J. Jance - Betrayal of Trust

Then Mel’s phone rang. She answered. “No!” she said. “When?” And then, “Okay. We’ll be right there.”

She picked up her purse. “Sorry,” she told Ralph. “Time to go to work.”

“What?” I asked.

“That was Ross,” she said. “There’s been a fire at Janie’s House overnight. He says the office building is a total loss.”

Ralph’s cell phone rang just then, too. Answering, he waved at us while I gathered up the photos and took them along as we left the restaurant.

“Are you okay?” Mel asked as we got into the car.

“Okay,” I said, “and more than a little amazed. Thanks for putting Ralph on the case.”

“You’re welcome,” she said.

It took only a few minutes to drive from the Red Lion to what was left of Janie’s House. Contrast is everything. The restaurant had been quiet and verging on sedate. At Janie’s House, chaos reigned for several blocks in either direction on Seventeenth Avenue Southeast. As Ross had told Mel, the middle building in the three-house complex had burned to the ground. Sparks from that had ignited the roof on one of the other two buildings and had burned through the shingles and into the attic space. No doubt that one would have suffered both smoke and water damage. Only the charred back wall of the middle building was still standing when we arrived. Firemen swarmed around it, extinguishing hot spots.

Our Special Homicide badges were enough to get us through the police barricades. Officers there told us that the fire chief in charge of the incident was Alan Mulholland. Dressed in full firefighting gear, he stood at the center of the action waving his arms and shouting out orders, while a frantic Meribeth Duncan, wearing sweats and with her orange-and-purple hair in sleep-tossed disarray, dogged his every step.

“How is it possible that there’s this much damage when the fire department is just down the street?” she demanded. “Couldn’t you have done something sooner?”

“Look, lady,” he said impatiently, “we were here less than four minutes after the call came in. You should have had hardwired smoke detectors in all the buildings. The one in the second building went off just fine when the roof caught fire,” he said, pointing toward the house next door.

“All three buildings had the same kind of equipment,” Meribeth insisted. “We had to install smoke detectors in order to bring them up to code. We have state-of-the-art intrusion detectors as well.”

“Then maybe you should have a chat with the installer,” Mulholland said. “This one didn’t work at all.”

Mel took Meribeth by the arm and led her away, giving me a clear shot at Mulholland.

“Is there a chance someone disabled the alarm?” I asked.

“That’s a possibility, I suppose,” Mulholland began, then he stopped answering my questions, glared at me, and fired back one of his own. “Who the hell are you?”

When I showed him my badge, he gave me an appraising look. “Special Homicide,” he mused. “That’s Ross Connors’s outfit, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“What are you doing here? I haven’t released any information about finding a body.”

“Is there one?” I asked.

My question was met with a sharp “No comment.”

Which told me that there was a body, but I didn’t press him about it.

“We’re here working another case,” I told him.

“A case connected to what happened here?” he asked.

“Could be,” I said.

When someone starts a game of noncooperation, it’s always pleasant to return the favor.

“So what are we talking about here,” I asked, “arson?”

Mulholland gave me a long look. Then, because I seemed to have passed some kind of first-responder professional muster, he gave me a reasonable answer.

“Looks good for arson, but we don’t know that for sure,” Mulholland said. “It’ll have to cool off before we can do any real investigating. It’s too soon to send in the accelerant-sniffing dogs, but I’d say, yes, my best guess is arson. And, yes, there’s at least one body in the rubble and maybe more. If it turns out that alarms and sprinkler systems were disabled, that would boost the likelihood of it being an inside job.”

Mel came over and joined us at that point. “How tough is that to do?”

Mulholland looked at her and then at me. “We’re together,” I said.

“It might be tough, but for someone with a reasonable amount of tech savvy, it wouldn’t be impossible.”

“Who called in the fire?” I asked.

“Some guy out delivering newspapers on his morning route saw it first. The 911 call came in just after six A.M., but the fire had been burning for some time before that. It looks like the fire was started in one of the back rooms, so it wasn’t visible from the front until after it had a good burn going. My lieutenant over there has the delivery guy’s contact information. Other than the fire, he didn’t see anyone. At least that’s what he told us.”

As Mel went to get the contact information, my phone rang. I hauled it out of my pocket. Caller ID said it was a restricted call. That usually means that the caller is a member of some political action committee bent on saving the whales or opposing abortion. How solicitors at both ends of the political spectrum ended up with my cell phone number on their lists is more than I can understand, and I didn’t make it easy for them. There was an unmistakable hint of frost in my voice when I answered.

“Who’s calling?”

“Captain Hoyt, with the Washington State Patrol,” Joan Hoyt said. “Dr. Mowat just sent over the official copy of his autopsy report on Josh Deeson. It turns out there was one item in particular he failed to mention to me earlier.”

“Anything we should know?” I asked.

“Apparently Josh was sexually active,” Joan said, “and not in the boy-girl sense of the word, either. There’s no way to tell if it was consensual or not, but there’s evidence of a recent sexual encounter that included sodomy.”

“What do you mean by ‘recent’?” I asked.

“Within ten to twelve hours of his death,” Joan answered.

“Is there enough for a DNA profile?”

“Mowat says not, but you and I know that’s a load of crap. I know they can extract DNA profiles from tiny microscopic samples, but I also know DNA testing isn’t cheap. I think that’s the real reason Mowat is dragging his heels. For him it boils down to a budgetary issue. He doesn’t want to squander his resources on something that’s going to turn out to be a simple suicide. Don’t worry, though,” Joan added. “I may have figured out a way to bypass him on this. To do that, however, I’ll need your help.”

“What kind of help?” I asked.

“I seem to remember there were dirty clothes in the hamper in Josh Deeson’s room.”

“Right,” I said. “I remember that, too.”

“I want those clothes,” Joan declared. “The room is still designated as a crime scene, so I’m hoping his family members have stayed out of it. I considered sending an officer over to the governor’s mansion to collect any and all clothing from the hamper in his bedroom, but I’m not eager to have to explain why we’re asking for it. You seem to have a good rapport with the governor and her husband. Do you think you and Ms. Soames could handle it?”

“Wait a minute. These people’s kid committed suicide and now we’re going to show up and drop the emotionally incendiary bomb that maybe he was gay, too?”

“Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t,” Joan said. “But one thing I know for sure is that Josh Deeson was a juvenile. According to Washington State law, that would make anyone having a sexual encounter with him guilty of statutory rape. That also makes Josh Deeson a victim.”