J. Jance - Betrayal of Trust

I recognized Dr. Larry Mowat. He didn’t recognize me.

“You crime scene?” he asked. “I called for my guys a while ago. I’ve got no idea what’s taking them so long. They should have been here by now.”

I knew exactly what was taking so long. His guys weren’t coming. Ross Connors had sent word down from on high. As a result Thurston County had called off their forensics people because Ross was sending in CSIs from the Washington State Patrol. The fact that no one had bothered to let Dr. Mowat know told me he was almost as popular with his fellow Thurston County employees as he was with the attorney general.

“I’m with Special Homicide,” I told Mowat. “I understand we’ll be handling this case from here on out.”

“Special Homicide? You mean that S.H.I.T. outfit that works for the AG?” Mowat asked derisively. “Somebody needs to tell Ross Connors to get over himself. This is a suicide, not a homicide. I know Ross holds me in pretty low regard, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of brainpower to see that this kid offed himself. He even left us a note.”

“What note?” I asked. This was the first I had heard of any note.

“On the desk over there. It says, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ What a joke. Take what? Like living in the governor’s mansion is some kind of hardship?”

For Dr. Larry Mowat, this qualified as wit.

I went over to the desk and looked down at the note. I didn’t touch it and I hoped Mowat hadn’t touched it either as I read it myself, aloud. It was, as they say, short but brief:

“I can’t take it anymore.” The initials J.D. were scrawled underneath those stark five words.

I noticed right away that there was a grammatical problem with that sentence. It was a case of what my high school English teacher, Mrs. Reeder, would have called “faulty pronoun reference.” In fact, if she’d still been alive and had seen the note, I’m sure those are the very words she would have written on Josh’s suicide note in bright red-colored pencil: FAULTY PRONOUN REFERENCE!!! She always wrote her remarks in capital letters with plenty of exclamation marks after them.

As I remember her long-winded harangues on the subject, pronouns are used in place of nouns, more specifically nouns that precede the pronouns in question-the pronouns’ antecedents. Mrs. Reeder was a holy terror, by the way, and spending a year in her class was tantamount to being brainwashed. After all these years, how else would I even remember the word “antecedent,” to say nothing of what it means?

In the case of Josh’s note, the pronoun “it” had no antecedent, but it told me there had been something terribly wrong in his life. Josh was a kid who had already suffered some pretty hard knocks. As a homicide cop, I leaned toward the idea that Josh’s mysterious “it” referred to his involvement with the girl in the video clip and to the part he had played in her death.

I’ve seen that happen over and over. Josh wouldn’t be the first suspected murderer to choose to exit on his own rather than deal with the legal consequences of his actions. Still, I couldn’t help wishing the kid had spelled “it” out for us in more detail so we’d be able to give his grieving relatives some real answers.

Dr. Mowat had looked at the note and immediately assumed that what was written there had something to do with ordinary teenage angst. I looked at it with the dubious benefit of having information Dr. Mowat wasn’t privy to. (I won’t even mention Mrs. Reeder’s opinion about ending sentences with prepositions!) What I saw in my mind’s eye were those two hands, pulling inexorably on the ends of that blue scarf, choking the life out of our still-unidentified victim.

Out in the world of criminal justice, a fair amount of attention is given to so-called deathbed confessions. This was neither-not a confession and not a denial.

I looked up from the note and found Dr. Mowat was still sitting on the bed, watching me speculatively.

“Maybe he killed himself because his folks wouldn’t let him have a computer,” Mowat said with a nonchalant shrug. “What teenager these days can get along without a computer? Isn’t not letting your kid have a computer considered to be a form of child abuse?”

I happened to know that Josh Deeson did have a computer. At that very moment it was off in Spokane and being analyzed by a branch of the Washington State Patrol crime lab.

Rather than comment on the computer issue, I changed the subject.

“Who cut him down from the door?” I asked.

The M.E. shrugged. “Probably the EMTs,” he said. “It sure as hell wasn’t me,” he added. “I’ve had my ass chewed a couple of times for doing just that. And take a look at this. Just before he killed himself, the kid was reading his Bible. Get a load of the verse he underlined.”

I saw the book then, hidden behind Dr. Mowat’s considerable bulk. He stood up when I walked over to the bed. The Bible lay open on the bedspread that probably hadn’t been rumpled before Mowat sat on it. A red roller-ball pen marked the page. The book was open to the Gospel According to Saint John. John 14, Verse 2, was underlined in red ink.

“In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”

It tugged at my heart that in the last hours and minutes before taking his own life, Josh Deeson had been reading his Bible-his mother’s Bible.

“Still think this is some kind of homicide instead of a suicide?” Mowat asked. “That looks like a suicide note, too, right there in black and white. Red and white, actually,” he corrected himself.

“I think,” I said truthfully, “suicide or not, there may be more going on here than meets the eye.”

I heard a doorbell, followed instantly by the now-familiar sound of footsteps ascending the creaking stairs. Whoever was coming paused outside the door of the room, no doubt doing the same thing I had done-putting on booties, putting on gloves.

“The CSI guys are here,” I said. “You should probably go wait somewhere else until they finish up.”

Mowat balked. “Go wait somewhere else? Are you kidding? You’re kicking me out of my own crime scene? You can’t do that. This is Thurston County.”

The bedroom door opened. I looked up expecting a group of CSI folks to enter. Instead, Mel Soames, wearing her own booties and latex gloves, slipped quietly into the room, closing the door behind her and leaving a trio of CSI techs stuck on the far side of it.

She looked at Mowat and gave him a thin smile. Not a nice smile, an icy smile. If she had given me that look, it would have shriveled my balls.

“Yes, he can,” she said to him. “You need to go.”

Mowat leered back at her.

“Hey,” he said. “I remember you. I thought you were some kind of detective, but I guess you got kicked back to the gang and now you’re one of the crime scene dolts.”

“Actually, I’m not a crime scene dolt,” she replied, giving the last three words an emphasis I recognized as nothing short of menacing. “I’m still a detective, and I work for S.H.I.T., too, right along with Mr. Beaumont here. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get the hell out. There’s a captain with the Washington State Patrol downstairs talking to the governor. Her name is Joan Hoyt. Give her your information. When we’re ready for you to come pick up the remains, we’ll have Captain Hoyt give you a call.”

Had I said the very same words, the results might have been quite different, but since the orders seemed to come from an entirely unexpected quarter, they threw Mowat for a loss. He didn’t know quite how to react. He looked uncertainly from Mel to me and then back at Mel again.