by J. A. Jance
“Mel and I have been ordered off the case. Joan Hoyt of the Washington State Patrol says the Olympia PD Sex Crimes unit will be taking over that aspect of the investigation. Once the DNA evidence is processed, we’ll try to let you know the findings, but it won’t be our responsibility to take it any further.”
“If Dysart really did molest Josh, I hope he rots in hell,” Gerry Willis said fervently. “But we’re out of it, Mr. Beaumont. Yes, I want to know for sure, but beyond that, whatever he did or didn’t do to Josh is over. I don’t want to know anything more about it, and it’s no one else’s business.”
“But the school district may be liable for bringing him on board,” I objected.
“That’s none of my concern. If there are other kids and other parents who want to make an issue of this, fine, but we’re not bringing up his relationship with Josh with anyone. The poor boy is dead. Surely we can allow him that much privacy-that much respect.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll see to it.”
And so will Ross Connors, I thought. It’s the least we can do.
I let myself out the front door and joined Mel and Gizzy in the S-550. Gizzy was sitting in the backseat crying quietly when I got in behind the wheel. It didn’t matter to me if her tears were due to fear or remorse. The fact that she was shaken enough to be crying seemed like a good sign.
I drove them to the Special Homicide Squad A office and stayed long enough to escort them into a tiny interview room. I turned on the room’s video recording system and made sure it was up and running. I gave Mel an earpiece that allowed two-way communication from inside the interview room to anyone outside in the hallway. When I waved good-bye, Mel’s parting words to me were simple.
“Bring back pizza and sodas.”
Fair enough. We were conducting an updated version of the carrot-and-stick routine. In this case, Gizzy’s parents were the stick and Mel-sweet-talking Mel-was going to be wielding the good cop’s most effective carrot and the interview room’s official secret weapon-pepperoni pizza. As I walked away, I heard Mel launch into the obligatory process of reading Giselle Longmire her rights.
There had been some necessary adjustments in our original plan, but we were also still on track with our general strategy. Mel would interview Gizzy while I tackled Ron Miller.
To that end, I drove straight to Olympia PD. When the guy at Olympia’s lockup facility told me Ron Miller had lawyered up and wasn’t speaking to anyone, I can’t say I was surprised. Ron was accustomed to having his parents haul out their checkbooks and fix whatever mess he had gotten himself into. They had done it at least once before by paying for that burned-out boathouse. I was sure Ronald Darrington Miller was sitting in his cell right then, convinced that by tomorrow morning one or the other of his parents would come bail him out and everything would be fine. I, for one, was pretty sure that on this particular occasion, for the first time in Ron’s highly privileged life, that strategy wasn’t going to work. For one thing, I had firsthand knowledge of something Ron Miller and his parents didn’t know-Marsha and Sid Longmire had had balls enough to throw their daughter under the bus. When they did that, they threw Ron there as well.
I couldn’t interview Ron, but as long as I was at Olympia PD, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to touch base with whoever was working the Janie’s House arson case.
“They’re not here,” the desk sergeant told me when I showed him my badge and ID and asked my question. “They’re out in the field doing a next-of-kin notification.”
“For the victim from the fire?”
The sergeant hesitated for a moment before he nodded. “His name is Owen Wetmore, age thirty-five. Our investigators don’t know if he’s a victim, a participant, or both. When they recovered the body, his ID was in his back pocket, charred but still legible. His parents are off in Europe on some kind of a three-week cruise. The detectives went to Seattle to talk to the grandmother.”
“At thirty-five, Owen is too old to be one of Janie’s House’s homeless clients,” I said.
The sergeant nodded. “My understanding is that he’s one of the houseparents.”
Someone with keys, I thought.
I gave the sergeant a business card. “Have one of the detectives give me a call as soon as they get back,” I said. “I may have some information for them.”
“It could be late,” he counseled. “It’s a long way up to Seattle and back.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s going to be a long night for everyone concerned.”
I stopped by the local Domino’s franchise and picked up a large pizza and three Cokes before I headed back to the office. It was summer. The night was warm. The fragrance of pizza in the car reminded me of summertime parties I had attended long ago, back when I was Gizzy’s age. It saddened me to think that this was most likely the last bite of freshly baked pizza Giselle Longmire would encounter for a very long time.
Back at headquarters, Ross Connors was standing outside the interview room watching through the glass. I was carrying the pizza in one hand and a cardboard multiple-cup container in the other. I set the load down on a nearby table and handed Ross a slice of pizza on a fistful of napkins.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Mel’s working her pretty good,” Ross said, biting the tip off his piece of pizza. “What the hell were these kids thinking?”
“They weren’t thinking,” I said. Then I tapped on the door to the interview room, opened it, and held the door open with my toe long enough to let myself inside.
“Your pizza has arrived,” I said with a flourish. After depositing the food on the interview table, I took my own drink and pizza and rejoined Ross outside in the hallway. Mel was clearly making progress with Gizzy. My hanging around and horning in on the discussion might have been enough of a distraction to mute her effectiveness.
“She said Ron and a pal of his came up with the idea of hiring Rachel to make videos,” Ross said. “Gizzy was the one who thought it would be funny to send one of them to Josh.”
“Videos-plural?” I asked. “As in more than one?”
Ross nodded. “A money-making venture. According to Gizzy, they did their filming in one of the outbuildings-an old caretaker’s cottage-at Ron’s family home out on North Cooper Point Road.”
“She was in on it from the beginning?”
Ross nodded sadly. “They lured Rachel here over the weekend with the promise of making another four hundred bucks by reprising her phony death scenes.”
“Would Ron Miller’s film partner happen to be a guy named Owen Wetmore, by any chance?” I asked.
Ross shot me a look and nodded. He didn’t ask me how I knew that, and I didn’t tell him.
“Does Owen drive a green pickup truck?” I asked.
Ross nodded. “As a matter of fact, he does-a dark green Chevy Silverado.”
Inside the room, Mel moved the pizza box aside and pushed a blue-lined notepad in front of Gizzy. “Write it all down,” she said, handing her a pen. “When you’re finished, sign it.”
“All of it?” Gizzy asked faintly.
“All of it,” Mel told her.
Mel stood up and stretched. Then she picked up another piece of pizza, came to the door, and knocked on it. We let her out.
Gizzy Longmire wrote her life-and-death essay for the better part of an hour. By the time she finally finished it, signed it, and handed it over to Mel, Joan Hoyt had already obtained a search warrant for the Ronald Miller residence on North Cooper Point Road. After dropping Giselle off at Olympia PD for booking, we went there, too, where officers from the Washington State Patrol, along with the arson detectives from Olympia, were already in the process of executing the search warrant. On the sidelines an outraged Ronald Miller, Senior, and his rudely awakened attorney ranted and raved to no effect. They might be able to run roughshod over any and all comers in a courtroom, but crime scenes are cops’ turf, not theirs.
And that’s what this was. As soon as we stepped i
nto the caretaker’s cottage I knew we had found the place where Rachel Camber had played her fictional role as well as her real one. The soiled mattress on the narrow cot in one corner of the room told the story of her imprisonment and death, as did the very expensive video equipment that still stood in the center of the room.
Ron Miller may have staged more than one phony snuff video, but someone had failed to give him the memo that, in real life, death isn’t a pretty picture. When a body stops working, there are consequences in terms of bodily functions. Nothing in Ron Miller’s life experience had taught him the necessity of cleaning up his own crap, and he hadn’t done so in this case, either.
It took hours to process the scene. The same Washington State Patrol crime scene team that had come to Josh Deeson’s bedroom appeared for a return engagement. They took photos dogged by Mel, who took her own photos while I cataloged each and every shot. By the time we finally left there to return to the Red Lion, the sky was starting to lighten. It was only four-thirty, but morning comes early in the Pacific Northwest at the start of summer.
We went back to our room and stripped off our clothing. Mel removed her makeup, and we both fell into bed. Mel was asleep instantly-the sleep of the just, as we call it. It took two Aleves and the better part of forty-five minutes before I was able to fall asleep, still hearing Ron’s words echoing in my head: “You and who else, old man?”
Chapter 28
Much later it was the sound of Mel’s key in the lock that woke me. She came into the sun-filled room carrying a tray loaded with a coffeepot, two cups, two salad plates with silverware, a pair of napkins, and an enormous bowl of cut-up fresh fruit-several different kinds of melon, raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries.
“Ready to sit up and take nourishment?” she asked. She looked great.
“What time is it?”
“Twelve-thirty.”
“I guess we missed checkout time.”
“I guess so,” she agreed. “But we don’t have much time. Ross expects us at Josh Deeson’s funeral, which starts at two. He wants us there for the funeral and for the press conference afterward.”
Ross is our boss, and an order is an order. I took two Aleves. I drank coffee. I ate fruit. Then I crawled out of bed, limped into the bathroom, and took a long hot shower.
Josh’s simple service was accompanied by mountains of floral arrangements and was conducted in the open air on the lawn outside the governor’s mansion. It was pretty much a standard funeral service. When the minister opened the microphone for comments, I was surprised to see Zoe Longmire slip out of her spot next to her mother and make her way to the podium.
Her words were simple and heartfelt. “Josh lived with our family,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t know him better. I’ll miss him.”
It was graceful. It was charming. It set the tone, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised because Zoe, like Gizzy, is her mother’s daughter.
Once Zoe sat down, a pimply-faced kid who said his name was Chipper Lawson stood up and talked about how Josh Deeson had helped him learn to play chess and that he was grateful. It cheered me to know that Josh had had at least one friend at Olympia High, someone who wasn’t Sam Dysart. And I made a note to myself to pass Chipper’s name along to the Sex Crimes guys in Olympia. If Dysart had made a habit of targeting socially needy kids, Chipper would have been another likely target.
There were several kids present, some of whom I recognized as having been at the scene of the Janie’s House fire. The only one of those that I knew by name was Greg Alexander. Dressed in a white shirt and tie, he stood to one side after the graveside service, talking quietly with Zoe.
Of all the kids we had met in the past few days, Greg seemed the most upright. Considering his troubled family background, I knew he was coming from a long way behind go, but somehow I sensed that he was going to make something of himself no matter what.
Giselle had been arrested the night before, but because she had not yet been formally charged, her name had not made it into the papers. I would assume that people at the service were puzzled by her absence, but no one mentioned it in my hearing.
It was late in the afternoon when we finally trooped back to the governor’s mansion where, flanked by Gerry Willis, Ross Connors, and Lieutenant Governor Roger Sikes, Governor Marsha Longmire stood in the shade of the mansion’s front portico and faced an army of microphones and cameras.
The press release announcing the briefing had given no indication of what was about to happen and didn’t contain any advance notice of the governor’s remarks. All it said was that she would be making an important announcement and that she would take no questions.
I watched Marsha Gray Longmire take her place behind the microphones with her customary grace and with her head held high. She waited for silence, then cleared her throat and began to speak.
“As you know, our family has been beset by tragedies this week, not only by the death of our ward, my husband’s grandson, Josh Deeson, but also by learning that our daughter Giselle has been taken into custody here in Olympia due to her part in some illegal activities that went on without her parents’ knowledge or approval. We are deeply saddened by the harm that her actions may have inflicted on other people and other families.
“In view of that, I can no longer function in this office. I thereby resign the post of governor, effective immediately. I have presented my letter of resignation to Attorney General Ross Connors and have notified Lieutenant Governor Sikes of my intention. My family will be moving out of the governor’s mansion as soon as those details can be arranged. In the meantime, I hope you will respect our need for privacy as we deal with these appalling events. Thank you.”
With that, she turned away. Then both she and Gerry Willis disappeared through the mansion’s massive front doors, closing them firmly. By the time the group of stunned journalists rumbled to life, she was gone, and newly installed Governor Roger Sikes, with Ross Connors’s capable help, was left to deal with the media fallout.
“Come on,” Mel whispered in my ear. “Let’s check out of the hotel and go home.”
And we did.
“I asked Ross for next week off,” Mel said as we rode the elevator up at Belltown Terrace. “We need to go to Texas. We can fly commercial or we can bite the bullet and take the jet. Which is it?”
I thought about the money the jet would burn, flying cross-country like that. Then I thought about my limping through airport concourses, getting on and off car-rental shuttles, and sitting for hours with my knees jammed up against the seat in front of me, while the guy seated there flew in full-recline mode.
Based on that, it wasn’t a tough decision.
“We’ll take the jet,” I said.
We flew out of Boeing Field twenty-four hours later on a Citation X. On the flight Mel and I spent most of the time talking about what the rest of the state was just now learning-that a group of supposedly well-respected “good” kids, terminally bored “good” kids, had gone bad and transformed themselves into a bunch of hoodlums. Giselle Longmire and Ronald Darrington Miller weren’t the only ones who would be facing charges.
Owen Wetmore, one of the Janie’s House houseparents, had been a full partner in Ronald Miller’s filming venture, and they had used Owen’s keys and security code to come and go at will. According to Gizzy, as soon as Josh died, Ron realized that the subsequent investigation might lead back to him. He had decided on his own that Rachel had to go. And then, when Owen started freaking out afterward, Ron decided that both Owen and the Janie’s House computers had to go as well.
Gizzy hadn’t been present when Rachel died and she hadn’t lit the match that started the Janie’s House fire, but she had driven the getaway car. She had known about the planned fire in advance and had done nothing to stop it. I thought it was likely that she would face homicide charges of some kind in regard to Rachel Camber’s death as well as Owen Wetmore’s. She also had admitted stealing Josh’s original watch-the one fr
om Gerry Willis-just to bug him, just because she could. That day after the Janie’s House fire, Ron had gone to the governor’s mansion intent on retrieving what they both thought of as their trophies. They had been shocked to find the watch missing. He’d had the bracelet in hand and was on his way to Gizzy’s father’s house to pick up the thumb drive when Mel and I took him into custody.
It seemed to me that Gizzy and Ron deserved each other in every sense of the word-a twisted match made in hell rather than heaven. So far the judge had denied requests for bail from both defense attorneys. That had to come as a huge surprise, to Ron especially. For the first time in his life his parents’ position in the community wasn’t working for him. A denial of bail was only the first step in the process. Mel and I both knew that legal proceedings against the pair would take months.
We had obtained Giselle Longmire’s confession without striking any kind of plea agreement. We had every reason to believe that her confession would withstand legal scrutiny and that they both would be going to prison for a very long time.
Between now and then, both families were living in an ongoing media nightmare. I wondered if Marsha and Gerry’s marriage would survive all the strife. Gizzy’s actions had torn holes in the fabric of their marriage that would probably never be mended.
As for Josh? The smoking gun had been found not in his cell phone records but in Sam Dysart’s. A call from his phone to the governor’s mansion landline had evidently summoned Josh on that out-of-character jog that had so puzzled his grandfather. Olympia police officers, executing a search warrant, had found the torn gift-wrapping paper and the box that had held the replacement watch we had found on Josh’s wrist. Dysart had gone to great lengths to track down that particular model. I like to think Josh went to his death expecting that his grandfather would believe the ruse that the watch on his arm was the one he had given him.
Was the watch a bribe on Dysart’s part in exchange for sex? Or was replacing Josh’s missing Seiko a thoughtful gift? So far there was no clear answer to those questions. Regardless, Dysart’s relationship with Josh had crossed the line. He had further victimized a kid who had already suffered far more than he should have. I was glad the man was dead. Dysart’s death spared Gerry Willis at least one painful legal proceeding. And it probably kept Chipper Lawson, the pimply-faced chess player at Josh’s funeral, from being Dysart’s next victim.
