J. Jance - Betrayal of Trust

“If I had a choice, this is the one I’d pick any day of the week,” Mel said. “But how do the girls get back and forth?”

“Zoe’s still too young to drive, so either Sid picks her up and brings her out or I do. Of course, now that Giselle is home for the summer, she can do some of the driving. Marsha and Sid share custody. When school was in session, it used to be the girls stayed with their mother during the week and then we had them every other weekend, with the situation reversed during the summer. Now that they’re older and especially with Giselle off at school, we’re all a lot more flexible. They come and go at their own discretion. I think it’s really important for everyone that we keep things as civilized as possible.”

“Commendable,” Mel said. “What kind of car does Giselle drive?”

“It’s an Acura,” Monica said. “A silver Acura. Sid bought it for her when she graduated from high school.”

A car pulled into the driveway and I heard the sound of a garage door opening.

“That’ll be Sid,” Monica told us. “He’s been out of town for several days.”

It seemed likely that Sid Longmire’s view of our visit would be far less cordial than Monica’s, especially if the governor had managed to alert him as to what was going on. We decided it was time to beat a hasty retreat.

“We’ll be going then,” I said.

“You don’t want to talk to him, too?”

“No, thanks,” I assured her. “We appreciate your help.”

We made a quick exit out the front door and were gone before Sid Longmire was able to unload his luggage from the car and come inside.

Sometimes the best way to win a confrontation is to avoid it in the first place.

She wasn’t at all what I expected,” I said as we walked back out to the car.

“Not what I expected, either,” Mel agreed. “A lot older and a whole lot more squared away.”

I was relieved to know that I wasn’t the only one who had arrived at Sid and Monica’s house with some erroneous preconceived notions.

During the interview with Monica Longmire, my cell phone had vibrated three different times in my pocket. Once in the car, Mel immediately got on the phone, checking with Records for licensing information on Giselle Longmire’s Acura and for any vehicles owned or driven by her boyfriend, Ron Miller, or by other members of his family.

I have a Bluetooth earpiece for my cell phone, but I’m not in love with it. Even though Mel and I put it to good use to save our bacon a few months ago, I use it only under duress. Most of the time it stays in my pocket until the battery runs out of juice. Rather than use a state-sanctioned “hands-free” device, I pulled into a parking place beside the guard shack, pulled out my phone, checked the missed calls, and listened to my messages.

I recognized all three of the numbers. Two were from Rebekah Ming, the manager at Tumwater Self-Storage. There were two calls from her but only one message. “Mr. Beaumont, I’ve had several customer complaints about garbage being hauled into the storage facility. You need to come by and empty it every day. Please. We don’t want to attract vermin.”

The other one was from Ralph Ames. “I understand you’re in Olympia at the Red Lion for the next couple of days. I happen to be coming down there tomorrow. Hoping to have breakfast. I’ll be there right around eight. Let me know if you can’t make it.”

From my door-to-door salesman days, I recognized that as an assumed close. When one asked for an appointment, the standard question was always: “Which would be better for you, mornings or afternoons?” The question is designed to leave the dreaded words “Not ever” out of the list of possible answers, with the underlying assumption being that of course you want to see me.

The idea of Ralph just “happening” to be in Olympia at that ungodly hour-a good ninety miles from Seattle-was also bogus. Ralph isn’t a spontaneous kind of guy. He doesn’t ever just “happen” to go someplace. He has appointments-deliberate appointments-and like it or not, Mel and I would be having breakfast with him in the morning. Evidently the governor’s garbage, piling up in the storage unit, couldn’t wait until then.

Mel was still on her phone and on hold. Here’s an idea. Why don’t cell phone companies discount the minutes people spend online without talking to anyone?

“Breakfast with Ralph tomorrow morning at the hotel at eight A.M.,” I told her, putting the car in gear. “But right now we’re on our way to Ross’s storage unit. You dodged garbage detail yesterday, but not today.”

“Dressed like this?” she asked.

“We’ll be careful.”

Moments later Mel was taking notes, holding the phone to her mouth with her shoulder and typing them into her laptop.

“Okay,” she said when she ended the call “Here’s the scoop on Ron Miller-Ronald Darrington Miller lives on North Cooper Point Road.”

“Darrington is his middle name?” I asked. “Like the town along Highway 2? It sounds a little pretentious.”

“Oh, right,” Mel said with a laugh. “Look who’s talking. Is being named after a town in Texas pretentious?”

She certainly had me there.

“Middle name notwithstanding, Ron is seventeen years old and already has two traffic stops to his credit-a Minor in Possession and a speeding ticket, reduced from reckless driving. The MIP charge was dropped for no apparent reason.”

“No wonder Monica doesn’t like him much. And how did the MIP get dropped? Political pull of some kind?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“What make and model car?”

“A brand-new Camaro with temporary plates. Probably a high school graduation present.”

“I guess it was too much to hope that he would be driving a green pickup truck.”

“I guess,” Mel agreed.

With a detour by an all-night drugstore for a bottle of Febreze, we drove straight to Tumwater Self-Storage. As soon as we stepped into the hallway I understood why Rebekah had been so insistent. Foul garbage odors permeated the entire floor. We let ourselves into the storage unit and went to work. I took pity on Mel and gave her the recycling while I tackled the coffee-grounds-leaking garbage. She finished hers in a hurry and then she helped me with mine.

Later on someone told us that finding what we found that night was just “blind luck.” I beg to differ. It wasn’t luck; it was work. And it wasn’t because we were slapdash about it either. Mel and I worked our way through the garbage slowly and methodically and-because of our clothing-carefully as well. There was nowhere to sit. We did it crouching or, in my case, bending over, because the tarp with the garbage on it was on the floor and my knees don’t do “crouch” anymore. I was about to give it up when something shiny caught the light from the bottom of a pile of used coffee grounds.

I brushed away the grounds and there it was-a watch with a stainless steel watchband. “Hey,” I said, “what do you know! Look what I found!”

I picked it up carefully in my gloved fingers and held it up to the light. I would have had to get out my reading glasses to read the front of the watch. Mel didn’t.

“It says ‘Seiko,’ ” she reported. “I could be wrong, but it looks exactly like the one we found on Josh Deeson’s body. Which means we have two watches-two interchangeable watches. What does that mean?”

I blew off the remaining coffee grounds and slipped the watch into an evidence bag. Meanwhile, Mel came over and looked through the trash in the same general area where I had been searching. It stood to reason that if anything else of interest had been thrown away, it would be found in close proximity to the watch. We spent another half hour picking through the trash, but we found nothing more than broken eggshells, soggy mounds of dead melon balls, and rotting strawberries. When we had finished, we dragged the tarps to the Dumpster, where we emptied and folded them. After returning them to the storage unit, we left the key at the office and headed back to the car.