Betrayal of Trust

Chapter 27

Once the kitchen door closed behind Gerry and Marsha, what followed was something my mother would have called “a pregnant pause.” In all my years as a cop, I had never seen a suspect’s parents step up the way Marsha and Gerry just had. And the fact that the other set of parental units was evidently on board and in total agreement with this unflinching bit of tough love was even more astonishing. In my experience, a crisis of this kind in divorced families usually devolves into a circular firing squad of finger-pointing.

As for Gizzy? I didn’t know if she would go ahead and demand an attorney, as she had every right to do with or without parental approval, or if she would run for the hills.

“Is it true?” she asked finally. “Is Ron really under arrest?”

Mel nodded. “Yes, he’s really under arrest. Usually, in these situations, the suspect who talks first is the one who gets the best deal. Not that Mr. Beaumont and I can make deals,” Mel added, “because we can’t.”

“How bad will it be for me?” Gizzy asked.

Mel shrugged. “I have no idea,” she answered. “That depends on what you’ve done, how much you know, and how much you can help us.”

“Are you placing me under arrest?”

“Not right now. We’re only taking you in for questioning.”

“Will I have to walk through the house in handcuffs?”

Mel’s handcuffs had disappeared much earlier in the afternoon when Ron Miller was locked in that capitol cop’s squad car. I still had mine. We could have used those.

“We’ll go around the outside of the house instead of through it so as not to disturb your parents’ guests,” Mel said. “But I don’t think handcuffs are necessary at this time, do you?”

“No,” Gizzy said. “They’re not.”

Mel took Gizzy’s arm and started to lead her around the side of the house, back to the driveway. I was going to follow, but then thought better of it.

“I need to do one more thing,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

I ducked back into the house through the kitchen.

When I stepped inside, the cook stopped what she was doing, placed both hands on her hips, glared at me, and shook her head.

“It’s beginning to feel like Grand Central Station around here,” she said.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I need a word with Mr. Willis.”

I found him by the bar in the living room, pouring himself a generous Scotch. With his recent surgery I wondered if that was wise, but that was his business, not mine.

“There’s one more thing I need to tell you,” I said. “I didn’t want to bring it up in front of Marsha.”

“What?” Gerry sounded bleak, as though he could hardly stand one more smidgeon of bad news.

“Sam Dysart is dead,” I said.

Gerry’s face brightened. “Hallelujah,” he murmured. “How?”

“He had a stroke. The first one evidently happened several days ago. He had been lying alone on the floor in a cottage out behind his house ever since. Mel and I found him there when we went to his house to talk to him this afternoon. We called 911. He was in the ambulance and being transported when he suffered another stroke and died. We have reason to believe he purchased the watch Josh was wearing when he died.

“Mel and I have been ordered off the case. Joan Hoyt of the Washington State Patrol says the Olympia PD Sex Crimes unit will be taking over that aspect of the investigation. Once the DNA evidence is processed, we’ll try to let you know the findings, but it won’t be our responsibility to take it any further.”

“If Dysart really did molest Josh, I hope he rots in hell,” Gerry Willis said fervently. “But we’re out of it, Mr. Beaumont. Yes, I want to know for sure, but beyond that, whatever he did or didn’t do to Josh is over. I don’t want to know anything more about it, and it’s no one else’s business.”

“But the school district may be liable for bringing him on board,” I objected.

“That’s none of my concern. If there are other kids and other parents who want to make an issue of this, fine, but we’re not bringing up his relationship with Josh with anyone. The poor boy is dead. Surely we can allow him that much privacy-that much respect.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll see to it.”

And so will Ross Connors, I thought. It’s the least we can do.

I let myself out the front door and joined Mel and Gizzy in the S-550. Gizzy was sitting in the backseat crying quietly when I got in behind the wheel. It didn’t matter to me if her tears were due to fear or remorse. The fact that she was shaken enough to be crying seemed like a good sign.

I drove them to the Special Homicide Squad A office and stayed long enough to escort them into a tiny interview room. I turned on the room’s video recording system and made sure it was up and running. I gave Mel an earpiece that allowed two-way communication from inside the interview room to anyone outside in the hallway. When I waved good-bye, Mel’s parting words to me were simple.

“Bring back pizza and sodas.”

Fair enough. We were conducting an updated version of the carrot-and-stick routine. In this case, Gizzy’s parents were the stick and Mel-sweet-talking Mel-was going to be wielding the good cop’s most effective carrot and the interview room’s official secret weapon-pepperoni pizza. As I walked away, I heard Mel launch into the obligatory process of reading Giselle Longmire her rights.

There had been some necessary adjustments in our original plan, but we were also still on track with our general strategy. Mel would interview Gizzy while I tackled Ron Miller.

To that end, I drove straight to Olympia PD. When the guy at Olympia’s lockup facility told me Ron Miller had lawyered up and wasn’t speaking to anyone, I can’t say I was surprised. Ron was accustomed to having his parents haul out their checkbooks and fix whatever mess he had gotten himself into. They had done it at least once before by paying for that burned-out boathouse. I was sure Ronald Darrington Miller was sitting in his cell right then, convinced that by tomorrow morning one or the other of his parents would come bail him out and everything would be fine. I, for one, was pretty sure that on this particular occasion, for the first time in Ron’s highly privileged life, that strategy wasn’t going to work. For one thing, I had firsthand knowledge of something Ron Miller and his parents didn’t know-Marsha and Sid Longmire had had balls enough to throw their daughter under the bus. When they did that, they threw Ron there as well.

I couldn’t interview Ron, but as long as I was at Olympia PD, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to touch base with whoever was working the Janie’s House arson case.

“They’re not here,” the desk sergeant told me when I showed him my badge and ID and asked my question. “They’re out in the field doing a next-of-kin notification.”

“For the victim from the fire?”

The sergeant hesitated for a moment before he nodded. “His name is Owen Wetmore, age thirty-five. Our investigators don’t know if he’s a victim, a participant, or both. When they recovered the body, his ID was in his back pocket, charred but still legible. His parents are off in Europe on some kind of a three-week cruise. The detectives went to Seattle to talk to the grandmother.”

“At thirty-five, Owen is too old to be one of Janie’s House’s homeless clients,” I said.

The sergeant nodded. “My understanding is that he’s one of the houseparents.”

Someone with keys, I thought.

I gave the sergeant a business card. “Have one of the detectives give me a call as soon as they get back,” I said. “I may have some information for them.”

“It could be late,” he counseled. “It’s a long way up to Seattle and back.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s going to be a long night for everyone concerned.”

I stopped by the local Domino’s franchise and picked up a large pizza and three Cokes before I headed back to the office. It was summer. The night was warm. The fragrance of pizza in the car reminded me of summertime parties I had attended long ago, back when I was Gizzy’s age. It saddened me to think that this was most likely the last bite of freshly baked pizza Giselle Longmire would encounter for a very long time.

Back at headquarters, Ross Connors was standing outside the interview room watching through the glass. I was carrying the pizza in one hand and a cardboard multiple-cup container in the other. I set the load down on a nearby table and handed Ross a slice of pizza on a fistful of napkins.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Mel’s working her pretty good,” Ross said, biting the tip off his piece of pizza. “What the hell were these kids thinking?”

“They weren’t thinking,” I said. Then I tapped on the door to the interview room, opened it, and held the door open with my toe long enough to let myself inside.

“Your pizza has arrived,” I said with a flourish. After depositing the food on the interview table, I took my own drink and pizza and rejoined Ross outside in the hallway. Mel was clearly making progress with Gizzy. My hanging around and horning in on the discussion might have been enough of a distraction to mute her effectiveness.

“She said Ron and a pal of his came up with the idea of hiring Rachel to make videos,” Ross said. “Gizzy was the one who thought it would be funny to send one of them to Josh.”

“Videos-plural?” I asked. “As in more than one?”

Ross nodded. “A money-making venture. According to Gizzy, they did their filming in one of the outbuildings-an old caretaker’s cottage-at Ron’s family home out on North Cooper Point Road.”

“She was in on it from the beginning?”

Ross nodded sadly. “They lured Rachel here over the weekend with the promise of making another four hundred bucks by reprising her phony death scenes.”

“Would Ron Miller’s film partner happen to be a guy named Owen Wetmore, by any chance?” I asked.

Ross shot me a look and nodded. He didn’t ask me how I knew that, and I didn’t tell him.

“Does Owen drive a green pickup truck?” I asked.

Ross nodded. “As a matter of fact, he does-a dark green Chevy Silverado.”

Inside the room, Mel moved the pizza box aside and pushed a blue-lined notepad in front of Gizzy. “Write it all down,” she said, handing her a pen. “When you’re finished, sign it.”

“All of it?” Gizzy asked faintly.

“All of it,” Mel told her.

Mel stood up and stretched. Then she picked up another piece of pizza, came to the door, and knocked on it. We let her out.

Gizzy Longmire wrote her life-and-death essay for the better part of an hour. By the time she finally finished it, signed it, and handed it over to Mel, Joan Hoyt had already obtained a search warrant for the Ronald Miller residence on North Cooper Point Road. After dropping Giselle off at Olympia PD for booking, we went there, too, where officers from the Washington State Patrol, along with the arson detectives from Olympia, were already in the process of executing the search warrant. On the sidelines an outraged Ronald Miller, Senior, and his rudely awakened attorney ranted and raved to no effect. They might be able to run roughshod over any and all comers in a courtroom, but crime scenes are cops’ turf, not theirs.

And that’s what this was. As soon as we stepped into the caretaker’s cottage I knew we had found the place where Rachel Camber had played her fictional role as well as her real one. The soiled mattress on the narrow cot in one corner of the room told the story of her imprisonment and death, as did the very expensive video equipment that still stood in the center of the room.

Ron Miller may have staged more than one phony snuff video, but someone had failed to give him the memo that, in real life, death isn’t a pretty picture. When a body stops working, there are consequences in terms of bodily functions. Nothing in Ron Miller’s life experience had taught him the necessity of cleaning up his own crap, and he hadn’t done so in this case, either.

It took hours to process the scene. The same Washington State Patrol crime scene team that had come to Josh Deeson’s bedroom appeared for a return engagement. They took photos dogged by Mel, who took her own photos while I cataloged each and every shot. By the time we finally left there to return to the Red Lion, the sky was starting to lighten. It was only four-thirty, but morning comes early in the Pacific Northwest at the start of summer.

We went back to our room and stripped off our clothing. Mel removed her makeup, and we both fell into bed. Mel was asleep instantly-the sleep of the just, as we call it. It took two Aleves and the better part of forty-five minutes before I was able to fall asleep, still hearing Ron’s words echoing in my head: “You and who else, old man?”