J. Jance - Betrayal of Trust

“Trash, not crap,” Ross corrected with a smile. “You mustn’t take all this S.H.I.T. stuff so personally.”

The three of us had a good laugh about that, but Ross Connors stopped laughing before anyone else did.

“Excuse me while I make a phone call.”

He picked up a desk phone and dialed a number. “I need to know what days trash is picked up at the governor’s mansion,” he said.

Ross never bothered introducing himself, so whoever was on the other end of the line knew his voice well enough to recognize it. The attorney general waited for a several minutes, ignoring us and idly tapping the top of his desk with a fountain pen, a distinctive Mont Blanc Thomas Mann model. Finally, the person he was waiting for came back on the phone. He listened for a time, nodding.

“All right,” he said finally. “To the winners go the spoils.” He put down the phone and then looked at me.

“Bad news,” he said. “The governor’s trash is picked up every day, recycling and garbage both. So I’ll need to work on how to manage the pickup as well as where you’ll do the sorting. I’ll have it handled before I leave town in the morning. As for you, Mel, once you have that photo in hand, I want you to go to work on the missing persons end of this.”

Mel nodded.

“How old do you think the victim is?”

“Maybe junior high,” Mel said. “More likely a high school freshman would be my guess.”

That was my assessment, too. Ross nodded in agreement.

“I thought so, too,” he said. “As soon as Governor Longmire showed me the video, I did some preliminary checking. In the past four months, we’ve had four teenage deaths in western Washington that are in line with that demographic. A drive-by shooting in Kent, a single-vehicle rollover car wreck in Kelso, a drug overdose in Raymond, and an alcohol-related head-on accident on I-90 near North Bend. In each of those incidents, the victim was a high-school-age Caucasian female with brown hair. But those cases also had full autopsies. None of them shows any sign of strangulation.”

“Which means the body of our victim is still out there somewhere,” Mel said. “Hence the missing persons files.”

“And not just from Washington, either,” Ross said. “The girl who was shot in Kent was from Portland and was visiting her grandmother over the summer. The girl in the head-on collision was from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. These days kids have driver’s licenses and cars. The girl in the video could be from Canada for all we know. Mel, I know you’ve worked with agencies in other states in the U.S. as well as in Canada. I want you to do it again.”

“Yes, sir,” Mel said. “Will do.”

“You showed the video to Josh?” Ross asked.

“We did.”

“What kind of reaction?”

“Shock,” Mel said. “He claimed he hadn’t seen it before, and I think he was telling the truth about that, but I’m not so sure he was being truthful when he said he didn’t know her.”

Ross nodded. “Right,” he said. “So where do kids meet other kids?”

“School, the mall, the movies,” I suggested.

“Okay,” Ross said. “So here’s the deal. Todd is a hard worker. I’m assuming that by the time you finish sorting your first batch of trash, he’ll have come up with the photo. Then I want you to hit the bricks. We’ll start with secondary schools within a fifty-mile radius or so. I’ll have Katie put together a list of school principals along with their contact information. Someone out there knows who this girl is.

“Again, when you talk to the principals, your cover story is that we’re investigating a possible case of bullying. School bullying is a big deal these days, the media flavor of the month. People will be a lot more likely to help if they think that’s all it is. They’ll turn skittish if they know it’s a homicide.

“And speaking of skittish. You’re going to need to talk to the governor’s daughters. They may not be best pals with Josh, but kids always know what other kids in the family are up to. When we were kids, my older sisters all thought I was a regular pain in the butt, but they would have died first before ratting me out to our parents. And I felt the same way about them. Someone needs to interview the girls.”

I was already shaking my head in objection. “Ross, I already know that isn’t going to happen. Marsha Longmire isn’t going to let us within arm’s reach of Zoe and Giselle Longmire. Neither is Garvin McCarthy.”

“You’re right,” Ross said. “I’m sure Garvin has seen to it that you’ve been declared persona non grata as far as the governor’s mansion is concerned, but this may help.”

He slid a piece of paper across the desk. On it was a Lacey address I didn’t recognize. Lacey is a suburb just north of Olympia.

“What’s this?” I asked, picking it up.

Ross smiled. “That would be the address of Sid Longmire, the governor’s ex, and the ex’s new wife, Monica. They live in a gated community on a golf course in Lacey, and they share custody of the two daughters, Zoe and Giselle. Actually, now that Giselle is eighteen, officially they share custody of the younger daughter only. Considering the way ex-wives and new wives usually interact, I have a feeling you’ll have a lot more luck interviewing Zoe at her father’s house than you will at the governor’s mansion.”

I folded up the address and put it in my wallet. Ross Connors is a wily old bastard. He’s a good guy to have in your corner, but I think it would be a bad idea to piss him off.

“Is that all?” I asked.

He nodded. “For right now.”

“Okay, then,” I said, standing up and offering my hand. “If you’ve got an early-morning plane to catch, we’d better be going.”

Mel followed suit.

“You’ll keep me apprised of any and all progress?” Ross asked.

“Absolutely,” Mel said.

We left the office and started for the front door, expecting to make it there on our own. Ross had told Mrs. O’Malley good night sometime earlier, but she was nonetheless hovering somewhere in the background.

“Right this way,” she said, appearing out of nowhere. She was still in her uniform; still in her apron.

She led us to the door, opened it, and shooed us into the hall.

“May the saints preserve you,” she said.

Since I was riding back to the hotel with Mel at the wheel, that wasn’t such a strange wish.

“Thank you,” I said. “And the same to you.”

We went back to the hotel. It wasn’t that late, but it had been a long day, and my knees were killing me. I took some Aleve and went to bed. Mel was still at the desk in the corner checking her e-mail when I drifted off to never-never land, thinking about Gerry Willis’s grandson, Josh Deeson.

Mel is more of a night owl than I am. That doesn’t mean she’s a slugabed in the morning, because she’s able to function on far less sleep than I do. I went to bed early, she went to bed late, and we both got up at the same time.

Don’t try to tell me that God doesn’t have a sense of humor, because S/He does. Just the morning before I had been pondering the joys of having separate bathrooms. The next day dawned with us ensconced in the Olympia Red Lion with only a single bathroom in sight. And, in the world of bathroom use, men and women are definitely not created equal. Women win; men lose.

The bathroom had a single washbasin and what would have been an adequate countertop had Mel been there alone. I found a place in among her bottles and potions to put my shaving kit on a temporary basis. I’d had the good sense to shower while Mel was out on her morning run and had my shaving kit safely back in my luggage when she came back. Once she disappeared into the bathroom to shower and do her makeup, when a need arose, I had to take myself down to the lobby and make use of a men’s room down there.