. With any kind of luck, though, I loosened his front tooth. I know for sure he’s got a split lip.”

“Who ducked?” I asked. “Whose front tooth?”

“Who do you think?” Mel asked irritably. “Dr. Mowat, that’s who. He listened in on your conversation with Ross earlier and figured out that you’d be tied up doing something else this afternoon. That’s why he claimed he had moved up the Deeson autopsy. He thought getting me alone was a good idea. Turns out it wasn’t.”

“You punched him?”

I admit there should have been a little more husbandly concern in the question and a lot less admiration, but I doubted Mel had been the only target of Larry Mowat’s inappropriate attentions. Most likely the creep had deserved having his lights punched out for a long time. Of course, if he ended up filing an official complaint against Mel, that might have all kinds of long-term repercussions.

Right that minute, however, neither Mel nor I was thinking long-term.

“I sure as hell did!” she declared.

“Let me take a look at it.” I scrambled up out of the desk chair, hurried to the bed, and lifted the ice pack off her knuckle. There was a neat cut across one of them where one of Mowat’s front teeth had broken the skin. The whole back of her fist was already discolored and swollen. I could tell from looking at it that her hand probably hurt like hell. I also knew she’d bite her tongue off before she’d admit it. Without being asked, I went straight to my shaving kit and got her a couple of Aleves. I came back from the bathroom with the pills and a glass of water.

“He’s probably filing a complaint even as we speak,” she said once she had swallowed the tablets.

“Were there any witnesses?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” she scoffed. “Jerks like that always make sure there are no witnesses.”

“Did you write up a report the last time he hassled you?”

“I did,” Mel said. “It’s in the file. There’s evidently been some bad blood between Mowat and Ross. At the time Ross told me he’d appreciate it if I’d leave it at that. And I did. Now all bets are off. If he files a complaint, I’ll file a countercomplaint.”

“Do you want me to go over to the morgue, finish witnessing the autopsy, and clean Mowat’s clock while I’m at it?”

She gave me a sheepish grin. “Thanks for the offer of being my Sir Galahad, but don’t bother. I already did a reasonable job of cleaning his clock myself. As for that autopsy? It turns out that wasn’t really scheduled for today after all. That was just a ruse to get me over to the morgue.”

“A phony autopsy as opposed to phony etchings,” I muttered. “Classy.”

Mel’s phone rang. Because she would have had to put down the ice pack to answer it, I plucked it out of her pocket and answered it for her.

“Mel Soames’s line,” I said.

“She punched him?” Ross Connors roared into my ear. “She flat-out punched him?”

“No,” I said. “I think it was more of a balled-fist situation than something flat-out.”

“Don’t be cute, Beau,” Ross said. “Mowat just called my office and raised all kinds of hell with Katie Dunn. I’m pretty sure he didn’t get a whole lot of sympathy from that quarter. Katie doesn’t like him any more than I do. How’s Mel?”

“She’d talk on the phone herself, but she’s holding an ice pack on her knuckles,” I told him. “She can’t do both at the same time.”

“Put me on speaker, then,” he said. “I need to talk to both of you.”

With some difficulty I managed to punch the appropriate numbers to activate the speaker function. It seems to me that there should be some standard operations that go from one kind of cell phone to another. That’s not the case, though. The controls on Mel’s phone differ enough from mine that I’m always baffled when I have to do anything with her phone.

“Are you there, Mel?” Ross asked.

“I’m here,” she answered.

“Good. Are you okay?”

“My knuckles are a little swollen, but I’m fine. Why?”

“I’ve had people monitoring new missing persons cases from all over the state in hopes of identifying the Jane Doe on Josh Deeson’s phone. A promising lead just turned up with the Lewis County Sheriff’s Department. The girl’s name is Rachel Camber. She’s fifteen years old, Anglo, and she’s been missing since Sunday. Her folks, who probably won’t qualify for any Parents of the Year Award, woke up this morning and figured out that their teenage daughter wasn’t home and hadn’t been home for several days.”

“Any other info on the girl?” Mel asked.

“Only that this isn’t the first time she’s run away. More like number three or four.”

“Where did she go the other times?”

“If the deputy found out during his initial contact with the parents, I don’t have that information at this time.”

“What about a photo?” I asked. “Does Lewis County have one and can they send us a copy?”

“As I understand it, the deputy who took the report picked up a copy of last year’s school photo while he was there at the house. He’s bringing it with him, and he’s on his way from Packwood to Chehalis right now. It’s about an hour and a half from Packwood to Chehalis. He’s probably another hour out at least. Between Olympia and there it’s right around half an hour. If Mel is up to it, I’d like you to be waiting for him at the sheriff’s department in Chehalis when he gets there.”

“I’m up to it,” Mel said determinedly.

“Keep ice on that hand and let Beau do the driving,” Ross advised her. “You know where the Lewis County Sheriff’s Department is located?”

That question was evidently directed at me. I knew how to get there all too well. Once, years ago, I’d been hauled into the Lewis County Jail by an overly enthusiastic deputy. It wasn’t one of my best moments, and it wasn’t something I had ever mentioned to Mel, or to Ross Connors, either. Some things are better left unsaid.

“Don’t worry,” I told them both. “I can find it.”

“As for Larry Mowat,” Ross continued, “don’t you worry about him for a moment, Mel. If he tries to make any kind of fuss about what happened between you, I’ll squash him flat like the bug he is.”

“Thank you,” Mel said.

I was all for squashing Dr. Larry Mowat. I would have told Ross Connors thank you, too, but it was Mel’s deal, not mine, and it wasn’t my place.

“I’m at the airport getting ready to fly out of Spokane,” Ross continued. “I have a few minutes before the plane is due to board. You probably don’t need to leave for Chehalis for another half hour, so how about bringing me up to date on what went on at the governor’s mansion. I’ve been out of the loop.”

Before Mel left for Larry Mowat’s faux autopsy, she had sent Ross a fairly detailed report about what had gone on at the Josh Deeson crime scene. Ross hadn’t seen it because he refuses to use his damned computer.

I had half a mind to pull Mel’s report up on the computer and simply read it to him word for word, but I didn’t. Instead we told him about our time at the governor’s mansion. We touched on everything we could remember off the top of our heads, including the part about Josh having been bullied by the kids at school as well as Mel’s and my reading of his supposed suicide note.

“It sounds like you don’t think he killed the girl,” Ross said.

“I think it’s possible he didn’t kill her,” Mel corrected, “but we’re going to have to prove it one way or the other.”

Mel has a way of saying things that allows for cover later on if that should prove necessary. She’d make an excellent politician, if she didn’t occasionally feel obliged to punch someone in the mouth.

“The watch sounds important,” Ross continued. “I’ll contact the crime lab and get them working on collecting DNA from the watchband. I told the guys in Spokane to do the same thing on the scarf. Once we have DNA profiles, all we’ll need is a couple of suspects so we can match them up. Case solved.”

That was my idea, too.

“What about the garbage detail?” he asked. “Did you find anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Too bad,” Ross said. “I was hoping you’d find something that would help us.”

“So was I,” I said.

I could hear a public address system talking in the background.

“Oops,” Ross said. “They just called my flight. I need to go.”

He hung up. I stripped off my shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops in favor of something a little more official-looking. If Mel and I were going to drive to Packwood that night to tell some poor unsuspecting parents that their precious daughter had most likely been murdered, then I wanted to look the part. That difficult assignment requires a certain amount of gravitas. In my book, it also requires a sports jacket and a tie, no exceptions. For those kinds of occasions, Mel favors a tailored suit and low heels. It’s what we do.

Once we were both properly put together, we refreshed Mel’s ice pack and rode down to the car. Mel insisted on bringing along our computers and our air cards in case we had any waiting time on our hands later.

I happen to know that Packwood is in the far reaches of Lewis County, within ten miles or so of Mount Rainier and right up against the edge of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. I thought the likelihood of our having an Internet connection from way out there was slim to none, but I packed up the computers without a word of complaint and carted them down to the car.

Mel is one of those women who are capable of and usually prefer to open and close doors all by themselves. This time she kept the ice on her hand and made no remark about my dashing around the car and playing the role of gentleman. And once we were belted in and headed toward the freeway, she did absolutely zero backseat driving. None.

It occurred to me, somewhere along the way between Olympia and Chehalis, that her taking a swing that had connected with Dr. Larry Mowat’s front tooth might turn out to be an excellent thing in terms of our own personal domestic tranquillity.