Betrayal of Trust jpb-20

by J. A. Jance

  Rather than wait around for classes to be dismissed, I headed back to the hotel. I figured I had about half an hour before Mel was due to arrive-long enough to stretch out on the bed and maybe grab a nap. It had been a short night and it was stacking up to be a long day.

  I had been asleep for about fifteen minutes when Mel showed up. We’re a good pair. I didn’t ask her about how fast she had driven, and she downed my leftover chicken with no wry comments about that, either.

  Ten minutes later we parked at the curb outside Janie’s House on Seventeenth Avenue Southeast. The three houses involved were all older homes in good repair. The lawns were mowed. The edges were trimmed. The exterior paint jobs were relatively new. From the article I had read I knew that the middle building, the one with the word OFFICE stenciled on the wall next to the doorbell, had once belonged to the shelter’s founder, Deborah Magruder.

  Mel and I were standing on the front porch, preparing to ring the doorbell, when the front door was opened by a middle-aged woman with aggressively orange-and-purple hair and enough piercings to belie her age. “May I help you?” she asked.

  There are times when those four words constitute a real offer of help. There are other times when they mean “Get lost.” This was an example of the latter.

  Mel presented her badge and ID. “We’re with Special Homicide,” she said. “We’d like to speak to you about someone who is possibly one of your clients.”

  “We don’t discuss our clients with anyone,” the woman said. “We’re here to help them. We’re not here to make it easy for cops to hassle them. Believe me, by the time the kids get to us, they’ve usually had a bellyful of people like you.”

  “Homicide investigators?” Mel asked sweetly. “Some of your clients have been suspects in murder investigations?”

  “I mean cops in general,” the woman said.

  “And you are?” Mel persisted.

  “My name is Meribeth Duncan. I’m the executive director of Janie’s House. I have nothing to say to you.”

  Meribeth attempted to turn and go back inside, but somehow Mel managed to insert herself between the executive director and the front door.

  “Does the name Rachel Camber mean anything to you?” she asked.

  “No,” Meribeth said. “And I wouldn’t tell you if it did. The kids who come here do so with the understanding that the services we provide are confidential. Most of them are homeless or come from homes that are so horrendous that they’d be better off homeless. They come here needing a place to hang out where they can be safe and clean. Do you have any idea how hard it is to stay warm or dry or clean when you’re on the streets? We have showers here. We have clothes washers and dryers along with a supply of donated clothing.”

  “What about beds?” I asked.

  “Our mission is to serve as a drop-in center only,” Meribeth replied.

  “What does that mean?”

  “We provide counseling, educational support like homework help and computer access. We don’t allow for overnight accommodations. Our liability insurance specifically precludes us from doing so.”

  That made me wonder. Rachel had told Kenny she’d be staying with “Janie.” That wasn’t true, but clearly she had stayed somewhere between the time she left home on Sunday and the time she turned up dead. We needed to know where she had stayed during that time, and if she had stayed there because she wanted to, or had she been held somewhere against her will?

  “If you don’t know Rachel Camber,” Mel said, “what about Josh Deeson?”

  Meribeth’s eyes narrowed. “The name sounds familiar, but. .”

  “You may have heard it on the news this morning,” Mel said. “He’s Governor Longmire’s stepgrandson.”

  “The kid who committed suicide?” Meribeth asked.

  Anticipating that there would most likely be a female gatekeeper at Janie’s House, Mel and I had decided on a plan of action. Mel would do the talking. I would be in charge of show-and-tell. About the time the woman was saying she didn’t know Josh, I pulled out his photo and held it out to her.

  “That’s him?” Meribeth asked. “That’s Josh?”

  I nodded.

  Meribeth shook her head. “He’s definitely not one of our clients. I’ve never seen him before. Besides, if he lived at the governor’s mansion, Josh Deeson was a long way from needing our kinds of services.”

  “And this is Rachel,” I said. “Rachel Camber from Packwood, Washington. She was found dead, murdered, in a water-retention pond in Centralia early this morning. Her parents just went back home after identifying her body.”

  This time Meribeth winced. It was a tiny gesture, but a telling one. Meribeth knew Rachel, and she didn’t try to deny it.

  “Her name is Amber, not Rachel,” Meribeth said. “At least that’s the name she went by when she was here.” She sighed and then looked up and down the street. “I suppose you should come inside,” she added reluctantly. “We need to talk.”

  She led us into the house-through a foyer, past a reception desk, and into a small office that had been carved out of what must once have been a spacious living room. She sat down behind a cluttered wooden desk and motioned Mel and me into chairs in front of it. We might have gotten off to a rocky start, but the mention of Rachel’s murder had broken down some of the barriers.

  “What about the dead boy?” Meribeth asked. “Is he a suspect in her death?”

  “Josh probably would have been,” Mel said, “but he died a good twenty-four hours before Rachel Camber was killed. That means he’s dead, but he’s also in the clear. You’re sure you’ve never seen him before?”

  “Never!”

  Meribeth’s answer was forceful. As far as I could tell, it was also truthful.

  “So how does this work?” Mel asked, gesturing at the Janie’s House surroundings. “Kids can come here and stay for free for as long as they like?”

  “No,” Meribeth answered. “As I said earlier, we’re not a group home facility. No one sleeps over. The shelter opens at seven in the morning and closes at ten at night. Drop-ins only. Generally boys hang out in the house west of here and girls on the other side. This building is the only one that’s truly coed. We have a library here as well as the computer lab. The other houses have TVs and VCRs, showers, kitchens, and laundry facilities. Here we try to maintain a kind of study hall atmosphere. During the school year we concentrate on academics. There’s some of that during the summer as well. A lot of our kids need remedial help, but during the summer months the emphasis is on having fun.”

  “Supervision?” I asked.

  “We have volunteer houseparents who manage each building,” she said. “Those are often former clients who’ve gone on to make better lives for themselves. And don’t think what we do here is free. We don’t charge money for our services, but the kids who come here are expected to help out. They do chores-dusting, sweeping, painting, loading dishwashers, yard work-just like kids are supposed to do at home.”

  “You make computers and cell phones available to your clients?” Mel asked.

  “Of course. Social networking is vital these days. Kids who are too poor to have access to e-mail or texting are marginalized or even ostracized. We do what we can to rectify that. There’s a cell phone in each building that’s for client use, and we have a total of ten computers.”

  “Do you keep track of Internet usage?”

  “We keep track of who uses the computers, but we certainly don’t monitor what they do on them, and we don’t censor them, either,” Meribeth said.

  “What about attendance?” I asked. “Do you keep track of who comes and goes, check photo IDs, anything like that?”

  Meribeth shook her head. “No. We’re a support system and we’re privately funded. We don’t have to keep attendance records to justify our existence.”

  “What about those chores?” I asked. “Are there sign-up sheets for those?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The houseparents handle those. They�
�re in closer contact with the kids than I am, but this is all done on a first-name basis only. Or at least what they claim to be their first names. And we don’t keep track of those, either. We work on an honor system. I assume you know what that is.”

  The first-name-only ploy was just that-a ploy to protect Janie’s House clients from people like Mel and me. I didn’t much like Meribeth’s snide “honor system” dig, either, but I didn’t push back right then because I saw Mel was reaching into her purse and retrieving her phone. That meant she was about to deliver some serious push-back of her own.

  “Do you happen to offer any drama classes here?” Mel asked. “Or filmmaking?”

  “We don’t offer any official classes as such,” Meribeth said. “We have a staff of volunteer tutors that comes in to help out as needed. That’s not to say that some of our clients aren’t involved in those kinds of classes, however. We actively encourage those pursuits. Through the years we’ve found that creative arts activities can be very therapeutic.”

  “I’m sure,” Mel said agreeably. “And I can tell you for sure that some of your clients have a real flair for the dramatic. If you don’t mind, I’d like to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a film clip that we believe may have originated here. At least it was sent out as a file first from one of the computers in this building and then from one of your cell phones. You’ll probably find it to be graphic, offensive, and quite shocking. We did, too. You do know what a snuff film is, don’t you?”

  “A snuff film?” Meribeth repeated. “You mean one of those movies where someone is actually killed on-screen? If that’s what you’re about to show me, I’m not interested,” she declared. “I will not watch such a thing. I won’t allow you to show it to me. You need to leave now. If you don’t, I’ll call the police.”

  “We are the police,” Mel reminded her. “And you don’t need to worry. It turns out that although this film is very convincing, it’s also make-believe. We now know that the young woman who is supposedly being murdered in this video, the girl you said was Amber, was still alive for a period of time after the film was made.”

  Without saying anything further, Mel activated the clip. Despite Meribeth’s protestations, there was absolute silence in the room as the clip played. By the time it finished playing, Meribeth Duncan’s face was ashen.

  “Are you sure she wasn’t really dead?” Meribeth asked. “It looked so real.”

  “Yes, it did look real,” Mel agreed, “but according to the medical examiner, she didn’t die until sometime later.”

  “And you think one of my clients is behind this. . this. .”

  Unable to find a strong enough word to express her horror, Meribeth left the sentence unfinished.

  “The clip was downloaded onto one of your computers here, probably from a thumb drive,” Mel explained. “Next it was uploaded to one of your cell phones. From there it went to Josh Deeson’s phone. That’s where it was found early Monday morning. We believe your cell phones were also used to send Josh any number of ugly text messages.”

  “Josh-the boy who committed suicide?”

  “Yes,” Mel said. “That happened yesterday morning. Rachel Camber’s body was found early this morning, but the coroner estimates that she was killed only a few hours before she was found.”

  “What do you need from me?” Meribeth asked.

  “We’re in the process of getting a search warrant so we can access your phone and Internet records. I’m expecting it to show up any minute.”

  “You won’t need a warrant,” Meribeth said. “As far as I’m concerned, you have my full cooperation.”

  Chapter 19

  Meribeth Duncan may have been a raging bleeding heart with a knee-jerk contempt for the police, but once she reached her tipping point, she was all in. It turned out a number of folks in the neighborhood had been waging a land-use war with her for years, trying to shut Janie’s House down completely.

  “Once this gets out, that might give them enough ammunition to go to the city council,” she said. “So how do we fix it? And how do we do it without letting the other kids know what’s up? Some of them might not come back at all if they find out the cops have been here.”

  My concerns tended to go in the opposite direction. I was afraid the troublemakers would do their best to delete any offending files from the computer system as well as from the phones. I had a good deal of faith in Todd Hatcher’s ability to recover any missing data, but still the idea of avoiding an obvious police presence at Janie’s House seemed like a good one. And certainly my Mercedes, parked on the street in front of the office, gave no hint of being a cop car.

  Finally, at my suggestion and citing a bogus plumbing emergency, Meribeth went from building to building, dismissing the houseparents who were on duty and shooing out any kids who had settled in for the day. Once they were gone, she posted a notice on each of the front and back doors saying that Janie’s House would reopen at 7:00 A.M. on Thursday.

  When Todd Hatcher arrived, properly drawn search warrant in hand, he came to the party in a mud-spattered pickup truck that didn’t look any more like a copmobile than my S-550. Nothing about our vehicles gave any kind of hint that Janie’s House, currently off-limits to its teenage clients, was dealing with anything other than a plumbing problem, or that the place was currently being scrutinized by members of Ross Connors’s Special Homicide Investigation Team.

  One whole wall of the director’s office was lined with four-drawer file cabinets. It turned out that Meribeth knew a lot more about the clients Janie’s House served than she had let on initially. She may not have kept official “attendance records,” but each client had a file, a paper file, with both first and last names attached, kept under lock and key in that collection of file cabinets.

  During three separate visits to Janie’s House, Rachel Camber had operated under the alias of Amber Wilson. Meribeth plucked the file with Amber’s name on it out of a drawer, opened it, and perused the papers she saw there for the better part of a minute. Then she closed the file and handed it to me.

  “When clients come here, they fill out that first page. If they want to give us an alias, we respect that. This is our needs assessment page. It’s designed to tell us something about where the kids are, especially if there’s any area of study that’s giving them trouble. We also want to find out what it is they’re hoping to accomplish. One of our jobs is to do what we can to help them meet their goals, no matter how mundane or how lofty. If you look at Amber’s goals statement, you’ll see she wanted to attend a cheerleading camp.”

  “I know,” I said, studying the information on the page. “Her stepfather told us about that. He said they couldn’t afford it.”

  “Right,” Meribeth agreed. “Those can be prohibitively expensive. One of my people was working on locating scholarship money that would have enabled her to attend a cheerleading camp later this summer. We expected to hear back on that any day now. That, of course, she would have attended under her real name.”

  “So you have both.”

  Meribeth nodded. “Usually,” she said.

  I took another look at Meribeth Duncan. With her orange-and-purple hair and her iconoclastic manner of dress-army fatigues and scuzzy boots-I doubted she had ever had any yearnings to be a cheerleader. A lot of folks in her position might have tried to steer her charges into things more to their own liking. The fact that she had supported Amber/Rachel’s ambition rather than denigrated it made me revise some of my initial thinking about Meribeth.

  “So did she come here this week?” I asked.

  Meribeth shook her head. “Not that I know of, but it’s possible she was here without my seeing her. We can check with the houseparents who have been on duty this week.”

  I made a note to do just that while Meribeth turned to another file cabinet. “I’ll give you a list of names and phone numbers,” she said. “These four drawers contain information on all of our volunteers. Some
of them do nothing but fund-raising. Some specialize in finding sources of appropriate scholarships. You’ll find files on all our houseparents, past and present, in here, as well as all our tutors. Some of those are retired teachers and businesspeople, although most of our tutors come from nearby high schools and colleges.”

  “Kids teaching kids?” I asked. “How does that work?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Meribeth said. “With kids who have a natural aversion to authority figures, peer-to-peer tutoring works surprisingly well.”

  By then Todd, working in a carrel-lined study, had located the offending computer-the one that had been used to upload the film clip to one of the shelter’s cell phones.

  In a matter of minutes he hit pay dirt. “Hey,” Todd said. “Come take a look at this.”

  I have a bad reaction to standing beside someone’s chair and trying to look at a computer screen. I guess it reminds me too much of standing next to a teacher’s desk to have a paper corrected.

  “Just tell us,” I said.

  Todd looked at Meribeth. “Let me guess. This whole computer system was donated, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Whoever did that was interested in helping you, but they must also have had some concerns that their donated system might be put to some kind of nefarious use,” Todd explained. “There’s a hidden file in this computer that functions as a virtual logbook-an invisible virtual logbook. The same program is probably on the other computers as well. Before new users can access the system, they have to create profiles that include their names-or at least whatever aliases they employ here-as well as their user names. After that, the logbook maintains a record of each time that user logs in or out as well as which computer was used.”