Betrayal of Trust

Chapter 24

Monica Longmire piled into the Audi, slammed it into gear, and took off. “That was a smooth way to get rid of her,” Mel said. “I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

We rang the bell. I was surprised when it opened and Zoe was once again standing there. I hadn’t seen her among the kids gathered at the scene of the fire, but she, too, looked as if she’d been crying.

“My mom’s not here,” she said, sniffling. “Our relatives are all flying in for the funeral. She had to go to the airport to pick someone up.”

“Who is it?” Gerry called from somewhere inside the house, somewhere out of sight.

“Agents Beaumont and Soames,” I called back. “We need to talk to you.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Gerry Willis grumbled. “What now? Marsha isn’t here. Gizzy has gone AWOL. Everything’s falling apart. Let them in, Zoe.”

A subdued Zoe led us into the living room. Gerry was seated on a sofa with a breakfast tray on the table in front of him. Good china. Good cups and saucers. Evidently the cook was still on duty.

“Can we get you something?” he offered.

I didn’t want to have this awkward conversation with Zoe standing there hanging on my every word.

“I’d love some coffee,” I said, nodding toward the pot. “Is that regular or decaf?”

“I’m only allowed decaf these days.”

“I’d like some coffee, too,” Mel chirped agreeably.

“Zoe,” Gerry said, “would you please go ask the cook. .”

Zoe set off. In one fluid motion, Mel fell into step beside her.

“I’ll be glad to help carry,” Mel said. It was a neat maneuver on Mel’s part. It conveniently took Zoe out of the picture, but it also left me holding the bag.

“Well?” Gerry urged after a moment. “What’s this about?”

“You don’t need to worry about Gizzy,” I said hurriedly. “We saw her just a few minutes ago.”

“Where?”

“There was a fire at Janie’s House last night. She was at the scene along with a bunch of other kids.”

Gerry nodded. “Good,” he said, reaching for his cell phone. “That’s a relief. I need to call Monica and let her know-”

“Actually, we already did that,” I said. “Mrs. Longmire was just leaving when we drove up. The last thing she said to us was that she was going to find Gizzy and give her a piece of her mind.”

Gerry favored me with a rueful smile. “If anyone can pull that off, Monica can. She’s the best disciplinarian in the group.”

In the annals of divorce-induced group-grope parenting, this struck me as being pretty civilized all the way around. It was good to see four grown-ups acting like grown-ups, putting aside their differences and doing what they could to care for the kids involved.

Gerry picked up his coffee cup, took a sip, and eyed me speculatively. “I have a feeling this isn’t a social call,” he said. “Why are you here?”

Direct questions merit direct answers.

“I’m sorry to have to bring this up,” I said, “but the autopsy results have revealed that your grandson was sexually active.”

“Sexually active,” Gerry repeated. “Are you kidding? Josh was a kid-a shy, bumbling kid. I doubt he could even talk to a girl without falling all over himself.”

“Not a girl,” I said, meeting his eye. “I’m sorry to be the one giving you this difficult bit of news, but the evidence found by the medical examiner would be consistent with there being no female involvement.”

Stunned, Gerry sat there for a moment saying nothing at all, then he shook his head. “This is unbelievable. Are you trying to tell me that Josh was caught up in some kind of homosexual relationship?”

I nodded.

There was another long period of silence. “That can’t be,” he said finally. “It just can’t.”

“Were there any boys he was especially close to?”

“No,” Gerry said. “Not that I know of.”

“Look,” I said. “Josh was a minor. At his age, any kind of sexual encounter, consensual or not, would be regarded as sexual assault and as a criminal offense. That’s why we’re here today, sir, to see if we can find some justice for Josh.”

“How?”

“I seem to remember there were dirty clothes in the hamper in Josh’s room the other day. We’re hoping we might be able to find DNA evidence that would point us in the direction of whoever did this.”

“You want Josh’s dirty clothes?”

“Yes.”

“Then by all means go get them.”

I went right then, while the getting was good. As soon as I started up the stairs, my knees went nuts. By the time I got to the top floor, I was sweating bullets and the pain was killing me. I stopped at the top of the stairs long enough to catch my breath and get my bearings. That’s when I noticed the doors to a linen closet right there in the hallway. I opened them, and voila! There were stacks of washed and ironed sheets and pillowcases. A clean pillowcase was exactly what I needed.

Grabbing one, I ducked under the crime scene tape and let myself into the room. The place was as we’d left it, with fingerprint powder marring every surface. The hamper, however, still full of dirty clothes, was untouched. I emptied the soiled clothing into the pillowcase and turned to make my escape in time to find a furious Governor Marsha Longmire blocking the doorway.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded

I closed the pillowcase and tied it in a knot. “Collecting evidence,” I said.

“What kind of evidence?” she wanted to know. “Josh is dead. His death has been ruled a suicide. What’s the point of torturing my husband any further? Can’t you just let it go?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t let it go. We’ve found evidence that Josh Deeson may have been the victim of a sexual assault.”

“You mean you think he was raped?”

“Maybe,” I said. “We also know that Josh was the target in a case of coordinated cyber bullying, with any number of kids sending him harassing text messages. The messages appear to have come primarily from cell phone accounts billed to Janie’s House, although they seem to have been written by several different people.”

“What kind of messages?” Marsha asked. “What are we talking about here?”

“Insulting, snide comments. In the old days when we were kids, the insults that were in fashion probably wouldn’t have been much more damaging than ‘Your mother wears G.I. boots.’ The messages sent to Josh were far more destructive than that, and far more personal.”

“But. .” she began.

I dodged around her and started down the stairs.

“How did you find out about these supposed messages?” Marsha asked.

“They’re not supposed messages or alleged messages or any other kind of weasel words. We know about them because Josh saved them,” I said. “He downloaded them from his phone to a file on his computer.”

“What does any of that have to do with Josh’s dirty clothes?” Marsha demanded. “Besides, this is our home. Even if his room is still designated as a crime scene, you can’t just come waltzing in here without a warrant.”

“Your husband gave me permission,” I said.

As I clambered down the long flights of stairs, I ached enough that I could barely walk and talk at the same time. As I neared the ground floor, I heard the sound of assembled voices coming from the living room and could see a collection of suitcases that had been hastily deposited in the entryway.

Gerry must have heard Marsha and me arguing as we descended. He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

“I’m the one who gave Mr. Beaumont permission to collect Josh’s clothes,” Gerry said. “If you have a problem with that, Marsha, you need to discuss it with me.” After telling his wife to back off, Gerry turned to me. “If you’ll forgive me, Mr. Beaumont, I’m going to have to renege on that offer of coffee. We have people here now-out-of-town guests.”

I nodded. “Of course,” I said.

Zoe came past, headed for the stairs. Gerry stopped her. “Please go tell Ms. Soames that Mr. Beaumont is just leaving.”

Nodding, Zoe went to do his bidding while Gerry walked me out to the car. When Mel emerged from the house, Marsha was still standing at the foot of the stairs.

“Do you think Josh was involved with another boy?” Gerry asked in an undertone as I put the clothing-laden pillowcase in the trunk and pushed the button to close it. “With someone his own age?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Willis,” I said. “I really have no idea. It could be another kid. It could be an adult.”

“Why don’t you go see Mr. Dysart?” Gerry suggested quietly, speaking in what was almost a whisper.

“The guy who ran the chess club?”

Gerry nodded. “That’s the one. I met him last May at the end-of-year dinner for the chess club. Josh thought the world of him, but I tell you true-the man gave me the willies.”

“Gives him the willies?” Mel repeated as we drove away. “That’s an expression I haven’t heard in a long time.”

Mel is younger than I am. There are times when we run head-on into a generation gap. It happens with jokes and music, and occasionally, as in this case, with vocabulary.

“Maybe not,” I said, “but if he bothered Gerry that much, it’s reason enough to stop by once more to see him. We should also have a chat with some of the other kids in the chess club. But before we talk to anyone, I want to go see Joan Hoyt. We’ll give her what we have so she can get it to the crime lab.”

Headquarters for the Washington State Patrol is on Linderson in Olympia. Once there, Mel went to have a chat with Records while I tracked down Captain Hoyt.

“How did it go at the governor’s mansion?” Joan asked when I handed her the pillowcase filled with Josh Deeson’s dirty clothes.

“About how you’d expect,” I told her. “I don’t think they’ll be putting us on their Christmas card list.”

I gave her the two business cards that I had briefly handed over to Gizzy Longmire and Ron Miller.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“I’m hoping the crime lab will be able to lift prints and/or DNA off the cards.”

“Related to Rachel Camber’s murder?”

I nodded. Then I handed over Mel’s and my garbage-sifting prize-Josh Deeson’s extra Seiko watch.

“What’s this?”

“Something Mel and I dug out of the governor’s garbage. The watch looks a whole lot like a duplicate of the one Josh Deeson was wearing when he died, the one your crime scene team already took into evidence. Here’s the number for the Seiko distributor. We need to find out when both watches were purchased, and, if we’re lucky, find some trail to the individual purchasers.”

Joan nodded. “I’ll put someone on this right away.”

By the time I was finished documenting the transfer of evidence, Mel was waiting for me in the car. Since she had her own key, she had been able to turn on the GPS.

“Take a look at this,” she said. “I loaded in Sam Dysart’s address. I wasn’t paying that much attention to the relative distances last night when we stopped by there, but it’s only a little over a mile from there back to the governor’s mansion. That’s well within walking distance for someone letting himself in and out of his third-floor bedroom with a pair of strategically placed rope ladders. And if you remember, when we asked Josh about who he had been with that night, he claimed he had been alone.”

“It’s all starting to make sense,” I said. “If Josh was being sexually exploited by a coach-type adult from school, that would certainly explain his reluctance to discuss it.”

“It might also explain where he went on that afternoon jog Gerry Willis thought was so unusual,” Mel said. “But listen to this. Here’s something interesting. Samuel D. Dysart, age fifty-seven, has no traffic citations, but he’s been cited twice for loitering in Fort Defiance Park in Tacoma, late on two different Saturday nights. One occurrence happened two years ago and the other the year before that.”

I allowed myself the luxury of an aha moment.

Loitering is a misdemeanor. Most civilians seem to place loitering citations on the same level of seriousness as littering violations. What loitering really means in the PC world of cop speak is that some unfortunate gay guy got caught wandering around in a public place in search of a casual sex hookup. Looking for love in all the wrong places constitutes risky behavior. In terms of potential danger, it’s several steps down from Internet dating services. When two men end up “loitering” together and what goes on is between consenting adults, it’s regarded as a relatively harmless, victimless crime. Giving someone a citation for loitering is the civilian cop’s version of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” and it’s a charge that doesn’t land the loiterer on the list of registered sex offenders.

In this case, however, maybe it should have. Now there was a victim involved-a juvenile victim, since Josh Deeson had died several years shy of the age of consent.

“Dysart sounds like a hell of a nice guy,” I muttered. “Just exactly the kind of person I’d want in charge of my son’s high school chess club.”

By that time, of course, Mel was already on the phone with the high school principal’s office, speaking to a secretary, and asking for the names of the kids who had signed up for the chess club to be e-mailed to her. After a question about how Samuel Dysart, a nonteacher, came to be in charge of the chess club, Mel listened for some time, typing on her computer the whole while.

“So here’s the deal,” Mel said once she was off the phone. “Twenty-some years ago, when Dysart was in his thirties, he was a nationally recognized championship chess player. Now he’s a retired software engineer. Two years ago, when the school couldn’t afford to pay one of its regular faculty members to be in charge of the chess club, they were delighted when Dysart showed up and volunteered his services.”

“Sounds a lot like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,” I commented.

“Exactly,” Mel agreed. “From then on, just like magic, there are no more loitering charges lodged against him. He doesn’t have to go wandering around in parks in the middle of the night looking for connections, because the school is happy to send him a never-ending supply of potential victims.”

The whole idea was anathema to me. By the time we stopped in front of Sam Dysart’s house, I was half sick to my stomach. Child predators revolt me. That was one core value Anne Corley and I had had in common. Ditto for Mel Soames. Antipathy toward child abusers is evidently part of my first sort in picking potential mates.

When we drove up to Sam Dysart’s house, everything looked pretty normal except for the fact that the curtains and blinds were still closed. The house was neat and clean like all the other houses on the block. A gardener’s truck was parked at the curb, and a guy with a lawn mower was industriously mowing Dysart’s small front yard.

Mel and I got out of the car and started up the sidewalk. When the gardener saw us, he turned off his mower.

“Nobody’s home,” he said without our asking. “I tried ringing the bell and knocking on the door because I was hoping to pick up a check. No such luck.”

Mel turned around and marched back down the sidewalk. At first I thought she was leaving. Instead, she went to Dysart’s mailbox. She opened it and pulled out a fistful of mail. After shuffling through it, she returned the stack of mail to the box. Then she came back to me.

“Considering the layers of junk mail and real mail, I’d say his mail hasn’t been picked up since Tuesday.”

Without having to discuss it, we fanned out and talked to the neighbors. Olympia isn’t a small town, but it isn’t a big city, either. People tend to know their neighbors. No one could remember seeing Sam Dysart for several days.

I spoke briefly to a woman who lived across the street.

“If there are three days’ worth of mail in his mailbox,” Agnes Jones said, “then something is definitely wrong. Whenever Sam goes out of town he always has me pick up his mail. He worries about identity theft. He’d never leave his mail in the box like that. Never.”

“So when’s the last time you saw him?”

“Let’s see.” She paused for a moment, frowning. “Now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve seen him since Monday. I was on my way back from the grocery store. He was driving out as I was driving in. We waved and that was it.”

“You haven’t seen him since then?”

“No, but that’s not indicative of anything. Neither one of us keeps regular hours, so we come and go at odd times. It’s not all that unusual for a week or so to pass without our ever laying eyes on each other.”

“Does he have many visitors?” I asked.

Something about my question must have put her on edge. “Wait a minute,” Agnes said. “Who are you? What’s this all about again?”

I showed her my badge. “We’re investigating a homicide.” You’ll notice I didn’t say what homicide, but the answer seemed to satisfy her.

“I can’t imagine Sam Dysart being mixed up in anything like that,” she declared. “He’s a perfectly nice man-a complete gentleman.”

“And about his visitors?”

“Kids drop by from time to time,” Agnes said. “Good kids,” she added. “Clean-cut kids from the chess club at Olympia High. Did you know Sam was once a championship chess player?”

“Yes,” I said. “So I heard.”

When I crossed the street again, Mel had already finished with her share of the neighborhood canvassing and was waiting for me at the end of Sam Dysart’s carefully edged driveway. By then the gardener had loaded up his tools and grass clippings and had left the premises.

“Anything?”

“The lady across the street claims that the last time she saw him was sometime around noon on Monday.”

“What do you think?” Mel asked. “Is it possible a welfare check is in order?”

“I think so.”

We stepped up onto the front porch. First we rang the bell. When there was no answer to that, we knocked. Again there was no response, so we walked around the side of the house to the backyard. The lot was far deeper than it was wide. In the far back of the property sat a small stand-alone cottage that looked like it had once been a single-car garage before being turned into either a storage shed or a tiny apartment. Ignoring that for the time being, we went to the back door of the main house and repeated the same knocking routine we had performed on the front porch-with similar results. No answer. When I tried the door, it was locked.

We were about to walk away when a telephone began to ring inside the house. I would have bet money it was Agnes from across the street calling to let Sam Dysart know that police officers had been nosing around his place. The phone rang several times and then went silent.

“Answering machine, most likely,” Mel said.

Turning as one, Mel and I headed for the small building at the far end of the lot. On the side facing us there was a single curtained window and an old-fashioned door-an antique door that took an old-fashioned key, a skeleton key.

When I went to knock on the door, it fell open at my touch because it wasn’t locked. It wasn’t even closed all the way. As the door opened, a noxious odor exploded around us. We stood outside, covering our noses with our hands and peering into the stinky gloom of what was evidently a tiny apartment. My first thought was that we had stumbled across a blocked toilet and someone needed to call Roto-Rooter right away.

In the arcane world of Planning and Guessing, as opposed to Planning and Zoning, buildings like this are referred to as ADUs (accessory dwelling units). That’s what bureaucrats call them. Ordinary, nonbureaucrat folks call those same structures mother-in-law apartments.

This one looked like a one-room cabin, complete with a small table-covered by a chessboard-a rumpled, unmade bed, a kitchen area with a sink, fridge, small stove, and microwave, and a closed door that most likely led into the bathroom with a plugged commode.

“Mr. Dysart,” I called out. “Are you in there?”

Mel reached around the door frame and located a light switch. Using a pen from her purse, she flipped on an overhead light. There was no sign of any kind of confrontation-no knocked-over furniture, no broken crockery. Fighting off the foul odor, I walked as far as the bathroom door and knocked on that as well.

“Mr. Dysart, police. Are you in there? Are you all right?”

In answer I heard an eerie croak uttering words that, loosely translated, sounded like “Help me.” Instead of coming from inside the bathroom, the sound came from behind me on the far side of that unmade bed. As soon as I stepped closer, I realized that was where the odor came from as well. A man lay there on the floor, trapped between the wall he was facing and the side of the bed.

I’ve heard all those “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” jokes, and several of them ran through my mind as I wrenched the bed away from the wall. In the background, I heard Mel on the phone calling 911.

“Are you Mr. Dysart?” I asked.

He nodded emphatically. He had been lying on his side, facing the wall. As soon as I moved the bed away from him, he flopped over onto his back with a wrenching groan. Initially I thought he was the victim of some kind of attack. When I reached out to help him, however, I realized that he had lost the use of his entire right side. Instead of dealing with a crime victim, Mel and I had encountered a serious medical emergency. Dysart appeared to have suffered a massive stroke. He had been stuck there on the floor, trapped between the wall and the bed and imprisoned in his own filth, for what must have been several days.

“Water,” he croaked. “Please.”

That much was understandable. I went to the kitchen cupboard, grabbed a glass, filled it, and came back.

“EMTs are on the way,” Mel said.

I picked my way through the stinking mess, knelt at the man’s head, and tried to raise him enough to offer him a sip of water. When I did so, the water ran back out one side of his mouth and dribbled down onto his chest.

Within a matter of minutes, units from the Olympia Fire Department arrived on the scene. They bustled into the room in full firefighting regalia, bringing with them the chatter of radios and bags of equipment. While they worked, Mel stood studying the door to the building.

“What do you think are the chances that the skeleton key Josh was wearing opens this door?” she asked.

“Why don’t we check?”

I plucked my phone out of my pocket and dialed Joan Hoyt.

“What about the key that was found on a chain around Josh’s neck?” I asked her.

“My understanding is that Dr. Mowat has already released the body,” Joan said. “That means his personal effects were sent either to the funeral home or else directly back to the governor’s mansion.”

Remembering the way Marsha Longmire had run me out of the house earlier, I knew which one I was hoping for.

My next call was to Larry Mowat at the Thurston County medical examiner’s office. I was hoping to talk to a secretary or a receptionist-anyone but him-so of course he answered after the second ring.

“J. P. Beaumont here,” I told him. “We need to know where you sent Josh Deeson’s personal effects.”

“ ‘We’ being you and that rabid dog you call a partner?” he asked.

“Mel Soames is my partner,” I said. “She also happens to be my wife. Now answer the damned question!”

My response evidently surprised him. He swallowed whatever additional smart-assed comment he had intended to make.

“I did what I always do in cases like this. I sent the personal effects to the funeral home, along with the body.”

“Which funeral home?”

“Nelson’s mortuary on Pacific. Why?”

I hung up without answering and turned to Mel. “Let’s go,” I said.

“Where to?”

I knew generally where Pacific was, and I headed there without having to wait for Mel to work the GPS.

“To a funeral home,” I told her. “Here’s the deal. The key was released along with the body. I’m hoping we can get there and grab it before your friend Mowat can pull the plug on us. If we can pick it up without a hassle, fine. If we can’t-if the personal effects have already been turned over to the family-then we’re going to have to ask Ross for another court order.”

This was one of the times when the gods were on our side. Larry Mowat is a top-down kind of guy. While he was consulting with Charles Nelson, the owner of the mortuary, Mel and I threw ourselves on the mercy of the minimum-wage-earning young woman who was running the Nelson Funeral Home’s outer office. We showed her our badges. She handed over what we needed, and we gave her a receipt. We were out of there in five minutes flat with the phone ringing in the background as we hurried out the door.

We drove back to Sam Dysart’s place. The ambulance was gone, although some fire department vehicles were still in attendance. As we walked through the side yard, the newly mowed grass was littered with medical debris. A young fireman was emerging from the cottage as we approached.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re not supposed to go inside here.”

Mel showed him her badge while I walked up to the door and put the skeleton key in the old-fashioned lock. It turned home with a satisfying click.

“Bingo,” I said. “Sam Dysart is our guy-Dysart and Josh.” I pulled the door shut and locked it. “Now let’s go see Ross Connors. We need a search warrant and some DNA evidence. We handle the evidence by the book. If Sam Dysart did this, I want him to go to jail for it for a very long time. I don’t want there to be the smallest possibility that he’s able to get off due to some mishandled piece of procedure or evidence.”

“The man had a crippling stroke that went untreated for days,” Mel pointed out. “If we lock him up, the taxpayers of Washington will end up footing his medical bills.”

“Fine,” I growled. “If paying a huge medical bill means the state treasurer has prevented one other kid from being victimized by this creep, it’ll be worth it. Let’s just say it will be taxpayer money well spent.”

“Josh won’t be there in court to testify against him.”

“No,” I said. “He won’t, but we will be. Just as soon as we get the go-ahead on that search warrant. We’ll be able to testify and so will the DNA from that glass of water I offered him a little while ago. Come on. Let’s go.”