Betrayal of Trust

Chapter 17

Dr. Epstein was in the process of attempting to call Governor Longmire when Mel and I left her office. On the way out of town, we stopped at a drugstore and stocked up on batteries for the cassette recorder Mel keeps in her purse. Fortunately she keeps a supply of extra cassettes tucked in there as well.

The trip to Packwood was still the same distance as it had been the day before, but somehow knowing where we were going made it seem shorter.

“We must have done all right with the locals yesterday,” I said. “At least it wasn’t necessary to send Deputy Timmons along to look after us.”

“Are you going to tell Kenny and Ardith, or will I?” Mel asked.

“We could always draw straws,” I suggested.

“No,” Mel said. “We’ll play it by ear.”

As we drove through Randle we noticed that there were no motorcycles parked in front of the Bike Inn, and a red-and-black CLOSED sign hung on the door. I had no idea who owned the bar. As far as I knew, Ardith was an employee. It struck me as a kind gesture on the owner’s part to have closed the place down for the day in honor of the tragedy playing out in Kenny and Ardith Broward’s lives. Once we arrived in Packwood, however, I was downright impressed.

Kenny and Ardith’s yard was full of motorcycles-two dozen or more, along with a collection of woebegone minivans and pickup trucks. People milled around on the porch, where a washtub full of ice, beer, and sodas was the center of attention. Out in the front yard, someone was lighting up an old-fashioned charcoal grill.

You could tell the motorcycle guys from the loggers by the way they were dressed, leathers as opposed to overalls and flannel shirts. A collection of kids dressed in shorts, some of them barefoot, clambered over the play structure. And even without stepping inside the house, I knew that it was full of neighboring women who had probably covered every available flat surface with a collection of casseroles and potluck-worthy hot dishes. Packwood was a small town, and the folks had gathered there together to show their respect and offer their condolences in time-honored small-town fashion.

In a way, this was surprisingly similar to the people who had come to the governor’s mansion once news of Josh’s death had leaked out. Friends had gathered there, too, offering sympathy and support, but that had been a far better dressed crowd; the vehicles involved had been more expensive; and to my knowledge, none of the guests had come to the governor’s mansion with a covered-dish casserole in hand.

Everyone paused and watched with interest as I squeezed into one of the last available parking spots. When Mel and I stepped out of the vehicle, Conrad Philips-the high school principal and the only visible black man in attendance-extricated himself from the group around the charcoal grill.

“Did you find her?” he asked.

I nodded. He understood the implications. What we had to say wouldn’t be good news.

“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll go get them.”

Philips disappeared into the house and returned a few moments later with Kenny and Ardith in tow. Mel and I had agreed we’d play this one by ear, but I don’t think either of us had anticipated that we’d be speaking to the Browards in front of this kind of audience. The silence in the yard was absolute-like the silence in the Bike Inn the day before-only bigger, much bigger, and far more attentive.

As Conrad Philips led the bereaved parents through the throng of people, I was struck by how they looked-broken, red-eyed, and hopeless. They had tried to prepare themselves for the bad news. Now they faced it together.

“You found her?” Kenny asked.

“Yes,” I said. “We believe so. The body of a young woman was found floating in a retention pond north of Centralia early this morning.”

Ardith swayed slightly on her feet and then buried her face in her hands. Kenny reached out to steady her, holding her upright, while somewhere in the nearby trees a bird of some kind began to sing. That’s what I’ll always remember about the scene-Ardith Broward weeping, the bird singing in the background, and everyone else waiting and watching in utter silence.

When Ardith quieted, Mel stepped forward and took one of Ardith’s hands in hers.

“The body has been taken to the morgue in Chehalis,” she said quietly. “If you and Mr. Broward don’t mind, Mr. Beaumont and I would like to drive you there to see if you can identify the remains. And, of course, we’ll bring you back.”

Ardith looked up at Kenny as if for guidance. “Right now?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“We can take our van,” he offered.

“No,” Mel told him. “That won’t be necessary.”

“All right then.”

We helped them into the back of the Mercedes. While I started the engine and backed out of the parking place, Mel removed her recorder from her purse, switched it on, and placed it on the seat beside her.

As we started back down Highway 12, Mel told them some of what we knew or suspected, but she left out a few important details-like the possibility that Rachel had been dead for only a few hours when she was found in the pond. We explained how the identification process would work. We tried to prepare them for the shock of what they would see and apologized in advance for the fact that their daughter’s body would still be in the same condition in which it had been found.

“Why is that?” Ken asked. “Why couldn’t you clean her up?”

“Because we might lose evidence in the process,” Mel said. “Evidence that could help us convict her killer later.”

“Oh,” Ken said. “All right then.”

I was content to do the driving and let Mel carry on the conversation. Somewhere along the way, Mel began explaining about the search warrant that would include both their home and their telephone.

“That reminds me,” Ken said. “I don’t know what else you’ll find, but Ardy and I went through Rachel’s room last night. We found this hidden in her jewelry case.”

He handed Mel a small business card. She looked at it and passed it to me. The design on the card showed a simple peaked roof with several stick figures gathered beneath it. The words JANIE’S HOUSE were written on the card, along with a phone number with a 360 area code. There was nothing else there, not on the front or the back.

“What’s this?” Mel asked.

“I have no idea,” Ken said. “But that’s what Rachel told me on Sunday-that she was going to Janie’s house!”

Mel took out her iPhone and began surfing the net. “It’s a drop-in shelter in Olympia,” she said. “In other words, it’s not a place where people stay, but they serve as a centralized source of needed services for homeless youth. It’s named after a girl named Janie Goodson, who was murdered in 1985 while living in a homeless camp outside of Olympia. Janie’s grandmother started it. It supplies showers, laundry facilities, meals, tutoring, and a place to hang out.”

“But why would Rachel even go there?” Ardith demanded from the backseat. “She had a home. She had us.”

I knew there weren’t any easy answers to that question. I had asked myself the same kinds of things years ago when my own daughter, Kelly, had taken off. In her case, the answer had to do with a boy named Jeremy. Maybe the answer for Rachel was something similar, but with a far more tragic outcome. A few years down the road, Kenny and Ardith wouldn’t end up with a couple of cute little grandkids to show for all their heartache. No, the best they could hope for was having a chance to lay their daughter to rest. On the other hand, that’s more than far too many parents of runaway kids ever have a chance to do.

In any case, I knew that as soon as the identification was out of the way and the Browards were safely home in Packwood, Janie’s House in Olympia would be my next destination.

“Can you get me a street address on that shelter?” I asked.

“Can do,” Mel said. “I’m working on it right now.”

The ID session was every bit as bad as we had expected. That was due in large part to the condition of the body. But it also had something to do with Dr. Epstein, who made her displeasure known by being disdainful and condescending to the point of being rude. It was fine for her to be mad at Mel and me. We deserved it. In fact, we had gone out of our way to provoke her. Instead, she took it out on the Browards, slamming the gurney with the body bag on it into the middle of the room and then jerking down the zipper to reveal the ghastly, still mud-covered face.

“Is that her?”

“Yes,” Kenny whispered while Ardith nodded wordlessly.

“All right then,” Dr. Epstein said. “We’re done here.”

As in “Here’s your hat. What’s your hurry?” If that was Dr. Epstein’s idea of bedside manner, she had done the world of medical science a huge favor by becoming a coroner rather than working with living, breathing patients. Maybe that was the path of least resistance if you don’t want to deal with customers who actually talk back. Ditto for Dr. Larry Mowat, the Thurston County M.E., although in terms of status, serving as Lewis County coroner was most likely a big step down from a position where you got to put the words “medical examiner” behind your name.

On the way into town, I think Ardith had clung to the faint hope that the body they were going to see wouldn’t be Rachel’s. On the way back to Packwood, knowing the worst, she seemed intent on starting to put together a plan for finding a coffin and holding services.

“You won’t be able to do that right away,” I cautioned. “King County will most likely send someone to pick up the body today, but the autopsy won’t be until tomorrow at the very earliest. You won’t be able to make plans for a funeral until after the M.E. releases the body.”

“So by the beginning of the week, then?” Ardith asked.

“I can’t say for sure,” I said. “I know it’s tough to be stuck in limbo like that, but that’s the way it is.”

For the trip back, with Mel driving her own vehicle, Kenny had taken my front passenger seat while Ardith rode in the back. After that exchange about funeral arrangements, Ardith fell silent. Eventually Kenny glanced back at her.

“She’s asleep,” he said. “Neither one of us slept last night-at all. Ardy blames herself, you know, for being too hard on Rachel and driving her away. That’s probably true.”

“What do you mean?”

Kenny shrugged. “I think Ardy looked at Rachel and saw too much of herself when she was that age. She didn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes she had, but the more Ardy tried to rein Rachel in, the wilder she got.”

“What about you?” I asked. “What did you think about Rachel?”

“I didn’t grow up the way Ardy did,” he said. “It seemed to me that Rachel was just a regular kid. I kept trying to tell Ardy that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

“That’s why you let her go on that overnight on Sunday?” I asked.

He nodded bleakly. “It was just supposed to be that one night.” He fell silent, too, and spent the next twenty minutes weeping silently. I gave the guy credit for doing his crying when his wife was asleep. I also understood the real reason for his tears. Yes, Rachel was dead, but that was only part of it. Ardith may have been blaming herself for her daughter’s fate, but Kenny Broward was doing the same thing-drowning in blame.

I understood exactly how it had all come about. He and Ardith had been playing good cop/bad cop with Rachel Camber. Unfortunately for all concerned, in this case both cops had lost.

Kenny finally managed to get it together and decided to tell me the rest of the story. “Ardy found money hidden in Rachel’s drawer along with that business card, and it wasn’t the first time, either. That first time she left it there so Rachel wouldn’t know we were snooping.

“How much money?” I asked.

“Eight hundred dollars,” Kenny said.

“That’s a lot of money for a kid to have stowed away.” Especially for a kid without a regular job, I thought.

Ken nodded miserably in agreement.

“Rachel wanted to go to cheerleader camp next month. One week costs a thousand bucks. We told her we didn’t have that kind of money lying around. We’re making ends meet, but just barely. I think she was saving up for that.”

That meant that Rachel had amassed an additional four hundred bucks to go with the four hundred Ardith had already mentioned. “But a total of eight hundred dollars?” I asked. “Where do you suppose she would get that kind of money?”

Kenny shrugged. “Ardy seemed to think Rachel was putting out, like a prostitute or something.”

“What about you?”

He shrugged hopelessly. “Drug dealing, maybe? That would make sense, but if she was really running away, why didn’t she take the money with her?”

“Probably a lack of trust,” I suggested. “I’d say Rachel knew the people she was going to be with on Sunday afternoon, and she was worried they might steal whatever she brought along with her.”

There was a long period of silence after that while ten miles or so of blacktop unwound itself between opposing banks of towering evergreens.

“Will we get her stuff back?” Kenny asked finally.

“What stuff?” I asked.

“Nothing valuable,” he said. “I was hoping we’d be able to give her a class ring next year. That’s not going to happen, but she did have a bracelet.”

When he first said it, what popped into my head was a charm-bracelet kind of thing-gold or silver with lots of little dangly thingies on it. My daughter, Kelly, had one of those once, but Kenny Broward soon disabused me of that notion.

“It’s an elephant-hair bracelet,” he said. “It looks a lot like the wire we used to hang my dad’s dropped ceiling. It has a little sliding fastener on it so you can make it bigger or smaller.”

“Elephant hair?” I repeated.

“An exchange student from South Africa came to school here last year,” Kenny explained. “Her name was Estelle. She and Rachel became good friends. At the end of the year, when it was time for Estelle to go back home, she gave Rachel a bracelet made out of elephant hair and made her promise to wear it every day. She did, too.”

I had an idea that the elephant-hair bracelet in question was now lying somewhere on the muddy bottom of the retention pond, but I didn’t say as much to Kenny.

“Anything that was found with the body will be inventoried and returned to the family unless it’s considered to be evidence of some kind.”

“All right,” he said. Then he shook his head again. “I guess I need to try to let Estelle know.”

“She probably has e-mail,” I said. “Try asking Conrad Philips. He’ll know how to get in touch with her.”

Ardith was awake again by the time we got to their house in Packwood. The yard was still parked full with people waiting to hear the bad news and to help the Browards cope with it. I knew Mel was right behind me. She’d execute the search warrant, then interview all these folks to see if anyone knew anything. In the meantime, I dropped off my passengers and headed right back out.

I pulled off the freeway in Centralia because I needed to buy gas. By the time I finished filling the tank, it was lunchtime and the call of that Country Cousin fried chicken was more than I could resist. I went inside and drew the same waitress who had served Mel’s and my breakfasts.

The chicken comes with a fresh salad, a dollop of mashed potatoes, and a stack of green beans. The salad includes a layer of tiny cubes of steamed beets. Back when I was growing up, my mother had to threaten me with bodily harm to get me to eat steamed beets. She’d be astonished if she knew I now eat them voluntarily.

The drawback on Country Cousin fried chicken is that it takes time to cook-a full half hour. I occupied my time by opening my computer, logging on, and checking my e-mail. The first e-mail on the list was the one from Beaumont, Texas-the one from my presumed cousin, the one I hadn’t replied to yet. I scrolled past that one. At the bottom of a long string of Viagra ads was one from Dr. Mowat, or, rather, LWMowatME, according to his e-mail address. The message itself was short if not sweet.

Deeson autopsy completed. As per the attorney general’s instructions, I gave the autopsy results and a certified copy of the death certificate to Captain Hoyt of the Washington State Patrol. Let me say for the record, Ross Connors is a jackass.

It did my heart good to know that Ross Connors’s dislike of Larry Mowat wasn’t the least bit unrequited. It’s sort of a waste when one person hates another one’s guts and the first guy doesn’t get it.

As far as I was concerned, I had my own opinions about good old Larry. In fact, I was so happy to avoid talking to him about the Deeson autopsy that I spent twenty minutes of my chicken-waiting half hour tracking down Captain Hoyt’s telephone number. I wondered what kind of approach I’d need to make in order to glean any usable information. Those concerns turned out to be unfounded.

“I’ve been expecting your call,” she said. “Ross Connors told me you’d be in touch. What do you need?”

“To know everything you know about Josh Deeson’s autopsy.”

“I don’t have the official report,” she said. “All I have right now is what Mowat told me. Cause of death is plain old asphyxiation,” she said. “Definitely suicide. No initial sign of drug use of any kind, which is fairly unusual in these cases. Kids who decide to end it all often turn out to be the ones who’ve already screwed up their bodies and their futures with some pretty obvious substance abuse.”

“What about personal effects?” I asked.

“Nothing much. The M.E. found only one item on the body-a gold chain with some kind of skeleton key on it. The crime scene team inventoried a Seiko watch. That’s already been sent along to the lab.”

I knew about the watch. The key was a surprise.

“A key?” I asked. “What’s it to?”

“Beats me. His room, maybe?” Joan replied. “It seems to me that the rooms on that top floor of the governor’s mansion all have old-fashioned keyhole door locks, but as far as I know the door wasn’t locked.”

“You’re right,” I said definitively. “And since the door wasn’t locked, that means the key is to something other than the door to his room.”

“How do you know that?”

“Think about it. Josh was about to commit suicide. That’s a hell of a lot worse than, say, thumbing through back issues of Playboy or Penthouse. If he’d had a key to the door of his room, he would have used it.”

“Yes,” Captain Hoyt said. “I see what you mean. I’ll have my people do some checking and see if we can figure out where the key is from.”

My chicken showed up. It smelled wonderful, but I could tell from the steam that it was still too hot to eat.

“All right then,” I said, poking a hole in the crispy skin to allow some of the heat to dissipate. “I’ll let you go.”

“One more thing,” she said. “I spent some time with Gerard Willis. You can’t help but feel sorry for the man. He’s really broken up about Josh.”

“I know.”

“So even though it’s not my case, I have to ask. Yes, I know Josh killed himself. I saw the room. There was no one else in there with him who could have been responsible, but do you really think he killed that girl, too?”

“No,” I told her, “he didn’t, but the two cases are connected somehow, and I’m going to do my damnedest to figure out whatever that connection might be.”