J. Jance - Betrayal of Trust

“You can’t talk to me that way,” he complained. “It’s disrespectful.”

“Sorry,” she said with a shrug.

Mel said the word “sorry,” but with her, tone of voice is everything. I understood exactly what she meant, as in, “Too bad. I just did talk to you that way.” She wasn’t sorry in the least.

Mowat stalked across the room and wrenched open the door. The three CSI guys were still waiting in the hall. From the way they were chuckling among themselves, there could be little doubt that they had heard the whole exchange. What’s more, they had evidently loved every word of it.

“Weren’t you a little tough on the poor guy?” I asked Mel in an undertone once Mowat was gone.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “When I was down here in Olympia working on a special project, that guy tried to put the make on me.”

“In that case,” I replied, “you weren’t nearly tough enough.”

The Washington State Patrol crime scene team entered stage left. It was made up of three guys-three experienced guys. They may have come into the room laughing at Dr. Mowat’s expense, but they got over it in a hurry and went to work. Someone higher up the food chain had given them marching orders. This was the governor’s mansion. The dead boy was the governor’s stepgrandson. The team had been told to do what they had to do, process the scene, take their photos, be respectful, and get the hell out.

I noticed they took particular care in untying the end of the necktie rope from the doorknob. One of the CSI techs coiled it as gently as possible and then stowed it in a waiting evidence bag.

People assume that you have to have a hard surface to collect fingerprints, and they did check every hard surface, but that’s yesterday’s technology. I knew from past experience that it might well be possible to collect usable fingerprints from the silk ties, too. More important, however, there was almost certain to be DNA evidence caught on the material. The problem was, in addition to trace evidence from Josh and from whoever might have worn the ties long in the past, there was probably also DNA evidence from the EMT who had cut down the body.

One of the techs was in charge of taking photos. Every time he snapped a picture, Mel used her little digital camera to photograph the same item. She took the photos while I took notes that would explain each of the photos for easy reference. The WSP crime scene photos would be the official ones-the ones that would be part of any legal proceeding. They would be available to us in good time, which is to say eventually or whenever the state patrol got around to giving them to us. Mel’s photos would fill in the gap and give us working copies we could use in the meantime.

As far as I was concerned, the watch was possibly the most important piece of evidence in the room. I was dying to see if it was the supposedly missing graduation Seiko. I didn’t make a fuss about it because I didn’t want to give away our prior involvement. Instead, I waited patiently while the photographer finished with his pictures of the body.

Since someone had cut Josh down, we all understood that the pictures of the body in situ probably weren’t all that important. Still, everybody played along and went through the entire protocol charade all the same.

“Okay,” the photographer said at last. “I’m done. You can call the M.E. back anytime.”

“First I need to see the watch,” I said.

Obligingly one of the techs turned Josh’s wrist over so the face of the watch was visible. My distance vision is fine. It’s up close where I need reading glasses, and I was able to read the logo with no difficulty-Seiko. Just yesterday, Josh Deeson had told us that the watch he’d been given for graduation was lost. Now, inexplicably, it was back.

On pieces of property, especially watches and cameras, sales receipts and serial number information can often be verified if you go to the trouble of digging far enough. If this really was the supposedly missing watch, then where had it been while it had been among the missing, and how had it been returned?

The crime scene photographer leaned in and took a close-up photo of the watch with his camera. As soon as he moved out of the way, Mel did the same thing with hers.

The crime scene guys were packing up to go when the door swung open again. I was amazed to see Gerry Willis standing in the hallway. His face looked gray. He had abandoned his wheelchair on the ground floor. He was panting and leaning heavily on a walker. It had taken tremendous effort on the First Husband’s part to make it all the way up to the third floor. I doubted Governor Longmire had any idea of where he was or what he was doing.

He stood there in the open doorway staring at Josh’s bare feet. That was all that was visible from behind the half-open closet door.

Of all the people in the room, Mel was the one who came to her senses first. She didn’t tell Gerry he shouldn’t have come all the way upstairs. And she didn’t deny him entrance to the room, although, since it was still an active crime scene, she most certainly could have. Instead, she hurried to the door, took Gerry by the arm, and gently escorted him over to the bed.

“You should probably sit down and catch your breath,” she said.

Gerry Willis nodded gratefully, but before he took a seat, he reached out and smoothed the part of Josh’s bedspread that Larry Mowat had left rumpled. Only when the bed was perfectly smooth again, as Josh must certainly have left it, did Gerry turn his walker around and ease himself down onto the mattress.

From that perspective, I knew that Josh’s body was completely exposed. In another minute or so, the CSI guys would have covered the corpse with something, but right at that moment, they hadn’t.

Gerry looked at the body for a moment, then he looked away, shaking his head sadly as tears spilled out of his eyes and dripped off his cheeks.

“Josh was meant to be a good boy,” he said hopelessly. “I failed him, just like I failed his mother.”

Far too often in my life I’ve been the one to bring parents-many times unsuspecting parents-the dreadful news that their beloved children are dead-that they’ve been murdered by some known or unknown assailant. Most of the time, the grief they feel rises up like a huge ocean wave-an emotional tsunami-that wipes out everything in its path. Losing a child to murder is awful.

And, having lost a wife to suicide, I can tell you that the anguish I felt after losing Anne Corley was worse than anything that ever happened to me. Nothing before and nothing since has ever come close.

But this was different. This was the suicide of a child, and Gerry Willis had been charged with the care and keeping of that lost child. The poor man’s understandable anguish seemed to suck the air out of the room. I didn’t say I understood how he felt, because I didn’t. Besides, saying something like that would have diminished us both. Mel got that, too.

“I’m so sorry,” she said softly. “Is there anything we can do?”

Gerry didn’t answer her for a long time. Instead, he sat there staring at his grandson’s still body and let tears flow unchecked. Finally he wiped his eyes and straightened his shoulders. I thought he was going to stand up. Instead, a puzzled frown crossed his face.

“I wonder where he found it,” he said. “He hadn’t worn it for several weeks. He told me he lost it, and I was pissed off about it because I paid good money for that watch. I expected him to take better care of it, but then last night, when he came to dinner, there it was on his wrist. I meant to ask him about it, but as you can imagine, last night’s dinner wasn’t a time for casual conversation.”