by J. A. Jance
“I’ll call the head of the WSP and tell them we’ll be working on this with them. It’s a good thing Governor Longmire called you,” Ross said. “Give me a minute. I’ll get back to you.”
Ross ended the call. I got out of the Cayman and followed Mel up the paved brick driveway that led to the governor’s mansion. There were a couple of city cop cars parked out front and a WSP command car as well. If an ambulance had been summoned, it had already come and gone. In its place was a van with an insignia that said “Thurston County Medical Examiner.”
A baby-faced kid decked out in an Olympia PD uniform, who looked far too young to be on the job, opened the door. Mel showed him her badge.
“Oh,” he said. “You’re the ones the governor wants to see. She’s in her office.”
He gestured toward the study. When we knocked on the door frame, the governor motioned us in through the open door.
Between her tearful phone call a few minutes earlier and now, Marsha Longmire had managed to compose herself. She had donned her official look, in both clothing and expression, that announced to all comers: “I am the governor and I am in charge.” That maybe impressed the unsophisticated kid manning the front door, but I wasn’t as awed by the surroundings as he was. Besides, I glimpsed the gratitude on Marsha’s starkly pale face when Mel and I first walked into the room.
I caught the look and I read the message: Governor Longmire didn’t want any cops in her home, but she had decided we were okay-the best of a bad bargain.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
Since Ross had ordered us onto the case, doing anything less would have been dereliction of duty, but I didn’t tell her that.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “What happened? Who found him?”
“Zoe,” Marsha answered. “When he didn’t come down for breakfast, I sent her up to get him. And there he was. The way she screamed. .” Marsha paused and shook her head. “It was terrible. I’ve never heard a sound like that. She’s in shock. I called our family doctor. He’s going to come by and give her something.”
“He hasn’t yet?”
“No,” Marsha said. “He’s on his way, but as far as I know he hasn’t arrived.”
“Is there anyone else here besides Zoe?”
“No, it’s just the three of us. Giselle spent the night at her dad’s place.”
Mel stood up. “Where’s Zoe right now?”
“She’s up in her room on the second floor,” Marsha began, “but I’d rather you didn’t-”
“We need to talk to her now,” I explained, interrupting her objection. “If the doctor gives her something to settle her down, it may also remove some important detail from her memory of the scene.”
“All right,” Marsha said reluctantly. “Turn right when you get off the stairs. It’s the room at the end of the hall.”
As Mel left the room, my phone rang. It was Ross. “I need to take this,” I told Marsha. “It’s the AG.”
She nodded and waved, but I’m not sure she was really paying attention.
“Are you at the mansion?” Ross asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Please give the governor my condolences,” he said.
I held the phone away from my ear. “Mr. Connors says he’s sorry for your loss.”
Marsha nodded, but again she didn’t seem connected to my words.
“Here’s how this is going to go down,” Ross continued. “S.H.I.T. will handle the investigation, but we’ll be using state patrol crime scene investigators. It’ll be a joint case.”
It was also going to be a big case. I understood Ross’s thinking. It was better to spread the responsibility around. If the case turned into a blame game somewhere along the line, that could be spread around as well.
“Where did it happen?” Ross asked.
“Upstairs in his room. It’s on the third floor.”
“Is there anyone there right now?” Ross asked. I relayed the question to Marsha Longmire.
She sighed. “I believe the M.E. got here a few minutes ago.”
“Did you hear that?” I asked Ross.
“Yes, I did,” he replied. “The Thurston County M.E. isn’t one of my favorite people. If that yahoo is on the scene, you’d better get your butt there, too.”
I excused myself to the governor and then, bad knees or not, I ran all the way up the stairs to the top floor, to Josh Deeson’s floor.
M.E.s and cops are supposedly on the same side, but we’re not necessarily on the same page. Medical examiners want to know how someone died. Homicide cops want to know who did it and why. Medical examiners are concerned with bodies. They’re not concerned with preserving crime scene evidence. Cases often turn on the smallest particles of trace evidence. For that reason, crime scenes have to be treated with great reverence and care. The items found under those circumstances need to be handled like fine, fragile antiques.
Some M.E.s are great, but some end up being the proverbial bulls in a china shop.
Unfortunately the Thurston County M.E., Larry Mowat, falls in the latter category. And since Olympia is both the state capital and the Thurston County seat, Ross Connors most likely had had enough dealings with Mowat to know whereof he spoke. I had met Mowat at various conferences, but I knew him primarily by reputation, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
I stopped outside the door long enough to slip on a pair of crime scene booties and a pair of latex gloves. Mel and I keep a ready supply of them in our vehicles so we can slip them into our pockets at a moment’s notice. I found Dr. Mowat sitting on the edge of Josh’s bed-his carefully made bed. The M.E. wore neither booties nor gloves. He was staring down at the dead boy, who lay on the floor between the open closet door and the closet itself.
As Marsha had already explained, a makeshift rope had been manufactured by stringing together a whole set of out-of-date neckties. They had been tied with knots that would have done an Eagle Scout proud. It wasn’t surprising that a kid obsessed with instruments of torture and death would be able to fashion an impressive noose for himself, one that had done the job for which it was intended.
Josh was clearly dead, but his stiffly spiked hair remained perfectly intact. I had a feeling someone-his grandfather, most likely-would come along and flatten out those spikes before Josh Deeson was laid in his final resting place.
I noticed something else, too. He was wearing a wristwatch-a good-quality wristwatch with a stainless-steel band. I would have had to turn Josh’s hand over to see if it was his graduation-present Seiko, but I didn’t. Until the crime scene photos had been taken, I didn’t want to touch anything at all.
I recognized Dr. Larry Mowat. He didn’t recognize me.
“You crime scene?” he asked. “I called for my guys a while ago. I’ve got no idea what’s taking them so long. They should have been here by now.”
I knew exactly what was taking so long. His guys weren’t coming. Ross Connors had sent word down from on high. As a result Thurston County had called off their forensics people because Ross was sending in CSIs from the Washington State Patrol. The fact that no one had bothered to let Dr. Mowat know told me he was almost as popular with his fellow Thurston County employees as he was with the attorney general.
“I’m with Special Homicide,” I told Mowat. “I understand we’ll be handling this case from here on out.”
“Special Homicide? You mean that S.H.I.T. outfit that works for the AG?” Mowat asked derisively. “Somebody needs to tell Ross Connors to get over himself. This is a suicide, not a homicide. I know Ross holds me in pretty low regard, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of brainpower to see that this kid offed himself. He even left us a note.”
“What note?” I asked. This was the first I had heard of any note.
“On the desk over there. It says, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ What a joke. Take what? Like living in the governor’s mansion is some kind of hardship?”
For Dr. Larry Mowat, this qualified as wit.
I went o
ver to the desk and looked down at the note. I didn’t touch it and I hoped Mowat hadn’t touched it either as I read it myself, aloud. It was, as they say, short but brief:
“I can’t take it anymore.” The initials J.D. were scrawled underneath those stark five words.
I noticed right away that there was a grammatical problem with that sentence. It was a case of what my high school English teacher, Mrs. Reeder, would have called “faulty pronoun reference.” In fact, if she’d still been alive and had seen the note, I’m sure those are the very words she would have written on Josh’s suicide note in bright red-colored pencil: FAULTY PRONOUN REFERENCE!!! She always wrote her remarks in capital letters with plenty of exclamation marks after them.
As I remember her long-winded harangues on the subject, pronouns are used in place of nouns, more specifically nouns that precede the pronouns in question-the pronouns’ antecedents. Mrs. Reeder was a holy terror, by the way, and spending a year in her class was tantamount to being brainwashed. After all these years, how else would I even remember the word “antecedent,” to say nothing of what it means?
In the case of Josh’s note, the pronoun “it” had no antecedent, but it told me there had been something terribly wrong in his life. Josh was a kid who had already suffered some pretty hard knocks. As a homicide cop, I leaned toward the idea that Josh’s mysterious “it” referred to his involvement with the girl in the video clip and to the part he had played in her death.
I’ve seen that happen over and over. Josh wouldn’t be the first suspected murderer to choose to exit on his own rather than deal with the legal consequences of his actions. Still, I couldn’t help wishing the kid had spelled “it” out for us in more detail so we’d be able to give his grieving relatives some real answers.
Dr. Mowat had looked at the note and immediately assumed that what was written there had something to do with ordinary teenage angst. I looked at it with the dubious benefit of having information Dr. Mowat wasn’t privy to. (I won’t even mention Mrs. Reeder’s opinion about ending sentences with prepositions!) What I saw in my mind’s eye were those two hands, pulling inexorably on the ends of that blue scarf, choking the life out of our still-unidentified victim.
Out in the world of criminal justice, a fair amount of attention is given to so-called deathbed confessions. This was neither-not a confession and not a denial.
I looked up from the note and found Dr. Mowat was still sitting on the bed, watching me speculatively.
“Maybe he killed himself because his folks wouldn’t let him have a computer,” Mowat said with a nonchalant shrug. “What teenager these days can get along without a computer? Isn’t not letting your kid have a computer considered to be a form of child abuse?”
I happened to know that Josh Deeson did have a computer. At that very moment it was off in Spokane and being analyzed by a branch of the Washington State Patrol crime lab.
Rather than comment on the computer issue, I changed the subject.
“Who cut him down from the door?” I asked.
The M.E. shrugged. “Probably the EMTs,” he said. “It sure as hell wasn’t me,” he added. “I’ve had my ass chewed a couple of times for doing just that. And take a look at this. Just before he killed himself, the kid was reading his Bible. Get a load of the verse he underlined.”
I saw the book then, hidden behind Dr. Mowat’s considerable bulk. He stood up when I walked over to the bed. The Bible lay open on the bedspread that probably hadn’t been rumpled before Mowat sat on it. A red roller-ball pen marked the page. The book was open to the Gospel According to Saint John. John 14, Verse 2, was underlined in red ink.
“In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”
It tugged at my heart that in the last hours and minutes before taking his own life, Josh Deeson had been reading his Bible-his mother’s Bible.
“Still think this is some kind of homicide instead of a suicide?” Mowat asked. “That looks like a suicide note, too, right there in black and white. Red and white, actually,” he corrected himself.
“I think,” I said truthfully, “suicide or not, there may be more going on here than meets the eye.”
I heard a doorbell, followed instantly by the now-familiar sound of footsteps ascending the creaking stairs. Whoever was coming paused outside the door of the room, no doubt doing the same thing I had done-putting on booties, putting on gloves.
“The CSI guys are here,” I said. “You should probably go wait somewhere else until they finish up.”
Mowat balked. “Go wait somewhere else? Are you kidding? You’re kicking me out of my own crime scene? You can’t do that. This is Thurston County.”
The bedroom door opened. I looked up expecting a group of CSI folks to enter. Instead, Mel Soames, wearing her own booties and latex gloves, slipped quietly into the room, closing the door behind her and leaving a trio of CSI techs stuck on the far side of it.
She looked at Mowat and gave him a thin smile. Not a nice smile, an icy smile. If she had given me that look, it would have shriveled my balls.
“Yes, he can,” she said to him. “You need to go.”
Mowat leered back at her.
“Hey,” he said. “I remember you. I thought you were some kind of detective, but I guess you got kicked back to the gang and now you’re one of the crime scene dolts.”
“Actually, I’m not a crime scene dolt,” she replied, giving the last three words an emphasis I recognized as nothing short of menacing. “I’m still a detective, and I work for S.H.I.T., too, right along with Mr. Beaumont here. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get the hell out. There’s a captain with the Washington State Patrol downstairs talking to the governor. Her name is Joan Hoyt. Give her your information. When we’re ready for you to come pick up the remains, we’ll have Captain Hoyt give you a call.”
Had I said the very same words, the results might have been quite different, but since the orders seemed to come from an entirely unexpected quarter, they threw Mowat for a loss. He didn’t know quite how to react. He looked uncertainly from Mel to me and then back at Mel again.
“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?
