J. Jance - Betrayal of Trust

When I didn’t respond immediately, Joan went right on making her case.

“Look,” she said. “We’ve got a bunch of kids here who have been involved in some pretty unsavory behavior. If you toss your ordinary sexual offender into the mix, who knows? We might get lucky and find some answers in the DNA database.”

Unfortunately, that premise made sense to me. A lot of sexual predators use volunteer work as a cover for searching out and stalking potential victims. It was possible that knowing Josh could have been the victim of a sexual predator might help overcome some if not all of his guardians’ objections to handing over his soiled clothing.

“All right,” I said, allowing myself to be convinced. “We can give it a try.”

As I closed my phone I thought again about Josh’s haunting suicide note: “I can’t take it anymore.”

Our initial assumption had been that “it” had something to do with the texting harassment he’d been subjected to. Now I wondered if being involved in a same-sex relationship might have proved to be more than he could handle. I remembered that some of the harassing text messages had taunted him about having homosexual tendencies. I had thought that was just teenage meanness and spite. Maybe, however, those comments had some truth to them. If so, that, too, might have fueled Josh’s self-loathing and despair.

By then, Fire Chief Mulholland was busy with someone else. Without bothering to tell him good-bye, I went looking for Mel. I found her huddled with some homicide cops from Olympia PD who were making it blatantly clear that they weren’t pleased to have us on the scene.

“So that’s all you’re going to tell us, that the attorney general asked you to stop by an arson fire here in Olympia?” the ranking detective asked. “That he just happened to know there might be a body here?”

“Pretty much,” Mel replied, giving them one of her winning smiles. That managed to defuse the situation, but it didn’t make it go away entirely. Eventually the city cops would connect the dots and come nosing around the governor’s mansion. Before that happened, however, Mel and I wanted to have all our own dots connected.

Not that I blamed the locals, Dr. Bonnie Epstein included, for being pissed. After all, when I was at Seattle PD, I hated having someone from another agency land in one of my own investigations. As I recalled those instances when someone else was the interloper, I couldn’t remember a single time when the willing sharing of information in either direction had been part of the program. Same thing here. We weren’t talking to them and they weren’t talking to us.

“Come on,” I told Mel. “We’ve got to go.”

“Where?” she asked.

“To pick up some laundry.”

Which tweaked the locals that much more. “What laundry?”

“Just some dirty clothes,” I said.

We left the guys from Olympia PD staring at us in disgusted silence as we headed back to the car. On the way I explained the situation. Mel didn’t like the idea of having to broach such a touchy subject with Josh’s grieving family any more than I did.

“What are we going to do,” she asked, “draw straws to see who’s stuck explaining this bad news to Gerry Willis and Governor Longmire?”

Why was it, whenever there was bad news to deliver, we had to resort to pulling straws?

We threaded our way back through the police barricades and found the Mercedes trapped in the middle of a crowd scene. There were kids everywhere, hanging on one another, weeping and wailing. At the closest intersection someone had set up a hand-lettered sign that said WE ¦ JANIE’S HOUSE. Around the base of it was a collection of flowers and a few teddy bears. I’m never sure why there have to be teddy bears at memorials like that, but there are. Always.

We were almost to the car when Mel’s phone rang. I could tell from her part of the conversation that the call was from Rosemary Mellon in Seattle with a few more details from Rachel Camber’s autopsy. Mel was still on the phone when I caught my first glimpses of someone who had to be Giselle Longmire.

DNA is funny that way. In the midst of that crowd of distraught teenagers, and sobbing hysterically like the rest of them, Gizzy was her mother’s daughter through and through. Slender, tanned, fit, and lovely, she had come to the scene in a pair of exceedingly short shorts, but she seemed genuinely dismayed by the fire’s devastation. While I watched, a tall young man wearing a tracksuit made his way through the crowd. When he reached Gizzy, she looked up at him gratefully and then fell against his chest, weeping uncontrollably and craving comfort, while the kid I assumed to be Ronald Darrington Miller gazed off over her head toward the firefighters still dealing with the aftermath of the blaze.

It was an unguarded moment. Ron was standing in a crowd of people, all of whom seemed to be mesmerized by the chaos around them. He had no idea he was being observed. If he had known I was studying him, he might have managed to conceal the look of smug self-satisfaction that washed across his face. Everyone else seemed to be caught up in the emotions of the moment while Ron appeared to glide effortlessly above the fray. Then Gizzy looked up at him and said something to him. In that moment, his face was transformed. Before he replied, he donned a convincing expression of concern.

Of all the people around, I’m pretty sure I was the only one who caught that sudden change. All the other kids gathered there really were shocked and dismayed. Ron Miller was playing at being shocked and dismayed. Big difference.

The cloud cover overhead broke up briefly, illuminating the two of them-Giselle and Ron-in a shaft of sunlight. And that’s when I saw them for what they were: two of the beautiful people whose sense of perfection would have been offended by the very existence of someone less than perfect-namely an interloper like Josh.

I remembered what Monica Longmire had said about Giselle resenting his being added to her family. It seemed reasonable enough to assume that someone with her intimate knowledge of Josh’s background could easily have provided fodder for all those taunting e-mails, while Ron’s connections to the Janie’s House computer and communications systems could have provided the delivery system. If that was the case, the two of them might not have been legally responsible for kicking the chair out from under Josh and his homemade noose, but they were morally responsible for putting him on that chair in the first place.

As for the video clip? That seemed to be part of the general harassment program. Was it possible then that Giselle and Ron, in all their native superiority, were also responsible for that? Had they pretended to murder Rachel Camber and then found it necessary to kill her once the investigation started to get too close? Or had they done it just for kicks? And did they really believe they could murder someone and get away with it?

The brief splash of sunlight went away, taking with it that single telling moment of clarity. I was left with something that was little more than an unfounded hunch. If I was going to follow up on it-if I was even considering investigating the possibility that one or both of the governor’s daughters might be involved in the harassment of Josh Deeson or in the death of Rachel Camber-I needed some evidence that was a hell of a lot more compelling than a bare-bones hunch. I was pretty sure that we were going to have DNA evidence to work with. What I wanted now was something to compare it with. Without probable cause we wouldn’t be able to demand DNA samples, but if we just happened to have some on hand. .

My mother loved Columbo . Had she lived long enough to see the advent of video recorders, she would have watched each and every episode over and over. She loved how Peter Falk, playing the bumbling detective, always got his man. . or woman. It seemed to me that this was an occasion that called for a real-life bumbler.