Betrayal of Trust

Chapter 13

Ross Connors, the Washington State Attorney general, weighs in as a statewide elected official. That makes those of us who have the privilege of working for him employees of a statewide elected official. Over the years I’ve learned that some places are a lot more welcoming to people who work for Special Homicide than others.

It turned out that, as far as the Lewis County Sheriff’s Department was concerned, Ross Connors was golden. Since Mel and I worked for him, so were we. We arrived in Chehalis well after five, but Sheriff Louis Tyler was waiting for us with the light on and the welcome mat out. He asked for the nurse practitioner from the Lewis County Jail to come over and take a look at Mel’s injured hand. Then we all settled in to wait for Deputy David Timmons to arrive from Packwood.

But there was more to Sheriff Tyler’s hospitality than just good manners. “You’re Special Homicide,” he said. “So what’s your interest in a fifteen-year-old runaway from my jurisdiction?”

It was a reasonable question that merited a straight answer.

“We think there’s a good possibility that Rachel is dead,” I said. “And we have reason to believe that her death might be related to the possible suicide of a boy in Olympia, a kid named Josh Deeson, one of whose guardians happens to be Governor Marsha Longmire.”

Sheriff Tyler thought about that for a long moment before he nodded. “Hold on,” he said, “I’ll be right back.”

He returned a few minutes later carrying a stack of paper folders.

“This is the third time Rachel Camber has run away. If you look at these, they may give you some idea of why.”

He shoved the file folders across his desk. Mel took one off the stack. I took another. I ended up with the mother’s file-Ardith Louise Haskell Camber Mills Stapleton. Unfortunately there was a mug shot. Think of any frowsy blonde you’ve ever seen in one of the domestic-violence clips on Cops-several missing teeth, stringy hair, and a nose that showed evidence of having been broken numerous times. Not an American beauty. The birth date listed made her thirty-two, although she looked decades older than that. And if she had a whole series of ex-husbands and a fifteen-year-old runaway daughter in the background, it was simple to do the math. Babies having babies is seldom a good idea, although Kelly and Jeremy, my daughter and son-in-law, seem to be exceptions to that rule.

I thumbed through the file. Ardith had arrests and convictions for DUI, domestic violence, drunk and disorderly, and disturbing the peace. She had been charged with child neglect, but there was no conviction on that one.

“And the men are?” Mel asked.

“Husbands and ex-husbands,” Tyler said. “She marries them, they beat her up, they leave her with a kid or two, and then she gets a divorce and moves on.”

“How many kids?” Mel asked.

“Six, I believe, but don’t quote me,” Tyler said.

“How does she support them all?” Mel asked.

“Let’s say she doesn’t get much child support from her exes,” Tyler said. “She works as a bartender in a low-life bar in Randle. She also may get some government help. The current man in her life is Ken Broward, who signed on after her last arrest. Kenny used to make a decent living driving log trucks. He’s been off work for months. They called him and wanted him to come back today. He couldn’t on account of not being able to locate Rachel. He needed her to look after the younger kids. He’s the one who turned in the missing persons report.”

“Not the mother,” Mel said.

“No,” Sheriff Tyler said. “Not the mother.”

Mel and I traded glances and folders. I gave her the thick one on Ardith, and she gave me the ones that dealt with the parade of lowlifes in Ardith’s life. I thumbed through them.

“Nothing on Ken Broward?” I asked.

“Not so far as I know,” Sheriff Tyler said. “From what I’ve been able to learn about him, Ken’s a straight arrow. Ardith’s lucky to have him, and Ardith’s kids are even luckier.”

“Except for Rachel,” Mel said. “Rachel’s definitely not better off. Maybe we should show Sheriff Tyler that video. He should know what we’re up against. He’ll know if there have been any other cases of that around here.”

Mel had loaded the clip onto her iPhone. She started it playing and then handed the phone to Sheriff Tyler. He watched it through with no comment other than a tightening of the muscles along his jawline. When the clip finished, he handed the phone back to Mel.

“Choking game,” he said quietly. “We’ve had a few instances of that around here, mostly with junior high school kids. By the time kids are Rachel’s age, they find other ways to get high, like stealing their parents’ prescription drugs or raiding their parents’ liquor cabinets.”

“Any deaths?” I asked.

He grimaced. “What do you call landing in a vegetative state at age twelve? Close but no cigar? Her name is Kim Hope from Pe Ell. Hope-that’s a hell of a name for a kid like that because, as near as I can tell, she doesn’t have any. She’s on a ventilator and a feeding tube and stuck in a nursing home for the rest of her life because her parents don’t believe in pulling the plug no matter what. But I’m guessing there are times in the middle of the night when her parents find themselves wishing she had been found and cut down a few minutes later, when it was all over. The other choking game victim, Richey Kincaid from Toledo, was lucky. He came away with nothing but rope burns around his neck. His mother heard him making a strange noise and came to check on him. Kim’s mother heard a noise, too, but she was doing something else and didn’t pay attention until it was too late.”

“No one else was implicated in either case?” I asked.

Tyler shook his head. “No one. Both Richey and Kim were alone in their rooms when it happened.”

“Is there a chance all these kids-Kim Hope, Richey Kincaid, and now Rachel Camber-knew one another?” Mel asked.

Sheriff Tyler shrugged. “With the Internet, I suppose anything is possible, with all that Facebook junk that’s going around, and Tweetie.”

Clearly Sheriff Tyler didn’t have a whole lot of familiarity with what Mel and I sometimes laughingly refer to as the iPhone generation.

“You mean Twitter,” Mel corrected.

“Whatever you want to call it,” Tyler replied. “It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me, but back to your question. Toledo’s a little burg just off I-5 about twenty miles from here on Highway 12. Packwood is about an hour and a half east of there, also on Highway 12. Pe Ell is on Highway 6, about twenty-five miles west of here in the opposite direction from Packwood. Physically that puts Rachel and Kim Hope a good two and a half hours apart. All three of them are small-town kids. Richey and Kim come from what I’d call solid families. Not so with Rachel. They’re all too young to drive, so if they’re connected it is probably through the Internet.”

“How big is Lewis County?” Mel asked.

Mel Soames is a relative newcomer to Washington State. She lived in Texas briefly when she was growing up, but as an adult she spent several years living, working, and driving back east. I think the distances out here surprise her occasionally. For instance, it still confounds her that you can drive for six hours to get from Seattle to Spokane and still be in Washington. Try explaining that to someone who hails from, say, Delaware or New Hampshire.

There was a light tap on Sheriff Tyler’s closed door.

“Come in,” he called.

The door opened to reveal a young uniformed officer standing outside. He was all spit-and-polish. I didn’t know if it was the beginning of his shift or the end of it, but his uniform looked like it was fresh from the laundry. The creases in his pants were still sharp.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” he apologized. “But Dispatch told me you wanted to see me right away.”

“Have a seat, Deputy Timmons,” Sheriff Tyler said. “These two officers, Mel Soames and J. P. Beaumont, are agents from the attorney general’s Special Homicide unit. They’re here to speak to you about Rachel Camber.”

I appreciated his avoiding the term S.H.I.T., and clearly Deputy Timmons was duly impressed.

“Yes, sir,” Timmons said. He edged his way into the room and took a seat on the only remaining chair. Not a seat so much as a perch. He sat fully upright, as though he were still standing at attention.

Ex military, I told myself, maybe the Marines.

“Did you bring that photo with you?” Sheriff Tyler asked.

“Yes, sir,” Deputy Timmons said.

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a notebook. Opening that, he removed a piece of paper that had been folded to the exact dimensions of the notebook. He unfolded the paper and handed it to Sheriff Tyler. The sheriff studied it silently for a moment and then passed it to Mel, who eventually handed it to me. It was a school photo with the same shy, tentative smile we had seen at the beginning of the video.

Looking at the photo made my heart hurt. If the two girls weren’t one and the same, then they would have to be identical twins.

Deputy Timmons seemed to find the silence in the room unnerving. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but did I understand you to say homicide? Does that mean Rachel Camber has been murdered?”

“It’s possible,” Sheriff Tyler said noncommittally. “How about if you bring us up to speed with what you learned in Packwood.”

Timmons’s notebook, which had been properly stowed in his shirt pocket, came back out. He opened it and began reading through his notes.

“According to Kenny-”

“Kenny?” Sheriff Tyler repeated. “You mean Kenneth Broward, Ardith’s most recent husband?”

“And Rachel’s stepfather then,” Mel supplied.

Deputy Timmons nodded and returned to his notes. “Kenny said that the last time he saw Rachel was Sunday afternoon. She told him she was going to see a friend and that she planned to spend the night.”

“Does this friend have a name?” Mel asked.

“Janie,” Kenny said. “Ken assumed Janie was someone from school, but Conrad Philips, the high school principal, is an old personal friend of mine. I gave him a call when I was on my way back from Packwood. He knows every kid in his school on a first-name basis. He says there isn’t a Jane or Janie in the bunch.”

“Is there a chance that Mr. Broward was mistaken about the name?” Mel asked.

“I suppose,” Timmons said with a frown, “but I doubt it.”

“So according to Mr. Broward, the last he saw of Rachel was Sunday, when she left on her own.”

“Yes,” Deputy Timmons said. “That’s correct.”

I knew where Mel was going. There’s a lot to support the idea that stepfather/stepdaughter relationships can be fraught with peril, so when she asked her next question, I wasn’t at all surprised.

“Have you considered the possibility that Mr. Broward might have something to do with Rachel’s disappearance?”

The genuinely shocked expression on Deputy Timmons’s young face made his verbal answer unnecessary.

“So you don’t think there was something inappropriate going on between Mr. Broward and his stepdaughter. .”

“No, ma’am!” Timmons said decisively. “I never gave that possibility any thought at all. I’ve known Kenny Broward all my life. If there was ever a truly upright guy, he’s it, although how he could get mixed up with someone like Ardith Haskell is more than I can understand.”

I glanced back at Ardith’s mug shot. Haskell was the first name listed there, a maiden name, as it were. People from your hometown are usually the only ones who stick to those first names, so it occurred to me that Deputy Timmons had known Ardith all his life as well.

“I’ve heard what Ardith’s place was like before,” Timmons went on. “Before Kenny was in the picture. You’d be amazed, Sheriff Tyler. Now the place is clean as a whistle. He cut down all the weeds in the backyard and put together one of those wooden swing things out there so the kids would have something to play on. When I got there, they were outside having fun like normal kids. If you ask me, Kenny’s more of a father to that bunch than all those other guys put together.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me understand this. Rachel went off with this supposed friend named Janie on Sunday.”

“Yes,” Timmons said. “She left Sunday afternoon about four, just after her mother left for work.”

“How did she leave?” I asked. “Did she walk? Did she ride?”

“She rode. Somebody picked her up, somebody driving an older-model pickup truck. Green. Chevrolet, Silverado. Kenny didn’t see the license, so that doesn’t help us much. There are lots of old Chevys in Packwood.”

“Okay,” Mel said. “She left on Sunday. Why did she leave after her mother went to work?”

“According to Kenny, Ardith and Rachel fight a lot. If Rachel had asked for permission, there probably would have been a big argument.”

“When was she reported missing?”

“This afternoon,” Deputy Timmons said. “Kenny called it in after Ardith left for work, for the same reason. He didn’t want to start another argument. I think I may have mentioned that Ardith isn’t exactly a nice person, a reasonable person.”

“Don’t you think it’s odd that Rachel’s stepfather is the one who turned in the report and not Rachel’s own mother?”

Deputy Timmons sighed. “He told me what she said.”

“What who said?” I asked.

“What Ardith said about Rachel’s running off,” Timmons said.

“What was that?” Sheriff Tyler asked.

“She said, ‘Good riddance. One less mouth to feed.’ ”

On the face of it, Kenny Broward sounded too good to be true, and Ardith Haskell was just the opposite-too bad to be real. Either way, the situation at the home in Packwood had been bad news for Rachel, and it had sent her running pell-mell into something much worse.

“Do you know where Ardith is right now?” I asked.

“Sure thing,” he said. “Tending bar at the Bike Inn bar in Randle. It’s a pretty rough crowd, but Ardith has worked there for years. She fits right in and can hold her own with the best of them-or the worst,” Deputy Timmons added. “Take your pick.”

I stood up. “We should probably go have a talk with her,” I said. “And maybe with Mr. Broward as well.”

Sheriff Tyler nodded. “Good idea,” he said. “But if I were you, I’d let Deputy Timmons take you there. You can drive your own car, of course. I wouldn’t expect you to go there in a squad car, but I caught a glimpse of your wheels when you got here. If you drive up to the Bike Inn by yourselves in that pretty little Mercedes of yours, those guys are likely to clean your clocks.” He grinned at Mel. “I have it on good authority that you’re fully capable of handling yourself in a pinch, but let me ask you this. If you were going out on an African safari, would you head off on your own, or would you pick up a local guide before you took off?”

“Local guide,” Mel said.

“Exactly right,” Sheriff Tyler said. “And this is the same thing. As far as the outside world is concerned, Randle and Packwood are a little like the back of the beyond. When Deputy Timmons came back home from his tour of duty in Iraq, I hired him to work that eastern sector of the county because he grew up there. He knows those logging roads like the back of his hand. He knows the people, the good ones and the bad ones.

“And why did I do that? Because, when I sent deputies from other parts of the county to Morton or Packwood or Randle and the like, asking questions, they never seemed to get to first base. If you go there on your own, it’s likely the same thing will happen to you. You can ask questions until you’re blue in the face. You’re not going to get any answers.”

What Sheriff Tyler was saying made sense. Mel stood up and turned one of her classic smiles on poor unsuspecting Deputy Timmons. I wasn’t the least bit surprised. When it comes to bringing unsuspecting young guys to heel, she’s a killer. I’ve seen her do it before, and it works like magic every single time.

“If you have time to take us there, Mr. Timmons,” she purred, “we’d be ever so grateful.”

Timmons blushed from the top of his collar to the roots of his hair. A few short minutes earlier, Mel had been the one voicing the suggestion that there might be some kind of unsavory connection between Timmons’s boyhood pal Kenneth Broward and Rachel Camber. In the face of Mel’s radiant smile, however, all remembrance of her unpleasant suggestion was zapped right out of Deputy Timmons’s random-access memory.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, grinning back at her. “I’d be happy to.”

If I had tried pulling that coy-smile bit, it wouldn’t have done a thing for Deputy Timmons, and it wouldn’t have done much for us, either.

“Would you mind going now?” she asked.

I believe Mel could have asked Deputy Timmons to march straight into hell about then, and he would have done it without question.

“Not at all, ma’am,” he replied. “Whenever you’re ready, I’m ready.”

And off to Randle we went.