J. Jance - Betrayal of Trust

“So it would appear,” Mel replied. “We can’t be certain, of course.”

Tears welled up again. Marsha took a ragged breath. “She had such a nice smile. I’m going to be seeing that smile in nightmares for the rest of my life. You have to find out who did this, even if. .” She stopped cold because she was thinking the unthinkable-that somehow one of the hands pulling the deadly scarf tight around an unsuspecting little girl’s neck belonged to her husband’s beloved grandson.

Marsha seemed to focus on Mel now rather than on me. “How do you do it?” Marsha asked. “How can you stand to deal with all those dead people?”

“Someone has to,” Mel answered. “Someone has to look out for the victims. Sometimes we’re all they have.”

Marsha nodded. “That’s what Ross said, too, but I can’t believe that Josh would be involved in something like this. The idea that he’d even have the image-” She broke off and then shivered. “It’s chilling. I can’t take it in. But if he wasn’t involved somehow, why would someone send it to him?”

There’s a time for brusque questions, and there’s a time for gentle conversation. This was the latter, and Mel is better at doing that than anyone I know.

“First off, Madam Governor-” she began.

“Please, call me Marsha,” the governor interrupted. “I’m not feeling very much like a governor today.”

“First off, Marsha,” Mel began again, “there’s no way to tell how old the film is. We may discover that it’s something that has been out there on the Internet for a long time.”

“You mean like on YouTube or something? Do they have sites like that?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Mel answered. “Lots of them. More than you can imagine.”

“So maybe it didn’t happen here-in Washington, I mean,” she said.

That was a bit of light in a very dark tunnel. Marsha Longmire grabbed at that straw for all it was worth.

“That’s what we’ll hope,” Mel said. “What time does your grandson come home from school?”

“My husband’s grandson,” Marsha said.

Marsha had obviously been shocked and shaken by what she had seen on the iPhone, and she was suffering because of it. Up to that moment, the one when she deftly distanced herself from her grandson, I had let myself be carried along by a wave of sympathy for her. Just then, though, I caught a glimpse of the teenager who, along with her fat-cat pals, had found it so easy to torment a gawky poor kid from downtown Ballard who had the unmitigated nerve to inhabit the same universe. And behind the gleeful expression on the mocking teenager’s face from long ago and the pained one on this woman’s face, I could see Marsha Longmire for what she was-a tough-minded politician. Josh Deeson might live in her home, but if he was involved in some kind of sordid mess that might dim Governor Longmire’s chances for reelection, the kid was about to be thrown under the bus.

As they say, blood is thicker than water, and Josh’s connection to Marsha Longmire had apparently just turned into H2O. I wondered if he would have been treated the same way if he were an actual blood relation. In fact, given the public scandal that was bound to ensue, I wasn’t so sure Gerard Willis, the First Husband himself, would manage to make the cut.

Strike one for Governor Longmire. In her book being a politician came first; wife and mother were a distant second.

When I turned back to the conversation at hand, I found that Mel had continued the interview without me.

“But you didn’t recognize the girl when you saw her.”

Governor Longmire shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”

“And as far as you know, she’s not one of Josh’s friends or acquaintances.”

“Josh doesn’t have any friends,” Marsha said. “Or at least not many. That’s one of his problems.”

In my book, that constituted strike two for the governor. When you’re a friendless, parentless kid, you’re stuck in a cruel universe that is not of your own making. I had never met Josh Deeson, but I was already in his corner.

“Does Josh wear any jewelry, like a watch or a ring?” Mel asked.

“Josh has the Seiko watch Gerry gave him for eighth-grade graduation. At least I think he still has it. Although, now that you mention it, I don’t think he’s been wearing it much lately.”

Strike three. Governor Longmire was clearly far too important to notice what the kid she’s supposed to be looking after might be wearing. Believe me, I know teenagers can be annoying as hell. And I have some experience with being a less than exemplary parent, but I had also read about some of Marsha Longmire’s stump speeches where she waxed eloquent on a return to “traditional family values” and talked about how loving parenting was needed to bring at-risk kids back from the brink, as long as said at-risk kids weren’t part of her own extended family. How do you spell hypocrite?

Mel glanced at her watch and closed her notebook. “Since you’d like us to complete the search of Josh’s room before he gets home from school, we should probably get started. We won’t be disturbing your husband, will we?”

“No. Gerry is in a hospital bed in what used to be the maid’s quarters on this floor. Before the surgery, going up and down the stairs was just too much for him. Josh’s room is on the third floor.”

“I understand he was using ropes to get in and out?”

Marsha nodded. “Rope ladders, really,” she said. “This is an old building with old wiring and lots of wood. For safety’s sake we keep a rope ladder in each upstairs room to serve as emergency exits in case of fire. Josh used two of them-one to lower himself out his window and onto the balcony over the front portico. He used a second ladder to go from the balcony to the ground.

“One of the guys on my security detail called to report seeing someone exiting the building. Whoever it was managed to get away, but they were pretty sure it was Josh. I went to his room to check. He was gone, but his window was open and the upstairs ladder was tied to the headboard of his bed. I told the security guys that I’d handle things from there, and I did. I left the ropes where they were. When Josh came scrambling back into his room a little after sunrise, guess who was lying in wait? He was quite surprised to see me.”

“I’ll bet he was,” I said. “Is that where Josh’s computer is, on his desk?”

She nodded. “I tried accessing it, but it’s password-protected now with his password instead of mine.”

Somehow I doubted a fifteen-year-old’s idea of an unbreakable password would be much of a barrier to a computer-savvy guy like Todd Hatcher.

“What about your husband?” Mel asked. “Might he know the password?”

“He might, but please don’t ask him. As I said, Gerry is ill. If I can be trusted to handle the governing of Washington State, I can certainly handle a recalcitrant fifteen-year-old. I told Josh that, because he broke curfew, he was losing all his privileges, including his cell phone and his computer. He knew I wasn’t bluffing, and he handed over the cell phone. The computer is up in his room. I made sure he didn’t delete anything before he left for school.”

“I’m assuming you didn’t mention anything to Mr. Willis about what you found on the phone.”

“Absolutely not,” she declared. “I saw no reason to upset him. It was bad enough that I was upset.”

Mel stood up and collected her purse. “Let’s go upstairs and execute that search warrant,” she said. “We don’t have much time.”

Marsha Longmire led us through the house and up two sets of stairways, all the while giving us a running commentary about who the mansion’s builders were, how much it had cost to build it, how much it had cost to renovate, and how much it had cost to rehab the place after it had been allowed to deteriorate almost to the point of demolition.